Has Andy Burnham really reinvented himself to prepare for a future leadership bid? In this week’s Spectator, I interviewed the Shadow Health Secretary about his rather forthright views on the NHS: views that some suspect have conveniently changed in order to appeal to Labour’s base. You can read the interview here, but for Coffee House readers, here are some extended quotes from our discussion.
Burnham was insistent that his views on the health service today are the ones he put into practice when he was Health Secretary under the last Labour government. When I asked whether he’d changed politically, he said:
‘Well, there are a couple of ways to answer that. Not politically because as I say, if these were easy words in opposition about the public NHS then people might be able to make that point but I changed it in government. People keep forgetting this but I took a difficult decision at the time to say that I wanted a different approach because I suppose I am mainstream Labour.’
‘Mainstream Labour’ means, according to Burnham, making a definite decision that ‘what works is the NHS’.
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