A defiant Andy Burnham has hit out at those demanding he make “simplistic statements of loyalty” to Keir Starmer, saying they are underestimating “the peril” facing Labour.
The Greater Manchester mayor came out fighting after the prime minister compared him to the former PM Liz Truss last week, suggesting his economic plans would be disastrous for the country.
Speaking on Sunday as the Labour Party’s conference got underway in Liverpool, Mr Burnham did little to play down the growing rift between the two politicians as he hit out at Sir Keir’s decision to suspend Labour MPs over the two-child benefit cap.
And, in remarks which inflame rampant speculation over his leadership ambitions, he also said he wanted to reform the whips system at Westminster – which only a PM could attempt.
He warned of the difficult elections facing Labour in Scotland and Wales, which it is on course to lose next year.
Speaking at a fringe event, he said: “I would say those out there making calls for simplistic statements of loyalty… are underestimating some of the peril that the party is in in those elections next year.”
He also claimed that Whitehall and Westminster “don’t like being answered back” after days of blowback to his public admission last week that Labour MPs had urged him to challenge for the leadership.
It comes after Sir Keir seized on Mr Burnham’s comment that the UK should no longer be in hock to the bond markets and compared him to Ms Truss and her disastrous mini-Budget.
Asked about Mr Burnham, the prime minister said: “I’m not going to get drawn in to commenting on the personal ambitions of the mayor, but I do want to be really clear about our fiscal rules because economic stability is the foundation stone of this government.
“It was three years ago this week that we had the Liz Truss experiment where she abandoned fiscal rules, in her case for tax cuts, and the result was a disaster for working people.
“The same would be true if you abandoned fiscal rules in favour of spending, and I’m not prepared to ever have that inflicted on working people again.”
Speaking about devolution, Mr Burnham criticised the decision to remove the whip from a number of Labour MPs who had opposed the hated two-child benefit cap, first brought in by the Tories, saying it was ”unhealthy in a democracy”.
He also said he “felt that Westminster makes a fraud out of good people” which was “why I would reform the whips system quite considerably” to let people “speak more authentically for themselves and represent” their areas. Westminster needed to reform “to let MPs be placed first”, he said.
The former cabinet minister, who left Westminster to become mayor, also claimed he was a “very significantly different politician for the experience”.
He described it as “liberating” to look at issues from the “bottom up” rather than from “35,000 feet up”.
He tried to confront criticism of his comments about the bond market, saying that his ideas, which include taking control of “fundamentals” like he has done with buses in his city, would “reassure” them because they would remove “uncertainty”.
