Andy Burnham indisputably proved that he has mastered the art of making a party conference speech yesterday. It has taken him a very long time to do so, but he's got there.
That was the good news of the day for Labour. The problem is what he said.
Or, to put it another way, the problem is what he did not say after all the emoting was done.
A friend called me last night and asked whether I thought Burnham had now won the next election, and my immediate response was to ask when that friend might think the next election might be, because based upon this speech, I can find nothing of any consequence that Andy Burnham is planning to do between now and the summer of 2029, if that is when the election in question takes place.
He promised electoral reform, but not before the next election.
He promised a national care service, but only after the next election.
He promised that there would be legislation on water, but there was no promise of action as yet.
He talked about changing our relationship with the EU, but not yet.
He said he would amend the triple lock on pensions, but only after an election.
And he talked about housing, but I got the sense that not much will happen at this moment. Labour is quietly abandoning its previous commitments to building.
So, here is a man sitting on a massive majority in Parliament, albeit one won by his predecessor, but which he has complete entitlement to use to his advantage, and yet there appears to be nothing on his list of immediate priorities for action.
Three questions arise.
The first is, why is that? Was he, just like Starmer, so unprepared to be Prime Minister that all he can do is talk about future campaigns rather than current action?
The second is, does he know that the crises we currently face are so significant that to add any further burdens onto government at this moment would be a mistake? But why, in that case, did he give no hint of acknowledgement of that fact? His whole speech seemed to take place in a vacuum where the consequences of war in the Gulf, climate change, drought, El Niño, and a real cost-of-living crisis did not exist.
Thirdly, is this because deep down he knows that his commitment to walk in lockstep with his Chancellor, who has committed the Labour Party to Rachel Reeves's, and so the Tories', fiscal rules, means there is precisely nothing that he can do to solve any problem that this country now faces because financial management is the sole priority of this moment, and he does not understand that this is precisely the wrong objective for his government to follow at this point in time?
I admit to struggling to choose between these options. I very strongly suspect that, like Boris Johnson, Andy Burnham is the type of politician who thrives on campaigning but is weak at governing. He is no Harold Wilson.
I also strongly suspect he has been warned about the impending crises about to hit the government, that he is fully aware of them, and that he chose not to mention them deliberately because, as yet, he really has no idea what to do about them.
And when it comes to neoliberalism, he is, to use the phrase that he and John Healey have chosen, in total lockstep with the idea that the fiscal rules are the strongest priority of government, and appeasing the City of London is its goal, and everything else must wait.
Andy Burnham is a Labour politician built in the mould of Gordon Brown, who thought finances mattered more than anything else. He might be the heir to Starmer, but the difference comes down to little more than their respective abilities in front of a crowd. The depressing fact is that Burnham would appear to have no better idea about what to do than Starmer did.
We are then set for one of two things.
One is an election much sooner than we expected, possibly in 2027, although he would likely lose his parliamentary majority as a result while remaining the largest party.
The alternative is nearly three years of drift.
Of the two, I think the second is most likely.
So very New Labour, then.
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“Andy Burnham is a Labour politician built in the mould of Gordon Brown,” – bunrt-ham learnt his politics on the knee of Broon, the “Broon-continuity-party”. UK politicos, for the most part, with perhaps 10 to 15 exceptions have lost contact with reality. I include the Deform rabble in that comment. Wilson was both an effective manager (he held an important role in the WW2 unity gov) and had some good ideas. He was not a visionary – but seems like a genius compared to the chumps that came afterwards.
It sounds like the political equivalent of a holding pattern over Gatwick in the holiday season.
On the subject of housing I have seen no let up in the amount of new private units being offered as pension investments that will be hired out and managed by registered social landlords (the asset you understand being privately owned). The publicly owned units struggle to get built.
To be fair though, Burnham is surrounded by hostility isn’t he in Whitehall and beyond. This is a Neo-liberal world after all. Even if he were the second coming of Attlee, he’d be up against institutions which are repurposed to look after the elite and not the country.
