Finn McRedmond: Andy Burnham making TikToks about parking tickets seems to be missing the point

In 1974, Harold Wilson circulated a memo around the Labour cabinet titled Little Things Mean a Lot. The idea was to draft a list of low-intervention policies that would improve the day-to-day of the average British voter. He was concerned with things like the cost of pints and whether Britain needed another morale-raising bank holiday. It is not the first thing that comes to mind when Wilson comes up – the British prime minister who famously said “the Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing”. But Andy Burnham – who longs to inject the ethos of the 1970s into contemporary Britain – appears to have spent some time thinking about it. On Monday morning he announced a national campaign to crack down on antisocial behaviour on public transport – not violent crime or anything so serious but “headphone dodging”. He is right to have identified an area of public life that has materially worsened in a short few years; if you are a commuter you will know how maddening it is when other passengers blare music or TikTok videos out loud from their phones. You will also be aware of how prevalent the habit is. I don’t remember that happening, say, five years ago. Fine. Good thing to fix. But is this really the policy area for a prime minister to be pronouncing on? Ought it not be a little beneath his office? Well, the first thing to note is that Andy Burnham doesn’t care. He is happily taking Britain to a place of parochial politics – he has also announced new measures to protect drivers hit with “rip-off” parking fines. READ MOREThen there is the campaign to remove hidden airline fees, to challenge bad customer service, to end auto-renewing subscriptions. All serious annoyances, of course. But I wonder if matters of such quotidian banality ought to be reserved for junior ministers, at least ... What is Burnham’s plan to improve the quality of Starbucks croissants? The little-things-that-mean-a-lot approach to governing does not exactly meet the moment. Or put another way: why does politics feel more parochial than ever, at a time when global affairs are king? Ireland is not excused from this criticism either, but more on that later. Burnham has long made it clear that the local and the domestic are areas of policy that matter to him; unlike Keir Starmer (or Emmanuel Macron, Leo Varadkar or Boris Johnson), Burnham eschews the international stage. It makes sense for a mayor. And fortunately for mayors, they needn’t concern themselves with wars in Iran or on Europe’s eastern frontier. Unfortunately for Burnham, he cannot elude big global crises by refusing to care about them. He might have had an idea about how he wanted to run Britain, but Burnham is slave to events just as every world leader is. Announcing a policy about parking fines in a jaunty TikTok video does not communicate that the British prime minister is taking these events as seriously as one might hope. In this era of parochial politics, we might consider the triple lock debate raging in the Dáil. Commendations to Micheál Martin for acknowledging that the “world has changed” and that Ireland might want to think about adapting. The level of debate, meanwhile, is totally debased by the Opposition – utterly and credulously attached to a policy that is no longer appropriate or even in their own interest (these arch pacifists are rejecting a motion that would allow Ireland to engage in more peacekeeping missions, for reasons logisticians will spend years trying to get to the bottom of). [ The triple lock: What is it and why is the Government trying to change it?Opens in new window ]In other words, this is parochial politics, too. It is a strange thing for Ireland’s left to do: at once wanting to be seen as a serious global arbiter on matters in Israel and Palestine (rightly or wrongly, the intensity of their posture reads as bizarre to many outside of Ireland) while shirking the actual obligations of being global arbiters. The longer Ireland clings on to the triple lock, the further estranged it will be from any European-wide conversations about the security and future of the Continent. And I am afraid that placards in parliament and mudslinging about Nazis does not – to repeat myself – really meet the severity of the moment. As for the Government? It is not totally exonerated from accusations of parochialism. Yes, it is good that Ireland is having a conversation about its international role. But as anxious Lithuanians peer at the Russian border wondering what might happen tomorrow, the debate about the triple lock looks like tinkering at the margins of a policy that is unfit for 2026. What feels gravely symbolic to the nation (and rightfully so) appears navel-gazing from the outside. I still hope the Government is successful. Just as I would rather have a knife at a gunfight than nothing at all. Martin has rightly – cautiously and sensitively, too – started a necessary conversation. But I look around anxiously and find a British prime minister making TikToks about parking tickets, and a Taoiseach adapting Ireland’s foreign policy 10 years too late. Nothing to worry about then.