THE gloss will come off Andy Burnham’s government if he continues to mismatch sweeping rhetoric with microscopic reform.

Holding an emergency Cobra meeting over drought, wildfires and heatwaves was arguably overdue — though these meetings are often summoned to give the appearance of decisive government action rather than actually take any.

This week’s crisis meeting resulting in nothing more than advice to retailers not to sell disposable barbecues and advice to the public not to use them. Longer term, a ban on them during the summer may be imposed.

This isn’t irrelevant — disposable barbecues do present a fire risk — but it is inadequate, hopelessly so.

Burnham declines to address the reason wildfires are a far greater problem than in the past — that the climate is warming rapidly.

The consequences are severe — this year’s harvest is forecast to be the worst since records began in 1984, while Britain has already suffered three of the worst five harvests since then since 2020.

Crops in many parts of the world are worse hit still, and drought and flood-linked ruin in major food-growing regions is now an annual headline.

Britain’s food security is a real problem again, as Green Party leader Zack Polanski has warned the new PM.

It is a worse problem still because of great-power conflict — the unprovoked US-Israeli war on Iran has choked off much of the world’s energy and fertiliser trade, with looming knock-ons on agriculture. The Ukraine war embroils two major grain exporters, with the warzone reducing the area of Ukrainian cultivated land by a quarter, while a Russian blockade of Ukrainian Black Sea ports has hit its exports; and recent Ukrainian strikes have in turn targeted the Russian ports from which its own grain is shipped to international buyers.

Britain is complicit in the Iran war — continuing to allow the US to launch attacks on Iranian targets from our air bases — and is still fuelling the Ukraine war too with cash, armaments and diplomatic resistance to a negotiated settlement.

Burnham has never given any indication he would turn the ship of state around on foreign policy. That only makes the job of the peace movement more essential, in forcing a change our lives ultimately depend on. But Burnham is also failing to live up to the promises of change he has been making.

The same week that his Cobra meeting took its bold stance on disposable barbecues saw Thames Water, biggest and most indebted of the parasitical privatised water companies, hand a cool million-pound golden handshake to its new finance chief.

Public opinion overwhelmingly backs the full return of all water suppliers to public ownership: and Burnham himself has indicated support for doing so.

Yet his government has not even intervened to take control of Thames, whose faceless global investors have loaded it with £20 billion in debt over years extracting enormous sums to enrich themselves and which is therefore on the brink of administration anyway.

This is not just a matter of social justice. The privatised water companies’ constant prioritisation of immediate shareholder returns has seen our infrastructure steadily degrade for three decades.

Not one new reservoir has been built since privatisation, while several have been shut down, though the country’s population has grown by a fifth.The same water firms imposing hosepipe bans allow the loss of three billion litres of water every day through their poorly maintained pipes, volumes that dwarf any hosepipe saving.

There is an obvious, popular, decisive response to drought Burnham could take: and one that looks at systemic issues rather than sticking plasters.

Keir Starmer exasperated a nation with his refrain “let me be very clear,” followed by some meaningless obfuscation.

Burnham risks universal disappointment if his flurries of activity result not in change matching his heady promises, but consultations about disposable barbecues and amended regulation for vape shops.