There is no plan to nationalise public companies. For that you need money. The bond market, as John Healey is finding out, is ensuring there is none. Burnham is a populist, which makes him as bad as populists of any political colour; promise all things to all men (or women). He presents superficially popular policies; actually he uses interviews, opinion pieces, to check the lie of the land. He won't carry out things that are not popular. When entering office he announced his number one priority was to end rough sleeping; its important, but is it the top priority. Then is was £2 bus fares, then the 3 month VAT holiday on energy bills, focusing on political "mega-donors", moving Number 10 to the Grim North, mayoral role in planning approvals etc Burnham is attracted to problems that lend themselves to an immediate, visible government intervention, while the problems that actually constrain Britain; productivity, debt, pensions, welfare expenditure, defence, energy security and private investment, are substantially harder to solve and produce few immediate political rewards. In someways, he is like Johnson, Farage and Trump. None of them are realists. The successful leader is the one who can communicate difficult policies, non-ideal choices, and take the country along with them. Thatcher never promised the earth to her supporters, She said it will be worthwhile in the end, but everyone needs to pull together. It wasn't based on an imaginary past, or nirvana, and she was pragmatic and a realist. And she never took the electorate for fools. The approach appears to be a 10-year programme of progressively increasing public control, with different mechanisms depending on the industry. Well, he's not going to be around in 10 years. Labour might cobble together a minority government at the next election, but he won't be head of it Railways are a different matter; the rail companies have time limited licences. When they expire, they are not renewed Utility companies will likely face changing utility regulation and insolvency rules; change the rules when a government declares the business to be be failing, and takes it over. Thames Water still carries with it enormous debt that the government will have to take on. Its easy to point to times when this was successful, such as Rail Track, Northern Bank, and the German energy examples, but you risk ignoring the obvious failures such as PG&E in the US, CEZ Albania, ECG Ghana and elsewhere. He's making a lot of promises to a lot of people, and sometimes talking up positivity doesn't cut it. Maybe he will rise to the occasion, maybe he will appoint excellent advisors, but I'm not holding my breath. He didn't get his shot through talent, but only by being not a member of the cabinet and parliamentary party. I'm sure after the honeymoon period, the Stafford Hospital deaths enquiries (or lack of them on his watch) will come back to haunt him.
