Opinion: The Milburn Review will be Burnham’s First Big Test

Alan Milburn’s welfare proposals will force the Prime Minister to decide whether he wants to keep his party happy or change the country

Andy Burnham has so far enjoyed that rarest of political commodities: goodwill. His arrival in Downing Street has brought a change of atmosphere, a sense of optimism and a welcome departure from the dreariness of the final months of Keir Starmer’s premiership. But atmospheres are not achievements. The recent Budget, for all its agreeable gestures, was strikingly short of substance. Sooner or later, every Prime Minister must discover whether the popularity which brought them to office can be converted into the authority required to govern.

For Burnham, that moment may arrive next week, with the publication of Alan Milburn’s review of young people and work. The former Labour health secretary is expected to recommend a radical restructuring of welfare provision for under-25s, including reductions in sickness and disability benefits for some claimants, alongside substantial investment in employment support. With nearly a million young people neither earning nor learning, the problem is plainly serious. But the proposed remedies will be politically painful, and not merely for those whose entitlements may change.

Labour MPs who forced Starmer into retreat over welfare reform last year are already expressing misgivings. Bell Ribeiro-Addy has questioned whether taking money away from disabled young people is a plausible means of helping them into employment. It is a reasonable objection, and one which Milburn’s final proposals will need to answer. But it also presents Burnham with a question which is older than the welfare state itself: how much disagreement is a leader prepared to tolerate in pursuit of what he believes to be necessary?

Every Prime Minister must make this calculation. Margaret Thatcher chose confrontation with the wets in her Cabinet and later with the trade unions, accepting division as the price of changing Britain’s economic settlement. Tony Blair was more conciliatory in temperament, and infinitely more attentive to the management of his parliamentary party, but he too understood that a large majority was not simply an ornament. His battles over foundation hospitals and education reform demonstrated a willingness to spend political capital, even when his own MPs resisted.

There are warnings in both examples. Thatcher’s determination eventually hardened into an inability to listen, contributing to her downfall. Blair’s authority, meanwhile, was gravely weakened by Iraq, where determination became inseparable from a catastrophic failure of judgement. The lesson is not that leaders should always confront opposition. It is that they must know which battles are worth fighting, and why.

American presidents face the same dilemma, albeit within a constitutional system which makes party discipline far harder to enforce. Lyndon Johnson understood that his enormous legislative ambitions required painstaking coalition-building. He did not mistake consensus for an end in itself; it was the means by which he secured civil rights legislation.

Burnham’s difficulty is that he has made his political reputation partly through an unusual ability to bring people together. His instinct is to listen, to accommodate, to lower the temperature. These are valuable qualities, particularly after years in which British politics has seemed permanently angry. But they are not sufficient.

Milburn’s review offers an opportunity to demonstrate that compassion and reform need not be opposites. Young people who can work deserve a system which helps them do so, while those who cannot must not be impoverished in the name of an employment target. The government will also have to persuade employers to participate. Cutting benefits cannot, by itself, create jobs.

The larger question is whether Burnham can persuade his parliamentary party to accept difficult changes without surrendering their substance. If he cannot, the risk is that his premiership becomes an exercise in agreeable postponement.

There is a difference between bringing people along and waiting until everybody agrees. The first is leadership. The second can become an excuse for doing nothing. Burnham must now decide where he stands.