14 ideas Andy Burnham definitely – definitely – won’t have thought of

—Lucy Reade

Make seafood great again

If it were not for the shipping forecast, you might easily forget that the UK is an island. Because – where’s the seafood? The UK has 7,000km of coastline, over 100 species of seafood and all I see around is sad-looking salmon wrapped in enough plastic to make a green voter faint. We’re an island that only eats half the seafood intake recommended by the NHS. That’s insane – the public doesn’t get to enjoy one of its country’s most amazing natural resources. Maybe we need to evoke the natural competitive spirit that the British have towards the French. So I’d love to ask the next PM – if the French can have thriving fish markets and seafood culture, why can’t we? We could discuss it over a lovely plate of scallops.

—Caroline Marie

Installing swift bricks 

Andy Burnham has said he wants Labour to oversee the biggest new council house programme since the postwar period. I’d like him to find a way to encourage, cajole, or compel builders to include swift bricks in every new property from day one. This should extend beyond council housing too. Design them in. Provide builders with incentives for doing this. Find a way. Cheap, hollowed-out bricks which retail for around £35 each can easily be installed under the eaves. The Scots have already made them mandatory in new builds. They make ideal homes for these beautiful, endangered visitors that bring so much joy to so many people – house martins and sparrows might use them too. Swifts spend most of their lives on the wing – they can even sleep while flying. Their distinctive high-pitched calls and swooping flight patterns are part of summer for many of us and their loss would be felt. They need places to nest when they land here after their long journey from Africa in late April or early May. There is cross-party support for this policy – even Reform UK’s Richard Tice, not usually such a friend to migrants – has championed them. In the best of all possible worlds Taylor Swift would promote the policy. Imagine that. Make it happen, Andy

—Nigel Warburton

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No.10 in the West

The west is the most ignored point on the British political compass. The “southeast” always gets a good hearing, as it encloses not only London and the home counties, but also the Reform-voting seaside towns of Essex and Kent. “The north” is always spoken about as a distinct political thing. But the west? Nothing. The problem is that so many people go on holiday to Devon and Cornwall they think it’s one giant cream tea designed by Barbara Hepworth. But it’s not. Go to Camborne, and you’ll find one of the most deprived towns in the entire country – and on your way, you might notice that Cornwall is the only county with no motorway. But no one in Westminster really cares about the west. And come to think of it, when was the last time you heard an MP, or a minister, with a proper west country accent? It’s the most politically under-represented region by miles. So, Andy Burnham, you don’t need a No.10 in the North – you need a No.10 in the West. You could even set it up in Burnham-on-Sea if you wanted. But if that’s a bit too “on the nose”, there are some great derelict buildings on Ilfracombe high street that’d be just the job.

—Jay Elwes

Archive the internet

The new PM should make the UK the global leader when it comes to archiving the English Language bits of the web. As a species, we’ve been online now for decades, and the web has been mainstream for 20 years. Billions of words, images, ideas committed to html, and none of it is really adequately archived at all. Thanks to digital rot – websites dying, commercial interests shifting, shifty actors seeking to cover their tracks, etc – we have allowed some of the most significant parts of human culture in the modern era to disappear, which is, objectively, insane. Yes, there are efforts made by the British Library and its UK Web Archive, but these are only partial, and still crippled following the 2023 cyberattack. Start taking “digital” culture seriously. It should be properly preserved.

 —Matt Muir

Nationalise Eurostar

I think renationalising trains or water or what-have-you is a good start but ultimately lacking in ambition. Were I to advise Andy Burnham, I’d tell him to start work on, somehow, nationalising the Eurostar. My reasoning for this is two-fold. First, I believe that while Britain won’t be rejoining the EU anytime soon, it would be good to signal that the country is ready to get close to the continent again. What better way to do it than to make sure that people can travel from one to the other comfortably and – most importantly – affordably?

Second, it would help to promote a greener, healthier future. By, over time, improving railway lines from other places into London, the government could offer millions of Brits the chance to visit Europe without having to fly – and vice versa. In our divided, complicated times, turning the Eurostar into a public good would show that countries can still choose to get closer to one another, all for the benefit of their citizens. It wouldn’t change everything, but it would be a step in the right direction.

—Marie Le Conte

Es for all!

Burnham should prescribe compulsory ecstasy taking for Mail and Express readers. Despite decades of tabloid demonisation, the government’s own evidence ranks the drug that inadvertently curtailed widespread football hooliganism as safer than horse riding. Few survive contact with their first pill with an intact worldview. By obliging the reactionary press’s core audience to drop a pinger, Andy Burnham could trigger the generational shift Britain so desperately needs. Sinking six G&Ts and taking to Mumsnet to vilify refugees living off £1.47 a day must surely lose its appeal once that first overwhelming surge of euphoria, openness and empathy is banked. Coming up hard in the garden-centre café, pushing an uneaten carvery around their plate and confessing to a minimum wage waitress the secret guilt of buying a house when property prices were only four times the average wage would be cathartic for everyone. Make the policy more palatable by stamping a poppy on the pill.