But this is also why he needs to be more radical. Sacking the governor of the BoE would be a start and a good look at some civil service heads as well. The Right would not suffer having ‘pinkos’ in its midst or anyone else who was ‘not one of us’. I’m afraid sometimes this is how power has to work. There are a lot snakes (blue ones) in his own party as well.
Yep – he has to be bolder – but I wish we were told who it is who is briefing against the interests of the majority of people in this country, and what they saying.
Explain Andy, explain!
Much to agree with
It’s probably just me. But there feels like an eerie tension in the air, like everyone is holding their breath, or suddenly the wind has dropped and all is silent. Right before the bomb hits…..
Maybe those in west minster know something we don’t.
I, too, have that feeling
I think the most effective way to counter that feeling is to focus on what is directly controllable by building personal, household, and local community resilience to withstand the crisis that is coming. The UK Government is not going to do it for us.
To quote yourself Richard – ‘much to agree with'<p>
Quite depressing<p>
But in his rhetorical honeymoon period he has probably done enough for Labour to win Holborn and St Pancras.
That I agree with
I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt for the time being. He has set his course. Winning the next election is Burnham’s target, in a way that never seemed important to Starmer. And many of the problems are too big to fix in one or two years. But Burnham will also need to show some delivery. Conjouring up some hope for the future is a good thing but he will need to persuade people that their lives are actually getting better. Without getting blown too far off course by events.
One thing he could do – and it is within his control – is reform the regulatory mechanism for pricing electricity. The weird auction that fixes prices by the most expensive component has to go.
On the last, agreed
If, as seems/feels/is likely to be the case, “our” U. K is not a practical/functioning democracy but a distorted polyarchy dominated by the financial group, might that group be the effective rulers with too many political parties supporting them actively (Conservatives and Reform?) to passively (Labour and Lib-Dems)?
I absolutely agree. Blair, Brown, Starmer, Burnham – all had/have the opportunity and the authority to change the economic post-1980 status quo, and didn’t – whatever else they did. Eg: they used PFI to build hospitals and schools, rather than money creation and effective resource mobilisation. They refused to nationalise utilities (except for failing banks). They ignored reform of social care.
My unanswered question is WHY?
Were they ignorant?
Were they threatened/blackmailed/bullied by other internal/external forces? WHO?
Were they ALL incompetent at governing?
Were they naive or stupid?
Were they never committed to making the world a better place in the first place, because they were evil scheming crooks?
Leaving all the political skullduggery they got up to, on one side, what prevented them from doing what they had the power and responsibility to do and break the power of unelected wealth, even though they made it to Downing St. with very good majorities?
We’ve all got our preferred theories – but I really would like to know. The latest Labour conference manoeuvres to retain Palantir in the NHS are so utterly crazy, that I’m even further from understanding WHY any Labour politician would want to do it. But clearly they do. Why?
A frightening precedent from the States. It seems that the only way to expose the evil of Trump to his MAGA maniac base, was to elect him again in 2024, cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war.
I ask myself, am I prepared to vote LINO-Labour JUST to keep Reform out? My answer at present, is NO. But Labour could change my mind.
Noted
Its difficult to avoid being led to the conclusion that there is indeed a deep state – which was glimpsed when George Osborne said Corbyn would never have got ‘security clearance’ to be PM.<p>
The powers that be must have had a real wake up call when Corbyn nearly beat Theresa May and from then on we had the illegally funded Labour Together ‘antisemitism’ coup – the faction still running the party after Josh Simons gave Burnham his seat<p>
Security services probably behind the scenes exerting whatever power needs to be exerted. And they are entwined with CIA/Mossad etc.<p>
It sounds like a conspiracy theory but goes along with the fact that main parties are now all funded by corrupt money – not by members subscriptions…………
And the corollory to that theory: Follow the money.
The operation to remove Corbyn, started earlier – as soon as he was elected leader. Initially it was a traditional dirty Labour factional fight, after the Brexit vote, 2016, led by Ian McNicol and the party bureaucracy,
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/6/27/labours-jeremy-corbyn-faces-crisis-after-brexit-vote
but it soon became organised, via the “chicken coup” co-ordinated Shadow Cabinet resignations, into a corrupt, covert and at times, unlawful plot, under Labour Together, focussed successfully, twice, on preventing Labour winning a General Election with him as leader, and later, installing Starmer as their compliant, ruthless and lying puppet, with Ruth Smeeth (“asset, protect”) never far from his side. See The Fraud, Paul Holden, OR Books.
