Andy Burnham loses the plot over Europe and Brexit voters

Andy Burnham is lining up something really crazy on Europe, a move that lands like a punch on everyone who voted Brexit.

British attitudes to Europe have always been a little mad. That much is plain. Yet the Greater Manchester mayor now appears set on a course that doubles down on the old Brussels instinct instead of accepting the settled will of the country. The Daily Express put it without varnish: he has lost the plot and is about to punch Brexit voters in the face.

This is not careful listening. It is the familiar habit of treating the referendum result as an embarrassment to be managed rather than a decision to be honoured. Ordinary people who backed Leave did so for sovereignty, borders and the right to make their own laws. They did not ask for another round of grand schemes that pull the country back toward the orbit it chose to leave.

Burnham’s approach sits in that long pattern where metropolitan politicians talk past the public. They speak of pragmatism while the practical effect is to reopen wounds and signal that the votes of millions still do not quite count. British common sense has always mixed wariness of remote rule with a hard preference for control at home. Ignoring that mix is what keeps the madness alive.

The country moved on. Institutions and politicians who keep circling the same European ambitions only prove they have not. A serious politics would drop the lectures, drop the clever realignments, and accept that Brexit was not a temporary tantrum. It was a verdict. Lining up anything that treats that verdict as optional is exactly the crazy turn the public has already rejected.

Voters can spot the difference between leadership and another attempt to reverse the result by stealth. Burnham’s latest direction offers the latter, and it will be read as such across the towns and cities that made their choice clear.