Andy Burnham has said he still believes the UK is far too exposed to global shocks, defending comments last year when he said the UK should be less “in hock” to the bond markets.
He said the comments had been deliberately misinterpreted by the former prime minister Keir Starmer and his advisers and said his aim was not more borrowing and spending but a far more resilient economy.
Burnham’s comments in an interview with the New Statesmen last year made waves before the Labour conference because of the then Greater Manchester’s clear ambitions to replace Starmer as prime minister.
In a fresh interview with the magazine on Wednesday, he said he had intended to highlight how vulnerable the UK was to global price fluctuations. Government borrowing has climbed again over the past months as energy prices have risen in response to continued deadlock on the Iran war.
The UK government borrowed a higher than expected £18.3bn last month, putting further pressure on the chancellor, John Healey, as he prepares for next month’s budget.
Burnham said he wanted to build an economy that was far less vulnerable. “I mean, the point about the bond markets, it holds – in that what I was saying was the country has left itself over-exposed,” he said, telling the magazine he was arguing for a “much more streamlined, productive state”.
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 also addressed criticism from the Conservatives after he said during an exchange at prime minister’s questions that national security “should not come at the expense of social security” – which opponents said showed he was not willing to cut the welfare budget to fund increased defence spending.
“It oversimplifies the political discourse that we need to have, doesn’t it?” he said.
Burnham, who will address his first Labour conference as prime minister in Liverpool next Tuesday, said he would set out his political vision, which would be a break from the economic and political mainstream of the past 40 years.
“It’s about control,” he said. “If you strip it back, and all the fluff and, you know, the verbiage, you can actually strip it back to one word, which is control.”
He said that would be a business-friendly approach, rather than purely statist. “People aren’t going to come in and invest in a significant way where the place isn’t functional and it’s in major decline,” he said, saying it was the state’s job to “create the optimum conditions for private-sector investment”.
“We’ve just got to get that belief back into Britain that, yeah, we know what we’re about, we know what we stand for, that is what we’ve always been, so we can do it again.”
In attempts to calm jittery bond markets, Burnham has previously said his budget would “stick to the fiscal rules” on debt and borrowing set out under Reeves, “but at the same time we will help reduce cost of living pressure on our constituents”.
