Unison Chief Tells PM Burnham: Budget Must Match the Rhetoric

Unison's general secretary Andrea Egan has put a hard condition on the trade union movement's support for Prime Minister Andy Burnham: the upcoming budget must start matching his anti-neoliberal rhetoric with structural change unseen in Britain since the immediate postwar period.

In a striking endorsement wrapped around an equally stark warning, Egan — leader of one of the UK's largest unions — writes that Burnham's arrival as Labour leader and prime minister marks "a historic shift" in British politics. The reason, she argues, isn't primarily Burnham's political skill, though she rates him "streets ahead" of Keir Starmer. It's how radically he has framed his project for the country.

What does that framing actually change? For Egan, who has spent almost four decades in the labour movement, the answer is ideological. She says she can't count how many times she has heard talk of reversing the devastation wreaked by Margaret Thatcher. But that kind of thinking, she notes, has been bread and butter for socialists and grassroots activists — not for a Labour prime minister.

She draws an unforgiving line through Labour's recent history to make the point. Tony Blair, "between torching the Middle East and taking a hammer to our civil liberties, infamously came to build upon Thatcher's legacy rather than bury it," she writes. Gordon Brown and Starmer, in her assessment, stood further apart from the Thatcherite fracturing of society than Blair did. Yet both, she argues, "continued to inhabit the political cage she built: the idea that there is no alternative."

The one previous exception she names is Jeremy Corbyn, whose programme "would have started to undo the rule of the market" but never reached government. By insisting at the start of his premiership that there is, in fact, an alternative way of organising the economy and society, Burnham has broken that cage — in Egan's reading, a genuinely historic move.

Why the diagnosis raises the stakes

Egan stresses that the prime minister's analysis isn't cheap talk. Burnham, she writes, "powerfully explained" to Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch that virtually every aspect of the country's malaise can be traced back to the "wrong turns" taken in the 1980s. She calls that diagnosis fundamentally correct.

But the flip side is that it leaves no ambiguity about what Labour must now do in government. To measure up to his own ambitions, Egan argues, the party will need changes to the structure of the economy unseen since the immediate postwar period. At a minimum, she writes, that means:

• bringing sectors into public ownership;
• investing on a huge scale to rebuild the social fabric — public services, infrastructure and collective life — that "has been shredded."

Quick wins won't carry the project

Egan gives the government credit for its early moves. Banking quick wins that don't require wrangling with the Treasury but signal the government is on the people's side was, she writes, a sensible approach for the early days — and Labour's steady improvement in the polls reflects it.

Her patience has limits, though. "Four decades of neoliberalism won't be ended through Google Maps updates of petrol prices, or even with measures to provide breathing room in the face of the cost of living crisis," she writes. Following a bold historical diagnosis with piecemeal measures, she argues, just isn't politically sustainable.

The pressures driving essentials upward — she cites US wars and the climate crisis — are, in her words, out of control. Without the radical action the prime minister has himself called for, the lives of people and communities "are going to keep getting worse, rapidly." And the political stakes couldn't be higher, in her view: "it's the far right that will benefit if this project fails."

What Unison wants from the budget

The budget, delivered by Chancellor John Healey, is where Egan says the programme must start matching the rhetoric. Unison is "clear about that," she writes, and so are her colleagues across the trade union movement. Nobody expects miracles on the day. "We're not expecting neoliberalism to have melted away by the time John Healey finishes reading out his statement," she writes. "But we are demanding serious measures that actually begin to improve workers' lives."

Her shopping list is specific:

• a big, multiyear funding plan to restore investment and wages in public services;
• bringing outsourced services back in-house, which she frames as kicking "profiteering vultures" out of the public sector;
• funding those measures by making "the wealthy few" pay their fair share of tax.

She singles out one tax flashpoint in advance. It is imperative, she writes, that the prime minister and chancellor defy pressure from the business lobby and the rightwing media and refuse to reject changes such as equalising income and capital gains tax.

A fight she expects — and welcomes

Egan closes with a warning about the resistance ahead. The decades-long political settlement the prime minister has defined himself against impoverished the vast majority, she writes, but it produced winners — and those who have profited handsomely from neoliberalism "will fight tooth and nail against any attempt to actually break with it."

Her bottom line for practitioners on both sides of that fight: if Burnham sticks with his ambition to remake Britain in the interests of the working class, it won't be easy, and the trade union movement will be at his side. "There's no dodging a battle with the vested interests committed to keeping things as they are — and the budget is the place to begin."

For markets, lobbyists and public-sector contractors, that reads as an early map of where the next confrontation over the UK's economic settlement will land — starting at the dispatch box.