—Henry Morris

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Ban VAR

Andy Burnham – the man who will soon be PM but I prefer to call “my fellow When Saturday Comes contributor” (he has written for the independent football magazine in the past) is a vocal critic of the VAR system and has stated that he would ban it entirely. FIFA outlaws government intervention in football, or at least did until this World Cup. But he should do it anyway and then move onto the other great horror of the modern game – half-and-half scarves.

—Matt Withers

Make some movies!

The next PM should create a fund of £12m to finance twelve feature films budgeted at £1m each to be shot in the UK with locally sourced talent from a range of backgrounds. Once the green light is given, there is no interference. The one rule is no literary adaptations and no social realism. Crime, comedy, horror, musicals, sci-fi. And it doesn’t have to be debut directors. So many filmmakers only get support for the first film and then disappear: two thirds never make a second film. The choice of projects should be decided by a rotating council of peers and be based on the quality of the script. Which I will write. 

—John Bleasdale

Noise pollution

Honestly, I know this sounds feeble and pathetic and incredibly NIMBY-ish, but one thing that would make life so much better for all of us is a more stringent enforcement of excessive noise levels, especially when it comes to stupidly loud cars. There’s really no need for violent nitrous explosions to be taking place while idling at the lights next to a playground. The legal vehicle noise limit is soon set to be 68dB, which is slightly quieter than a vacuum cleaner. Most of the things that are used to soup up cars are illegal anyway, just annoying and time consuming to enforce. Make it easier to prosecute these shrieking wheeled soul-quenchers, or tool up the Noise Abatement Society, I say. 

—Dale Shaw

Cap the price of bottled water

Train tickets are too expensive in the UK. Whenever I come home from Italy, I wince at forking out £25 for an open return between Chelmsford and London. It only takes 30 minutes! But worse is when I’m thirsty – small bottles of water can cost up to £3, much more expensive than supermarket prices. So when Burnham gets in, I want him to cap water prices at train stations and install more drinking fountains.

—Jessica Lionnel

Poor behaviour in cinemas

By far the most pressing issue facing Andy Burnham’s prime ministership, is the decline of etiquette at the pictures. With the battle against antisocialism now lost in all other areas of public life, the sanctity of the cinema is all that separates us from societal collapse. As an old man long accustomed to yelling at clouds, it seems to me that patrons who swipe left and right in the hope of a late-night hookup after a weekend screening of Obsession have mistaken the Holloway Odeon for their front room. Once, while watching a film in Camden – and this isn’t a joke, by the way – I saw one cinemagoer leave for 20 minutes before returning with a takeaway curry. He even had papadums. This has to stop. While I personally favour death by firing squad for anyone who even thinks of sullying my abiding relationship with the moving image, perhaps it would be more politically acceptable for prime minister Burnham to adopt a Clockwork Orange approach to this problem. After a stern warning, repeat offenders will be forced to watch Sex & The City 2 on a loop for a week. 

—Ian Winwood

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Save café culture

Burnham should ban Gail’s. Not because the pastries are bad, but because it has become the mascot for everything that’s gone wrong with our high street. Londoners love to rave about our neighbourhood coffee shops, while making it almost impossible for them to survive. Every Coffee comes with 20% VAT, while business rates, rents and energy bills keep climbing and customers think twice before spending a fiver on an oat flat white. Chains with deep pockets can swallow the rising costs, pay whatever landlords want and keep opening, until every high street starts to look the same, complete with another red and white Gail’s sign. Before long, the cafe that’s been there for a decade is gone, replaced by an outlet selling £9 smoked chicken Caesar sandwiches to people tapping away on MacBooks. If the next prime minister wants to save Britain’s high streets, stop saying you back small businesses and start giving them a fighting chance. Because your best local café shouldn’t be the same as everyone else’s

—Ruby Mitchell

Do something about the phoneboxes

“Rather than being a marker of decline, shouldn’t we make our high streets the new symbol of Britain’s renaissance?” Andy Burnham asked in his keynote speech. As someone who grew up in Waterlooville – a town that has too often made national headlines because its centre was such a dive – I found myself furiously nodding along. How we feel about where we are from often starts with the high street. If it is a shithole, we feel shit about ourselves. Reviving our high streets should also be about making our towns beautiful again. Bring back Victorian-style lampposts. Repurpose old phone boxes. Fill roundabouts with flowers and shrubs instead of leaving them to resemble wasteland. Some London neighbourhoods have these touches in abundance. If Islington can boast posh, elegant lampposts, why can’t Waterlooville?

—Ben Sturt