Burnham’s Big, Bad Speech Offered One Good Idea
The American Conservative · R · trust 36/100
The prime minister highlighted real problems with elder care but ignored deeper crises.
Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... Britain has a new prime minister who can, at least, deliver a speech. Andy Burnham, the former Blairite who has reinvented himself as an old-school socialist, electrified British politics at the end of September with a speech that promised to take Britain back to the 1970s.
Not since John Smith, the Labour leader whose early death paved the way for the Blairite centrist revolution in the early 1990s, has there been a Labour leader, and PM, who is so unapologetically Labour , and he lovingly caressed every party prejudice about why Britain isn’t working as it should. And in further proof that most of British politics remains an argument with the legacy of Margaret Thatcher, he got his biggest cheer for a promise to undo the former Conservative leader’s privatization of the water industry.
The speech was left-populist, tribal, emotionally manipulative, ideologically blinkered, and wrong about most of Britain’s biggest problems. But it also had one useful and original idea at its heart: paying for reform of the underfunded system of elder care by ending the expensive so-called “triple lock” on the public pension system, which guarantees that the state pension rises in line with earnings, inflation, or 2.5 percent, whichever is highest.
Burnham’s lackluster predecessor, Keir Starmer, would not have had the courage or imagination to come up with such an idea. But neither would he have been so naively ideological to suppose that Britain has a built-in center-left majority waiting to govern in perpetuity once the old first-past-the-post voting system is replaced with a new, more proportional system, another of Burnham’s promised reforms. Nor would Starmer have been apparently so unconcerned with Britain’s constipated state machine and spluttering economic engine as to make a whole speech without, as one commentator noticed, using the words “entrepreneur,” “biotech,” “Oxford,” “Cambridge,” “London,” “financial services,” or many of the other right-coded things that Britain is actually quite good at.
Nonetheless, the speech has had its desired short-term effect and provided a Burnham bounce in the opinion polls, allowing Labour to narrowly lead the insurgent right-populists of Nigel Farage’s Reform party, mainly by winning back some of the disillusioned younger graduate voters in the big cities and university towns who had deserted the party for the leftist Greens.
Does Burnham really believe in all that back-to-the-1970s and public-ownership stuff? It is one thing to take back control of failed organizations like Thames Water, but all of energy and water? Burnham’s leftist ambitions will certainly be constrained by the fact that he can’t increase public spending and Britain is already paying more for its debt pile—which reaches nearly 100 percent of GDP—than comparable European countries. But the left-inclined voters cannot be fed on rhetoric alone.
The run-up to the next general election in 2029 is more likely to confirm the view that the great tragedy of British politics is the failure of the Boris Johnson–led realignment after the big Conservative election victory in 2019. In the light of the Brexit vote to leave the European Union, there was an opening for the main party of the right to lock in a new swathe of socially conservative lower-income voters who were impatient with the left’s social liberalism but also wanted protection from the harsh winds of the market economy.
Johnson—the joker anti-politics politician—should have been the perfect figurehead for such a realignment, but the combination of his capricious personality, Covid, and the fact that the Conservatives were constantly divided between their conservative and liberal wings put paid to the realignment and ushered in a badly timed Labour Government in 2024. Labour entered with a huge majority—thanks to the divide on the right between Reform and the Conservatives—but with no idea what to do with it.
The new government was certainly in no position, temperamentally or ideologically, to respond to the accumulated failures and unintended consequences of the Blair/Cameron era. One reason I am no longer a member or supporter of the Labour party (I was a member from my student days until 2017) is that I believe we need a government that can address those problems. What are they?
The problem of overregulation, state incapacity, and too much dispersal of power to the courts and regulators; the absence of “tough love” in health and social services, including the over-diagnosis problem and the inability to control welfare spending; the economy-throttling high energy costs, which are the result, in part, of the chaotic and over-rapid path to “net zero” in the name of global leadership; the indifference to both high levels of immigration and deindustrialization (from both Labour and Conservatives), the combination of which has been a main driver of populism; the neglect of technical/vocational education in favour of university over-expansion; the creation of a new progressive establishment—Oxbridge, the British Medical Association and all health institutions, the Senior Civil Service, most of the legal profession—with views some way to the left of the average voter on both social and economic issues.
It is very hard for the party that ushered in most of these changes, admittedly with some help from the Conservatives, to perform a volte-face . And Burnham’s speech underlines just how little he wants to. He expatiated on public ownership, though with the wriggle room provided by the phrase “public control,” and said nothing at all about the overregulation/state incapacity problem, or the welfare incontinence, or the self-inflicted energy cost wound, or even how to stimulate economic growth.
Moreover, while Burnham has proved adept at appealing to the economic nostalgia of less-well…
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