STEPHEN GLOVER: Burnham will need to call an election before voters realise he's no better than Starmer. If he wins, this is the hellish landscape that awaits...

The Budget on Wednesday has been dismissed as a snoozefest that ducked the enormous problems facing this country.So it was. But the measures announced by John Healey at the command of our unelected Prime Minister were also sly. He threw some voters a few encouraging morsels before an inevitable General Election.Hence the bribe of £100 to 20 million people to reduce their energy bills this winter. It’ll soon be wiped out after the so-called price cap rises in January, but Burnham and Healey hope Labour will first be rewarded at the polls.It’s all politics, of course, and we shouldn’t be surprised by the Chancellor and Prime Minister helping their cause. The truth is that if Burnham doesn’t call an election soon he is stark, raving bonkers.ShamelessThe Office for Budgetary Responsibility (OBR) – which is admittedly not always correct but is under new, apparently competent management – forecasts that household disposable income will fall by 0.6 per cent next year, largely due to higher energy costs.David Miles, a leading light at the OBR, says ‘it is a pretty grim picture’. There’s nothing in the OBR’s report that would lead even the wildest optimist to suppose 2028 and 2029 will be any better.So why would the Prime Minister serve out the remaining half of this Parliament and go to the polls in 2029? He must have enough political acumen to realise that before long the ‘Burnham Bounce’ is bound to become one long depressing bong.No, there’s going to be an election next year. It doesn’t matter that the PM has categorically ruled one out since he has already shown that he can turn on a sixpence. Andy Burnham talked about the need for ‘unflinching honesty’ at the recent Labour Party conference, and has spouted the same self-serving nonsense in the CommonsHere is the man who promised the voters of Makerfield before the by-election in June that he was ‘not proposing that the UK considers rejoining the EU’. Since becoming Prime Minister that is exactly what he has done several times.Whenever a politician repeatedly insists on his honesty, it’s time to start counting the spoons. Andy Burnham talked about the need for ‘unflinching honesty’ at the recent Labour Party conference, and has spouted the same self-serving nonsense in the Commons and on the airwaves.He has declared that he will serve the whole term. A couple of days ago he changed that formula, and said there wouldn’t be an election during the next 12 months. I expect he’ll shamelessly revise that figure again.As I’ve said, things are only going to get worse – and that is on the basis of the OBR’s forecasts. Reality may be even more dire, especially if the energy crisis persists as a result of Trump’s idiotic Middle Eastern war.Burnham will need to call an election before the whole country realises he’s no better than the hapless Starmer, whom he brutally assassinated, and probably even worse.There’s a further strong motive for going to the country soon. The Right remains divided, though in a slightly different configuration. Most recent polls show the Tories a little in front of Reform UK, and Labour pulling a little ahead of both of them.A poll released earlier this week by Ipsos had Labour on 32 per cent, an increase of 5 percentage points on the previous month. The Tories are in second place on 24 per cent and Reform is third with 20 per cent. That is the largest Labour lead Ipsos has recorded this Parliament.Election Maps UK predicts that, if these figures were translated to a General Election, Labour would have an overall majority of four, while there would be 66 Liberal Democrat MPs who could lend a hand.It could be a rogue poll of course, but it reflects a trend shown in other surveys. Reform, which has been damaged by financial scandals, has declined markedly since its heyday a year ago. The Tories have made only modest advances, while Labour is making significant ground.Burnham will be told by advisers that his party’s improvement is likely to be undermined by the bad economic developments forecast by the OBR. Go now, will be their mantra. Go before it is too late.And this is where I break out in a cold sweat. For who can doubt that a new government led by Burnham, even if it were slightly moderated by the Lib Dems, would be the most Left-wing one in our history, made even worse by innate incompetence?Freed from the constraints of the 2024 Labour manifesto, a Burnham Government would raise income tax and national insurance on ordinary workers. It would whack up taxes on the better off with capital gains tax increases and yet more property taxes. Burnham will be told by advisers that his party’s improvement is likely to be undermined by the bad economic developments forecast by the OBRAddictedThe very rich would have to contend with a wealth tax. Many of them would escape abroad to more hospitable climes, to the detriment of the British economy.Would spiralling welfare be reined in? I very much doubt it. The Chancellor’s suggestion yesterday that it will be cut before the election was slapped down by No 10. Labour has become irreversibly addicted to higher welfare.Five more years of Labour would give us more growth-stifling pro-trade union laws. The boats coming across the Channel wouldn’t stop. Shabana Mahmood’s cautious attempts to make it more difficult for immigrants to obtain residency would be binned under pressure from Angela Rayner and her ilk.Net zero would be supercharged at the expense of ordinary people so that energy costs would continue to rise faster than in other countries. Owners of wind farms would receive even more than the £4 million a day they currently do for their turbines to lie idle.And, of course, a Burnham Government would finagle this country back into the sclerotic and increasingly politically unstable European Union, or at the very least its Single Market, very possibly without a referendum.VanityThis is the hellish landscape that awaits us, if Labour wins an early election. It is the combination of socialismand incompetence that is terrifying. These two habitual bedfellows ruined once prosperous Venezuela. For God’s sake, Labour practically finished off this country in the 1970s.There is only one way of avoiding this fate, which is for the Right to unite. Alas, the recent decline of Reform UK makes this aspiration even more problematic.Kemi Badenoch evidently thinks the Tories can again become the only major party of the Right, although in most polls they are doing no better than in the 2024 election.Nigel Farage isn’t going to throw in the towel after all he has been through, and he almost certainly has a bedrock of support. But how will he ever get rid of the stink of financial impropriety?Only a pre-election pact can save the Right so that Tories and Reform – whose policies are now so alike – don’t take votes from each other to the benefit of Labour or Lib Dems in seats across the nation. Yet vanity, tribal loyalties and blind devotion to party stand in the way of the needs of the country.Andy Burnham will call an election next year. He would be stupid not to. And I fear the Right is so petty and so introverted that it will enable him to win – and consign us to a very dark age.