Which Andy Burnham will we get this time?

Coffee House Shots

The Spectator

Politics, Daily News, News

4.4 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 22 May 2026

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Andy Burnham has officially launched his campaign today to be MP for Makerfield (read: Prime Minister). But what does he actually stand for? We’ve had briefings that, despite being the candidate of the soft left, he will stick to Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules and keep Shabana Mahmood’s immigration reforms. He’s flirted with nationalisation of utilities, but which exactly? What’s the big pitch?

Burnham’s launch comes the day after some good news for the government, after net migration hit its lowest level since the pandemic. The number of people moving to Britain dropped to 171,000 in the 12 months to December, nearly half the figure recorded the year before. So why isn’t the government shouting about it?

Oscar Edmondson speaks to Michael Simmons and Noa Hoffman.

Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Subscribe to The Spectator and get 12 weeks of Britain's most incisive politics coverage, unrivaled books and arts reviews, and so much more, all for just £12.
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0:27.4	Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast. I'm
0:33.0	Oskredmanson. I'm joined today by Michael Simmons and Noah Hoffman on the day that Andy Burnham finally,
0:38.9	officially launches his bid to be Prime Minister, I mean MP for Makerfield. But before we get
0:44.7	onto that, Michael, which is essentially bad news for the government, there is maybe some good
0:49.6	news in terms of fallen migration numbers. Can you take us through it? Yeah, well, migration numbers
0:53.3	are always such a complicated story. So I will try my best to simplify them. But what we had was yesterday,
0:59.7	a release from the ONS, on net migration for last year. And what they found is that against kind of
1:07.2	what had been forecast, net migration, so the difference between people coming to the
1:11.8	UK and leaving the UK halved in a year down to 171,000 per year. So that's down quite a lot
1:20.2	from the peak of the Boris wave. And people like Shabana Mahmood have been saying, look,
1:25.6	this is a kind of a big success for us.
1:30.3	Now, there's a couple of interesting points to make here.
1:33.2	I think firstly, you know, if you want to get migration down, as Shabana does, clearly it is a success.
1:38.4	But as to how much of a success can actually be, you know, given to this current Home Secretary, I think is
1:44.8	questionable. I mean, I think most migration experts would say that this is actually as a result
1:49.7	of the tightening up to visa conditions that the Tories implemented in their dying days in power.
1:56.4	But the other angle here is emigration, people leaving the country. And opponents of labor,
2:03.2	opponents of the Home Secretary have been saying that, oh, look, this is actually a British brain
2:07.8	dream. It's loads of Brits leaving. And actually, that's not quite the case either. Because whilst
	...

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