The PM’s small measures aim to help the public take back control – and we know how powerful that can be

E-bikes, noisy headphones, flytipping: Burnham is weighing in on areas that make a difference to how people feel about life

Imagine waking up one morning to find a humiliating video of you, filmed without your knowledge or control, plastered all over social media. Maybe you were sweating at the gym; or maybe at work, in a bar, or walking down the street, where you never realised the stranger hassling you for your number was covertly filming for his social media channel dedicated to shaming women who won’t date him.

This week ministers hinted at a potential crackdown on so-called pervert glasses, wifi-enabled spectacles that let the wearer capture video of people around them, after multiple reports of men using them to harass women. (Though a small flashing light on the frame is meant to warn that the user is filming, it’s easily missed and worryingly easily disabled.) If so, it would be a small win, admittedly, in the context of what feels like an endless losing battle against big tech. But it would give young women back some small sense of control in life, and that matters perhaps more than we think.

When Andy Burnham declared war last month on people listening to loud music on the bus without headphones, he was mocked for fiddling while Rome burns. What next, jail time for finishing off the milk and putting the empty carton carefully back in the fridge? But if anything, the prime minister has since doubled down on sweating the small stuff. In a week in which unknown forces have been disrupting food supplies and grounding flights across Europe, Burnham found time to weigh in personally over thoughtless idiots abandoning hire bikes in the middle of city pavements – a genuine problem for blind people and people trying to get round them with pushchairs or wheelchairs, but usually the sort of crackdown left to junior ministers – and on the attempt to save Poundland shops for the nation. It wasn’t until I spoke to the former Starmer strategist Claire Ainsley about her new book, Control: How We Lost it and How to Take it Back, that something clicked into place: all these policies are about exerting control, in situations where we feel it’s been taken away from us.

In the book, she writes that the classic advice given to people in anxious times is to focus on what you can do – small things over which everyone has mastery – and worry about the rest later, when you can ideally tackle it in a calmer frame of mind. And that’s essentially how Burnham is approaching Britain, an anxious country with much to be anxious about currently. There may be little its prime minister can realistically do about Donald Trump (that’s one for American voters, who made a promising start this week), Vladimir Putin, oil prices or a stock market slump that may or may not herald the beginning of the AI bubble bursting. But combating small acts of selfishness, that make a surprisingly big subliminal difference to how people feel about their lives, their high streets, the public realm through which they move, are very much in his wheelhouse.

The freedom to just unlock a Lime bike and cycle away undoubtedly changed city life for the better, but with it came a whiff of anarchy. Hire bike riders have earned their reputation for jumping red lights, zooming along pavements, knocking over pedestrians and abandoning their bikes wherever it suits them when they’re done. But transport secretary Heidi Alexander’s consultation will also look at illegal and antisocial riding, picking up on persistent reports from outside big cities of something darker and more intimidating; packs of balaclava-wearing young men burning through housing estates on dirt bikes and e-scooters that aren’t legal on roads, yelling abuse at anyone trying to stop them, fuelling a sense that the police have lost control of the neighbourhood. This kind of antisocial behaviour isn’t new – 20 years ago it was teenage joyriders stealing cars – but when it leaves parents feeling it’s not safe to take their kids to the park, it’s corrosive on a much deeper level. In parliament recently, the Darlington MP Lola McEvoy described illegal e-bike riders running amok in her constituency as a “visible degradation of our collective social contract”.

The summer’s crackdown on fly-tipping, again personally fronted by the prime minister, fits a similar pattern: his new Makerfield constituency was home for years to an illegal dump full of rotting, rat-infested rubbish that despite his best efforts the previous MP Josh Simons couldn’t get anyone in authority to shift, until it caught fire and a nearby primary school had to close. In her book, Ainsley quotes Simons describing the first year in office for many new Labour MPs as “a crash course in state failure”.

If all Andy Burnham can ultimately offer the country is petty crackdowns while the world goes to hell in a handcart, then his project is doomed to fail. (Keir Starmer used to talk before the last election about small steps to win back the confidence of voters angry with politicians, and look what happened to him.) But “take back control” was a powerful slogan for Vote Leave for good reason. If Labour could somehow creatively reinterpret it to mean a country where the state actually works, big tech can no longer operate with no thought for the human consequences, predators don’t have licence to behave as they please and pensioners have a fighting chance of making it down a pavement – well, isn’t that what we used to call governing?