Andy Burnham has refused to retract his assertion that the United Kingdom is “in hock” to the bond markets, insisting his words were designed to expose the nation’s fragility in the face of global price volatility rather than to advocate unrestrained fiscal expansion.
A Resilient Economy, Not More Borrowing
The Greater Manchester mayor, who is poised to address his inaugural Labour conference as prime minister in Liverpool next Tuesday, told the New Statesman that his controversial comments had been systematically misrepresented by Keir Starmer and his team. He argued that his objective was never additional debt or expenditure but rather the construction of an economy far less susceptible to external shocks.
He said criticism from Starmer and the then chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was unjustified. “They couldn’t understand why I was saying some of the things that I was saying … [They] didn’t know what to do with it, but they did what they always do, which is they pulled one line out of it and then framed that one line within their world, rather than the one that I was talking about.”
Burnham described his vision as a “much more streamlined, productive state” that would shield the UK from the vagaries of international energy markets.
The Bond Market Vulnerability
