Who is Andy Burnham? People who aren’t obsessed with politics are scratching their heads, following the return of the so-called King of the North to Westminster. Burnham has been away from the Commons for almost a decade, and while he barrels toward No. 10, he remains an unknown quantity for many voters. Not, however, for some of the women who have followed his career, who’ve found plenty to worry about.

It’s not just that Burnham’s record on women’s rights is alarming, though it is. He’s also flirted with economic policies which appear neutral but would disproportionately affect vulnerable women. Almost 1.7 million pensioners live in poverty, and more than half of those are women. Yet Burnham has repeatedly expressed interest in a land value tax, which would replace council tax and stamp duty with an annual levy of up to 0.5% of a house or flat’s value. While an “initial” cap has been floated, an 80-year-old widow who owns a house valued at £1 million, for instance — and that’s far from unusual in cities like London — could eventually face an annual charge of almost £5,000. A Burnham government could find itself accused of forcing elderly women to sell their homes and leave communities they’ve lived in for decades.

There are other fears, too. Until last week, Burnham was the Mayor of Greater Manchester, an area which has become notorious for some of the worst grooming gang scandals. He set up a series of reviews into historical abuse, but Maggie Oliver, a former detective constable who exposed her own force’s failings in Rochdale, has claimed that Burnham failed at “the final hurdle”, allegedly undermining a so-called “final assurance review” into more recent abuse cases. The former mayor has rejected these criticisms, but one of his allies, the fellow Manchester MP Lucy Powell, who is also Labour’s Deputy Leader, had to apologize last year after appearing to dismiss the issue as a “dog whistle”.

Yet there is ultimately one reason above all others that women have reasons to distrust Burnham. His enthusiasm for the wilder shores of trans activism dates back to 2019, when he signed a letter demanding that the Conservative government make it easier for biological men to get a certificate saying they were legally women. Three years later, Burnham was insisting that biological men who identify as women should be able to use women’s toilets. He dismissed opposition from feminists — “supposed feminists” in his words — as a “minority view”.

Last month, as his pronouncements on the subject came under greater scrutiny, he faced a dilemma. How could he appear to accept the Supreme Court judgment on the primacy of biological sex without alienating noisy trans activists in the PLP? The answer is a fudge: he now says “the time has come” to implement Equality and Human Rights Commission guidance, while insisting on the need “to find common ground”. There is none — either you believe that women have an unequivocal right to single-sex spaces or you don’t — and it speaks volumes about Burnham’s character that he claims to believe otherwise.

The current PLP is unrepresentative of anyone but activists, yet its members will decide which names are on the party’s leadership ballot, assuming that a leadership contest goes ahead. A “coronation” is also on the cards, allowing Burnham to become prime minister without having to reveal his policies in detail. That’s a worrying prospect for women — whose fears around Burnham’s record will go unscrutinized and unanswered — while Labour MPs continue to project all their unrealistic hopes and expectations onto their much-vaunted King of the North.

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Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.

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