You don’t have to be John Betjeman to know where this Labour story will end – because we’ve heard it before
Daily Telegraph 29/06/26
It’s a brave politician who chooses to give his first keynote speech in a museum, but for Andy Burnham it seemed somehow appropriate. For his entire speech was something of a museum piece, an artefact redolent of the Michael Foot days of Labour politics: strikes and trade union banners, class warfare in Parliament and ranting Leftists on the streets. The public sector, nationalisation, the unions, the state, splashing around public money – these are Burnham’s tools to make things better. We know how this story ends.
After all, Burnham evoked the era himself, even daring to give Foot’s donkey jacket a mention. In perhaps the most revealing phrase of the speech, he identified the “foundations of working class aspiration” as a “council home” and “good technical education”, a post-war image if ever there was one: the Labour vision of vast numbers of happy workers in the local factory or down the local coal mine, “Calling All Workers” on the radio, housed in gloomy tower blocks or identikit estates, each with a front door painted the same colour by local authority fiat.
But Labour had to learn in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher that large numbers of their voters wanted something better than being part of a municipal client vote: their own house, a better job, a new car, a chance at a different life in which they were in control, not Alderman Foodbotham from the Municipal Tramways Committee. Burnham doesn’t like Labour voters aspiring to a better life. He may yet have to learn that many people, yes, even in the North, still do.
There was depressingly little new in this speech. More council housing for a country that already has twice as much social housing as the EU average. Public control of the utilities. Parity of esteem for technical education – which seems to be happening without his help thanks to the manifest failings of the university sector. And, of course, a “radical” plan to make the regions great again, an attempt to make us believe that moving a No 10 desk from London to Manchester is the “biggest rebalancing of power our country has seen”. (Note to Burnham: we’ve already had that. We voted for it in 2016 and got it in 2020. But that’s not the kind of rebalancing he approves of.)
None of this is exactly ground-breaking. A genuinely radical plan would give each region the power to set its own tax rates, decide what to spend the money on, and thrive (or not) accordingly. This would give voters a real choice.
But we aren’t getting that. We are getting vast sums collected through national taxation and then handed out to local mayors to be spent as they wish. This isn’t radical. It’s the city boss under a new guise, T Dan Smith or Derek Hatton reinvented for the present day. Want to set up a business or bid for a public contract in Burnham’s Britain? You had better get on with your local mayor.
Beyond devolution, there wasn’t much of an agenda in Burnham’s supposedly agenda-setting speech. Nothing on migration. Nothing on net zero. Nothing on EU policy. Nothing on tax rates. Nothing on regulation. Nothing on public spending levels. Above all, no sense of the challenges, the trade-offs, the mechanisms by which economic growth is actually generated.
Instead Burnham offered lots of Labour-values bromides about the co-operative movement and Peterloo, yoked together with nonsensical jargon. Making “place-based collaboration the new operating principle for UK plc” was presumably penned by his economic advisers, the collectivist Brownians on steroids, Jim O’Neill to reassure the markets and Miatta Fahnbulleh MP for the Leftist loons on the backbenches.
And finally we got another plea for “consensus politics”. Our Andy doesn’t like it when people criticise him. He thinks “finger pointing [and] point scoring” are undignified and aspires grandly to a “more collaborative politics”. Normally politicians start calling for this when they have been in power for a long time and want to present themselves as elder statesmen. They don’t often do so before they have even got started.
What does Burnham think politics is supposed to be for, if not the testing of ideas in the public square? If we are not allowed to criticise without being accused of some kind of social criminality, where does this leave us?
We know Labour has always seen Right-wingers as moral deviants, comparable to the Nazis according to David Lammy, just “scum” for Angela Rayner. But we have at least always been allowed to say our piece. The problem is that anti-free-speech ideas are now well ensconced in Labour circles. They have an authoritarian dislike for dissent and they think some political ideas are actively dangerous. Surely, more clampdowns are coming.
Now it is probably no surprise to any reader that I don’t approve of Burnham’s vision for Britain. I knew it would be socialist, collectivist, statist. But I didn’t expect it to be quite so bleak, so backward-looking, so authoritarian, so clearly redolent of the “bright, hygienic hell” of John Betjeman’s Huxley Hall, his world of electric glares and sloganising public murals, this time “good growth in every postcode and hope in every heart”.
Burnham promises a “circuit breaker” for Britain. I wonder whether he really thought hard about that metaphor. His choreographed coup d’état and the pound-shop Peronism now in prospect are certainly going to switch Britain off with an overload of statist ideas. But can he switch us on again? That, I really doubt.
Comments
Post a Comment