The success of their treachery gave us the chaos of the May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, Starmer and Burnham “governments” for which we are expected to be grateful.
After 46 years of destructive neoliberal economic damage, it isn’t acceptable for Burnham to tell us to wait another three years, in the hope that this time, a PM might actually deliver. That might work for an opposition, but not for the incumbent, not now.
He is guaranteed to fail unless he prioritises NOW:
1. Replacing fiscal rules with MMT rules, because that’s the way it IS, and then governing (sustainably) to meet the most urgent needs of the people, asap.
2. Voting reform & PR, in time for the next election.
As Richard makes clear, he CAN do this now, if he wants to, if he really cares about “we, the people” and then he could work through some well thought through practical solutions, like a green new deal, a politics of care, TWR2024, some popular proposals from the 2017 Labour manifesto, and build a “caring coalition”, ready for whatever the GE 2029 produces.
The Labour hierarchy never accepted him as leader. Every appointment he made to his office required a shadow appointment at Labour HQ to monitor what he and they were doing.
Richard, on much of this you’re right. Rules built around a single target year invite fiddling, headroom this thin turns every OBR forecast into a mini-crisis, and a Chancellor who squeezes investment to hit an arbitrary line isn’t being prudent. Full employment and ending child poverty should be the goals, not the footnotes.
Where we part company is on how you get there. Burnham has actually delivered public ownership. He took Manchester’s buses back into public control and saw off the operators in court when they tried to stop him. Healey’s caution is a starting position, and the case for better rules gets won inside this government, not against it. His namesake Denis found in 1976 that markets can overrule a Cabinet in a week. Burnham has to earn room before he spends it.
The Greens offer no route at all. Their only experience of running anything is Brighton, where bin strikes and budget chaos got them thrown out twice, plus a spell in Scottish government that ended with their own flagship climate target abandoned. Your Party fell out over its membership list before it wrote a policy.
1983 showed what a split anti-Tory vote produces. Split the left again and you won’t get anything close to your economics. You’ll get Farage’s.
You are far too dismissive of the Greens
And Labour is now an answer to no known question, unless the question is “How can we dress up neoliberalism as a supoosedly left of centre cause?”
Tinkerman Burnham is as you say is kicking the cans down the road.
It is pointless expecting Tinkerman or Healey to grasp how money is really created and what flows from this because their advisers have no idea and the neoliberal tropes appear to suit their goals of austerity/fiscal prudence to keep the City etc “on board”.
What is staggering how Labour has failed to do anything sensible about the long term problems facing the UK with such a big majority.
Why vote Labour at the next election? It is only to possibly keep out Garage.What a choice!
What storms are about to hit the global economy? The consequences of the US/Israel war on Iran and the non sustainable hype/funding of US AI companies.
The UK PM actually has more executive power than the US president. Burnham could enact all his promises tomorrow if he had a mind. I can only assume that there are powerful forces behind the scenes that are stopping him.
Carole Cadwalladr has given us all the heads up as to how elections are now fought on social media and most of the electorate are still not very media savvy.
In the run up to the next General Election I’d expect a full onslaught of the same Pre-Brexit style fear mongering and false promises propaganda, all aided and abetted by the social media owners and amplified ten-fold as they now know how effective it works – the Right don’t do fair fighting.
If Burnham does nothing else with what’s left of this term he really needs to focus on his promise of electoral reform and, if at all possible, get it over the line beforehand, though I suspect that to be unrealistic. With FPTP they’ll be no significant Labour majority the next time, we can be confident of that, and it may well be much much worse.
I may be stating the blindingly obvious here but Burnham’s slow lumbering style of delivery doesn’t inspire much confidence.
As the Queen said, “The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day.”
The really depressing thing is that this is the best our politicians seem to have to offer.
I did think that bringing his dead dad into a conference speech was rather crass too.
