Column calls for public ownership, tax changes and in-house services
Unison general secretary Andrea Egan urged UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham on October 26 to use this week’s budget for a large, multiyear program of public investment and tax reform. Writing in an opinion column in The Guardian, Egan said the program should restore investment and wages in public services, bring service delivery back in-house and make the wealthy few pay their fair share of tax. She also called for sectors to be brought into public ownership.
She urged Burnham and Chancellor John Healey to defy pressure from the business lobby and the rightwing media, including pressure to reject changes such as equalizing income and capital gains tax. Her position was conditional: Unison and Egan’s colleagues across the trade union movement would be by Burnham’s side only if he maintained his historic ambition to remake Britain in the interests of the working class.
The chancellor, John Healey, and Andy Burnham at the Labour conference in Liverpool, 28 September 2026. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian
Egan wrote that the budget “must be the moment that the prime minister’s programme starts to match his rhetoric.” She said the time for talking was over, but clarified that unions did not expect neoliberalism to have melted away by the time John Healey finished reading his statement. Instead, they demanded serious measures that actually begin improving workers’ lives.
Egan said the decades-long political settlement Burnham had “rightly defined himself against” might have impoverished the vast majority, although it had produced winners. Those who had profited handsomely from neoliberalism would fight tooth and nail against any serious attempt to break with it. She said the change would not be easy and that vested interests committed to keeping things as they were would resist, making the budget the place to begin that fight.
Egan said factors ranging from US wars to the climate crisis that made essentials increasingly unaffordable were out of control. Without the radical action Burnham had called for, she said, the lives of people and communities would keep getting worse rapidly. She also said the far right would benefit if the project failed.
To measure up to Burnham’s ambitions, Egan said Labour would have to implement changes to the structure of the economy unseen since the immediate postwar period. At a minimum, she said, Labour should bring sectors into public ownership and invest on a huge scale to rebuild a social fabric — public services, infrastructure and collective life — that neoliberalism had shredded.
Burnham’s political shift and early measures
Egan opened her political comparison with Keir Starmer by writing, “After Keir Starmer, things could only get better inside Labour.” She said Burnham’s arrival as party leader and prime minister did more than clear that low bar and gave the trade union movement cause for hope. Less because he was “streets ahead” of his predecessor as a politician — although she said he was — and more because he had radically reframed his project for the country.
Egan said she had been active in the labor movement for almost four decades. In that time, she said, she could not count how many times she had heard calls to reverse the devastation Margaret Thatcher had wrought. For socialists and grassroots trade union activists, she said, political thinking was “bread and butter,” but not so much for a Labour prime minister.
Egan said Tony Blair, “between torching the Middle East and taking a hammer to our civil liberties,” built upon Thatcher’s legacy rather than bury it. She said Gordon Brown and Keir Starmer were more set against the Thatcherite fracturing of society than Blair, but both continued to inhabit the “political cage” Thatcher built: the idea that there was “no alternative.”
Before Burnham, Egan said Jeremy Corbyn was the only major party leader ideologically opposed to neoliberalism “in a remotely serious way.” Corbyn drew up a program that would have started to undo the rule of the market, but he did not become prime minister. Burnham’s insistence at the beginning of his premiership that there was an alternative way of organizing the economy and society to the neoliberal one marked, in Egan’s view, a historic shift.
Andy Burnham plays bingo during a visit to Humphrey Booth resource centre in Salford, 9 October 2026. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Egan said this kind of talk was not cheap. Burnham’s vision mattered, she said, because it had challenged assumptions that had shaped politics for decades and because the analysis was fundamentally correct. She said Burnham explained to Kemi Badenoch that virtually every aspect of the country’s malaise could be traced to the “wrong turns” taken in the 1980s. His diagnosis, she wrote, left no doubt about what Labour had to do in government.
Many of the Burnham government’s early measures had been welcome, Egan said. She described banking quick wins that did not require wrangling with the Treasury as a sensible early approach because they signaled the government was on the side of the people; Labour’s steady improvement in the polls reflected that welcome. But she said four decades of neoliberalism would not be ended through Google Maps updates of petrol prices or even measures providing breathing room during the cost-of-living crisis. Following a bold, historical diagnosis with piecemeal measures was not politically sustainable, she said.