Healey as chancellor? Streeting as defence secretary? This isn’t a cabinet to change the UK like Burnham promised | Owen Jones

Politics The Guardian By Owen Jones 21 Jul 2026 15:00 1 min read

Putting Ed Miliband in charge of the Treasury would have signalled a genuine new era. Instead, the new PM has played it safe Andy Burnham has promised to bring “four decades of neoliberalism” to an end. The first serious test of that pledge was always going to be the cabinet he appointed. The red flags are impossible to ignore. Ending neoliberalism would mean putting privatised services back into public hands, unleashing public investment and using the power of the state to reshape the economy.

Putting Ed Miliband in charge of the Treasury would have signalled a genuine new era. Instead, the new PM has played it safe

Andy Burnham has promised to bring “four decades of neoliberalism” to an end. The first serious test of that pledge was always going to be the cabinet he appointed. The red flags are impossible to ignore.

Ending neoliberalism would mean putting privatised services back into public hands, unleashing public investment and using the power of the state to reshape the economy. Yet Burnham’s support for the government’s suffocating fiscal rules – and his preference for the vaguer language of “public control” over public ownership – had already raised doubts about how far he was prepared to go.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

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