Come Monday, the United Kingdom will gets its fifth Prime Minister in four years. Popularly dubbed the "King of the North", Andy Burnham's time in Downing Street is expected to see a "rewiring" of Britain as he vowed to be a pro-business leader.
However, most of his pledges are part of a long-term vision, but he does not have much time left as the general election is less than three years away. To keep his promises, the Labour leader will have start implementing his plans right away.
On Friday, Burnham said his experience working with businesses as mayor of Greater Manchester would be a model for his new government.
"I will be a pro-business leader of the Labour Party, as I was a pro-business mayor of Greater Manchester," Burnham said. "We turn places round together, and that is the way we ran in Manchester, and we will take to the whole country."
Burnham has proposed to move part of the Prime Minister's Office from London to Manchester in the North of England. While the existing office of the PM is metonymically known as No. 10 Downing Street, the office in Manchester will be dubbed No. 10 North. He believes that decentralising the government could give regional leaders greater control over spending, transport, housing, skills and economic growth.
The team in Manchester will "oversee the biggest rebalancing of power our country has ever seen," Burnham had said during his first speech after launching a bid to be PM.
However, it should be noted that British voters have punished former PMs who promised big, but failed deliver on their pledges. Burnham's vision is grand and complicated as his plans to decentralise the government could see stiff resistance from those in the central government. Any promises that he makes has to be done before the next general election in mid-2029.
"If you talk a good game, but don't actually pass any of the power on, or it happens very slowly, people get impatient and get frustrated by it," Reuters quoted Henri Murison, chief executive of the Northern Powerhouse Group, a lobby group of northern English business and civic leaders, as saying.
It remains to be seen whether the Labour leader can achieve what his predecessors Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer could not in the past four years.