RobertJ, above, articulates exactly what I have been asking for years- WHY have Labour governments refused to nationalise utilities, why use the ruinous PFI to finance hospitals, etc, etc, etc. No one can tell me, so like Robert, I have then asked what external and internal forces could be operating- blackmail, threats, bribery, sheer incompetence or stupidity- and I am no closer to an answer. Burnham’s speech yesterday was a lovely piece of acting- no script, no lectern, real tears, too. Give him an Olivier award! But everything is still being kicked down the road. Yet again, WHY? Cui bono? Answers on a postcard. Thanks, RobertJ, for making me feel slightly less bonkers!
I promise you: you are not bonkers
Jam tomorrow if you vote for me in next GE, was my reading of AB.
As you say he’s captured by the neoliberal ‘fiscal rule’ agenda – he can’t change anything.
It’s like neoliberalism has died, but it’s lies prevail so the new world can’t be born, and wondering how to help this birthing?
Genuine question, Prof, is there any mileage in an umbrella economic alliance ‘there is an alternative and hope’ an alliance of all the current great thinkers like yourself and others like Monbiot, Mazzucato independent journalists public supporters etc. The number is potentially large, as is in the All Under One Umbrella in Yes movement in Scotland.
Rationale being solidarity of purpose and voice is the only way systems have ever changed. Easy to ignore individuals and small groups, much harder for right wing media and political class to ignore a large economic alliance.
Yes, there is.
But I am not the networker / organiser to establish it. That is not my skill set.
Thanks Prof, so value your opinion and good to know you think it would work,
wondering who could, and need not be a person but maybe a small group with the right credibility and expertise to organise.
The advantage of an alliance is it doesn’t stop each doing there own thing it’s a messaging vehicle to get attention and momentum.
It would also inevitably need a bit of money. Secretariats and websites have a cost.
The most chilling part of Orwells 1984 is not the story, it is the annexes and the comments on Newspeak. Reducing language to the point where e.g. the first few sentences of the US declaration of independence would be unintelligible to those knowing only Newspeak.
We have reached a similar point both in politics & the systems (e.g. energy) that underpin what passes for civilisation. Burnt-ham spouts platitudes behind which there CAN sit nothing – because Burnt-ham does not have the syntax or thought process to enunciate anything other than platitudes. Functionally he can’t because he does not have the knowledge or the words.
I see the same in my area of interest, energy. Most commentators are functionally incapable of thinking in terms other than “markets”. Even more sad, they don’t even realise they have been groomed. Same with the politicos, I’m quite sure Burnt-ham was personable enough @ uni’ but Wezzie politics (& the socialising that is part of it) ensured the gradual closing of his mind and thought processes. These comments apply to 95% of UK politicos and senior civil servants.
There are some lessons from history on how to deal with this situation, but since this is a family orientated blog I will forbear.
Thanks, Mike.
I agree on the risk of there being 3 years of not enough happening. However, if changes to voting happened ahead of a general election there would be many media voices decrying it as an affront to democracy because it was not part of Labour’s manifesto last time. That would need a general election or referendum (and we know from last time we had one on changing the voting system that voting on it that way might kill the idea).
Allowing the triple lock to end at the end of the current commitment and tying that to a reform of social care could do more to improve the affordability of lower income pensioners than the triple lock itself, although the details remain to be determined and as has been discussed on here tax treatment for higher rate taxpayers might have been a better source of funding for such a tied commitment. This is all the more true when eliminating means-tested care contributions would benefit wealthy pensioners more – it would balance things out somewhat.
Similarly, Labour’s last manifesto pledges had shied awsay from closer EU ties, so it is again something where any attempt to shift significantly without the support of a general election would get significant attacks in the media.
I don’t like the delays, and there is a risk of it kicking the can down the road indefinitely, and also losing support in the meantime resulting in welcome changes never being enacted, but I do see it as a welcome shift in direction for Labour with a clear effort to avoid being ‘undemocratic’.
The question is then what Burnham is willing to do in the meantime to retain sufficient support to win the next general election?
Parliament is sovereign.
Everything else is media babble.