Have your say on whether the PM is right to blame Brexit for Britain’s sluggish economic growth
Andy Burnham hit out at Brexit (Image: Getty)
Andy Burnham hit out at Brexit in his first address to the Commons as Prime Minister. The PM claimed Britain had taken “a series of wrong turns” from the 1980s onwards in his statement to MPs yesterday.
Mr Burnham, who was a Remainer, said Britain’s departure from the European Union was partly to blame for decades of slow growth, along with deindustrialisation and privatisation of the 1980s and the impact of austerity. He said: “Political power was centralised, economic power privatised, the country deindustrialised. Austerity followed, hollowing out councils and depriving them of the agency to act to reverse any of this.
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“And then Brexit compounded the damage, ushering in a decade of low growth and stalled regeneration. Change begins with honesty and I’m not hearing much of it this afternoon.
“Unless we are blunt about what went wrong, we won’t turn things around.
“Far from taking back control, the combination of these policies took control out of the hands of communities up and down Britain.”
During a mammoth three-hour and 23-minute statement, including questions from backbenchers, he hit out at the “failed economic model”.
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Mr Burnham added: “The Government I lead will be relentless, relentless in giving people and places what they were promised 10 years ago: ownership and control.
“And from that control over their destiny comes change and growth.”
But Tory leader Kemi Badenoch accused Mr Burnham of “living in the past” and wanting to “take us back to the 1970s”.
It comes as Mr Burnham U-turned on his stance on rejoining the EU when he was campaigning to win the Brexit-voting Makerfield constituency in the crunch by-election.
He had previously said he wanted to see the UK back in the Brussels club within his lifetime.
But during the by-election campaign, he insisted he was not in favour of rejoining the bloc.