Andy Burnham is already out of ideas – revisiting Brexit shows the PM doesn’t trust the British people

On Monday morning, he was rebuffed by his own Foreign Office Minister – and by Monday evening, he’d backtracked entirely.

At best, the Prime Minister’s statement was hugely irresponsible, and risks sowing doubt about the result of an independently-monitored democratic vote.

These baseless claims have been debunked time and time again – in 2018, the serving head of MI5 said that outside influence had not determined the outcome of the vote.

Peddling disproven claims about foreign influence risks undermining public trust in our democracy.

But at worst, the Prime Minister could be accused of deliberately sowing doubt about the result of the 2016 vote, in an attempt to justify revisiting our relationship with the EU, with absolutely no democratic mandate for doing so.

As Kemi Badenoch so rightly said in Parliament, this is lazy thinking.

Burnham knows that he has no solutions to the actual problems that we face as a country, so instead, he’s banging on about the EU.

Our national debt is now so huge that it runs to more than £100,000 for every single household in the country.

The number of working-age people on welfare is ballooning, while energy bills push higher and higher.

It now takes the average first-time buyer about a decade to save up for a deposit.

Not a single one of these problems will be solved, or even made better, by aligning ourselves more closely with Europe.

Do we really need to open another decade of back-and-forth over the EU – all for the grand prize of being forced into the Euro, and losing control of our borders?

Yet this is exactly what Burnham and Labour seem focused on.

Emily Thornberry, another senior Labour MP, even told Sky News that Britain could be dragged back into the EU without a referendum – and that people who don’t like that should “get over it”.

It’s remarkable that, just a few months into the job, Burnham already seems to be out of ideas.

All he knows how to do is raise taxes, while giving people less control over their own lives and less power over how our country is governed.

Burnham’s EU obsession is driven by the same instinct that’s provoked his newfound fixation on changing our electoral system – moving us away from a system where the person who gets the most votes wins, and towards a system where political fixers in Westminster get to stitch up election results behind closed doors.

It all points to a Prime Minister who doesn’t know how to tackle the big problems that we face, and who doesn’t trust the British people.

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