Andy Burnham’s conference speech last week has been surprisingly well received. It was a breath of fresh air, not least because he didn’t spend time launching ad hominem attacks on opposition leaders. Apart from that, he sounded authentic and actually appeared to believe what he was saying; he also announced what was probably the most radical policy platform since Margaret Thatcher in 1979, reversing much of her agenda. Reform UK now looks less like the great insurgents and more like an establishment party campaigning to keep the status quo. Labour has stolen a march on Farage. If voters really want change, Burnham now looks the better choice.
Before the last election, when the Tories were desperately unpopular, Labour had the 'Ming vase' strategy, being ultra cautious, not rocking the boat too much, offering essentially anodyne stuff to avoid upsetting anybody and risking a dip in the polls. It worked in 2024 and gave Starmer a massive majority. But instead of ditching it once in Downing Street, he doubled down on caution. The last two years have really been squandered.
Burnham has essentially juggled with the vase on stage and, guess what, it’s still intact.
Burnham said what for so long has been politically unsayable on both the left and the right. Through privatisation (which I confess I supported at the time) governments relinquished most of the levers giving them control over the economy, leaving fewer and fewer options to regulate growth. This applied to both the Tories and Labour under Tony Blair.
The government became powerless to help consumers or to make Britain more resilient through infrastructure investment. They left it to the free market, and the market has betrayed us. The latest scandal is how private energy firms have reduced our diesel stocks to pathetic levels in pursuit of higher profits, leaving us uniquely vulnerable to a global shortage. We have 42 days worth, Germany 398!
It wasn't Brussels that we gave up control to, but our own private sector.
Chancellors increasingly have had to make do with pathetically weak regulators, tax and spending changes and borrowing to fill the gaps. Gordon Brown granted the Bank of England control over interest rates, eliminating perhaps the main lever.
Politicians then started to pledge not to raise income tax, NI or VAT. This is now de rigueur. If any party goes into an election without that commitment, it’s seen as electoral suicide. That effectively left chancellors fiddling round the edges to raise tax by stealth or cut tax and cut spending along with it, or more and more borrowing. Lately, the bond markets globally have started to raise interest rates on fears about the ability of nations to service overwhelming debt, so more borrowing is now effectively off the agenda.
The only serious option left for debate is cutting spending, of which welfare has been the main target since 2010. This is where political discourse has been - until last week. Burnham may have finally started to change course.
He has ‘adjusted’ the triple lock so that there are still the same three elements (inflation, wage growth or a fixed percentage) which will set pension levels but they won’t keep going up ahead of wages, and should simply keep pace with average incomes from 2030, saving £50 billion a year by 2049-50.
And linking the savings to creating a national care service is a master stroke. He can’t be accused of neglecting pensioners, and even the sons and daughters of pensioners should be happy that they won’t risk the total loss of any family assets if a parent needs long-term care.
Moves to bring water, the electricity grid and the railways back under some form of public control will, in my opinion, be widely welcomed. We are all sick of money disappearing abroad in dividends to nationalised foreign utilities like Arriva and EDF or to voracious venture capitalists.
Looking back, Mrs Thatcher was utterly naive in thinking private businessmen and shareholders could be trusted to make monopolies more efficient and, even if they could, were interested in sharing the financial benefits with us. Greed got the better of them.
The other three main items were more affordable housing, voting reform and, of course, Brexit. In fact, Burnham announced so many big changes that his opponents seem stunned and are scrambling to respond.
On Brexit, he said unequivocally that it has brought more harm than good and pledged to put all the options, up to and including rejoining the EU. Philip Rycroft, the top civil servant at the Department for Exiting the EU from 2017 to 2019, is quoted in the FT.
Rycroft argues that none of the options suggested by Burnham — a customs union or rejoining the EU single market — are workable. “Burnham has the credibility to open the debate. And he’s accepted the outcomes range from ‘where we are now’ to ‘rejoin’, but you quickly find the way stations between those points are not very comfortable,”
“The UK is too big an economy to be bound into a reality where it takes trade deals and rules from Brussels with no say over how those deals and rules are put together.”
In my view, the only viable option is full membership, but a true believer needs to advocate it, and Burnham may not be that man. His apparent newfound enthusiasm for the EU should not be exaggerated. A 2019 report in the Manchester Evening News shows Burnham as a pragmatist. He wanted the 2016 referendum vote respected and said he would vote to leave in a second referendum, if Labour got the right deal. He also said he would vote to remain to avoid leaving without a deal.
I think this reveals him as someone slightly indifferent to the EU, not a committed European in the Edward Heath or Tony Blair mould. I’m not sure that will be enough. If we are to win the argument, someone really passionate about the EU project should lead the campaign to rejoin, not proposing it as just a way to boost GDP.
I think also British industry will need to come out strongly in favour of rejoining, and businesses should not sit idly by as they did in 2016. The leave campaign sold a dream last time, but we can all see the results, and that won’t be an option next time.
Farage will, naturally, claim he is the only person who can make Brexit work and thinks Burnham's speech has 'opened the door' for him. I think revisiting Brexit will allow Farage to dig his own political grave arguing for something that two-thirds of the country KNOW has been an abject failure.
The problem with all the ‘Brexit wasn’t done right’ stuff is that nobody quite knows what ‘done right’ means. All we do know is that it isn’t what we’ve got, apparently. Farage in 2016 said that leaving under any conditions was going to be better than what we had.
In a Q&A after a speech days before the referendum, Farage claimed that even if we left with no deal, that would be an improvement. “The worst case scenario [a no deal Brexit] is better for this country than where we are now," he said. He also said it “was about more than money.”
He was critical of the 2019 Withdrawal Agreement, but after the TCA was negotiated, he said that while the deal was "not perfect", Boris Johnson had "done what he said he'd do on the big picture", concluding: "On the big stuff, the war is over."
Three years later, Farage said Brexit had failed. The country had "not actually benefited from Brexit economically", admitting that it was actually about money after all.
We have had seven prime ministers since 23 June 2016, from both major parties, four of which (May, Johnson, Sunak and Starmer) had a decent opportunity to ‘make Brexit work’ but, according to Farage, failed at it and everything else. Goodness knows how many different ministers, advisers, civil servants and officials have tried in that time.
But no matter, Farage and his band of hopeless incompetents will fix it all in 100 days. Good luck with arguing that in a general election campaign when you are mired in sleaze, your fruitcake councillors are creating mayhem in Local Authorities across the country (when they aren't resigning or being suspended) and you're the most disliked political figure in Britain.
We have ten years of ammunition: every lie, every false claim, every failed forecast, every inflated promise, every prediction that Brexiteers made pre and post-2016 that turned out wrong, will be used against them. It should be a campaign to relish for all pro-Europeans. Bring. It. On.
TMG Polling
The Guardian have published a large 5,627-respondent poll showing 50% of the population strongly or somewhat support rejoining the EU while just 28% strongly or somewhat oppose. Removing the don’t knows gives us 64% v 36%, about the average of the most recent polls.
Note there are still a lot of undecided voters, but encouragingly, by far the least popular option is for moving further away, which is Reform UK's main policy platform.
Trump
The US president gave a lengthy interview to Time magazine last week. The entire transcript (which Time say has been ‘lightly edited’) HERE.
I invite you to read it. Afterwards, ask yourself if the bizarre ramblings could have come from anyone remotely OK mentally. It’s perhaps the craziest interview ever given by any world leader in history; even Colonel Gaddafi seemed less deranged than Trump.
If you didn’t know, you might think it was a spoof, but it wasn’t. In fact, it’s a typical Trump interview of the sort he gives regularly. He wanders off topic, tells obvious lies, praises himself to the heavens, exposes his profound ignorance and generally behaves like a deranged, narcissistic ten-year-old.
It’s quite stunning. And he is Farage's mentor.
