This week all eyes are on the PM at his Labour Conference speech. Our diarist MP Simon Alexander writes about the narrative around Andy Burnham, driven especially by the New Statesman magazine
Did you see The Speech? It was very good: no notes, a bit of unfeigned emotion, plenty of red meat to the electorate, the audacity of hope. Let us see what happens next.
I am more concerned with the house journals, and I will apply the same method next week when the Conservatives have their conference. How are they trying to pick themselves up off the floor upon which they were knocked out in 2024, and where do the right-leaning newspapers and magazines think the next election – probably the next but one election – will be won?
Over on the left, of course, I have to go to the Guardian, who before the conference began were concerned as to whether the PM was going to be ‘radical’ enough and bring an end to ‘40 years of neoliberalism’. Alas the piece dissolved into think-tankery and my eyes glazed over much of it, although I did note down a bunch of names to look out for: Graeme Cook, Marc Stears, Carys Roberts, George Dibb, Arthur Downing. Remember their names. I also wrote down the names of think-tanks like the Haldane Society and the Good Growth Foundation, some of which would be useful in providing the PM with ideas.
The lede paragraph reminded us of what seems to be the PM’s main message: he comes to fix people’s everyday problems, like Martin Lewis, except someone you actually want to have a drink with. His Lewis-approved policies in his first ten weeks as PM have included cheaper bus fares, lower electricity bills, relief for pubs and gig venues, more council housing, a national care service and, most importantly for people like Feargal Sharkey, ‘public control’ over private ownership of utilities. One professor compares the PM to ‘a screen on to which different Labour factions project their hopes, telling us more about what other people want to happen than what he might do’. So he’s also the Princess of Wales.
Anyhow, to the New Statesman, which is to the Labour Party what The Spectator is to the Conservatives. The PM gave an interview to Tom McTague, the magazine’s editor and author of a chunky book on postwar Britain that I keep on meaning to borrow from Vish. The interview was 5000 words long, so I told Em-Dash to summarise it; she obliged, not because she wanted to (she did) but because I pay her to keep me informed of such things.
Vish scoffed at both the portrait photo that accompanied the interview (‘he looks presidential’) and its strapline: ‘“‘O’Andy Burnham seizes control: The Prime Minister on life, fate and his plan to make Britain believe again”. Pffft.’
‘Come on now, Vish,’ I said, biting into a raisin Danish, ‘it’s harmless propaganda. It doesn’t mean anything. Would you rather he posed in an Everton third strip or a New Order 1987 tour t-shirt instead?’
‘Yes. Both.’
I left Vish to the inbox which I pay him to work through, and began to read Em’s executive summary. ‘Burnham himself is seized by the sense that this time it will be different, that he will be different’ comes with a note that simply reads: ‘Miliband. Corbyn. Starmer. Fourth time’s the charm.’ Then there are the editorial lines from McTague that are pathetic attempts at injecting drama into his piece: ‘An opportunity was coming in Westminster – he could feel it. And he wanted me to know something: he was ready.’ The writer’s final flourish was that ‘Andy Burnham has a sense of the power he possesses. Now he has to prove he’s up to wielding it.’
Buried amongst all of this puffery was news of how the PM runs his Westminster office: weekly meetings of the kind Tony Blair used to do 20 years ago; buffet lunches after PMQs with some of his 400 MPs; a bigger role for the bag-carrying principal private secretary aka unpaid aide.
Resilience and devolution will be key themes in the Burnham government, with a sharp focus on AI and the ‘business-friendly socialism’ perfected during his time as Greater Manchester mayor. It was interesting that he had a section of his conference address where he effectively wanted to take back control. ‘We seem to have lost a sense of ourselves, what do we stand for,’ he told McTague, planning on ‘rewiring the country’.
In his address he preached honesty, giving people what they wanted in a politician. There are seven Nolan Principles of public life and Honesty is one of the seven, alongside Openness, Accountability, Integrity, Selflessness, Objectivity and Leadership. Remind me to measure LOTO by that yardstick next week, and the leader of Reform UK plc too.
Phil Tinline used to work for the BBC and turned one of his final radio series into a meaty book about the Death of Consensus, another one on the tsundoku pile of books to read when I’m not fighting fires on behalf of my constituents. Tinline, who is turning into a public intellectual on the level of Olusoga or Beard, wrote another long piece in the same issue of the New Statesman based on his academic paper Power Failure: A New Theory of Power, written for one of those thinktanks whose mere names bored me rigid in the Guardian article. To quote Tinline’s summary of his paper:
I argued that British politics desperately needed a clearer conception of power, and how, over the last few decades, it has come to be so badly misallocated: concentrated when it should be devolved, and dispersed when it should be centralised. Everything is expensive. Nothing works. The people who are supposedly in charge are either useless or just don’t care. They say what they think we want to hear, but really, they just help their mates, and themselves. They don’t play by the rules, so why should we?
Tinline noticed that Burnham was allocating blame not on the poor hapless public representative voted in by the electorate, but by the civil service mandarin, just as we all learned in the 1980s when Jim Hacker was stymied by his foe Sir Humphrey. Localism, which the PM wants to achieve by decentralising power from SW1 to all the other postcodes, may be tough when local government is so weak; just ask James Berrygrove, or don’t as the case may be.
After the Second World War, Tinline writes, ‘town halls built vast numbers of houses, while Whitehall instigated the construction of universities, motorways, nuclear power stations and even whole new towns’. After they did all that, in the 1960s the public stopped trusting the government entirely. We then got privatisation, outsourcing, consultancy and regulators, all polysyllabic words that to many sound like the adults in Snoopy cartoons (‘wah wah wah!’)
Plus the Human Rights Act of 1998 led to everyone’s favourite bugbear, the ECHR, being written into English law. Tinline concludes that ‘this has led to a state in which power is certainly centralised as far as local government is concerned, but at the same time is entangled in risk-averse restrictions and continually reliant on multiple outside organisations’.
In fact, politicians like, to pick one entirely at random, Rupert Lowe have far less power than, to pick another entirely at random, Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group investment firm. Witness, Tinline correctly says, ‘the way British government seems unable or unwilling to stop huge foreign companies buying up swathes of our homegrown businesses, even our critical infrastructure’; or, I might add, the United Arab Emirates from building an Etihad Campus in East Manchester.
What caused subpostmasters years of grief? Fujitsu’s computer software. Who is at fault for polluted rivers? The shareholders whose profits go up as quality of water goes down. Social care has probably gotten worse since private companies started running the firms, although more of us are ill. And why are streaming subscriptions going up even as we have to deal with mandatory adverts in the middle of shows we pay to see? Here’s Tinny again:
It is much harder to put a face on the unaccountable power that arises from a Whitehall department outsourcing a contract to a huge all-purpose company, for instance, or on the US private equity firm that owns a failing children’s care home, or the conglomerate that decides to close a cherished GP surgery.
Why he isn’t one of those thinky-tank people I can only guess, but Tinny diagnoses the issues well. It’s easy to point at boats and brown people and promise to Make Britain Great Again, and easier still to buy a balaclava and throw stuff at the police. But the PM is tasking himself with changing the country at a time when we are fragmented, poor, depressed and sick. Enough already, I say, and good luck to the man and all of those faceless figures mentioned above (do you remember any of them? Carys something, Arthur somebody else.)
The Labour Party have wasted two years of their five-year mandate standing still. They have sacked Angela Rayner and brought her back, and now the boy DJ, Darren Jones, lurks menacingly as Keir Starmer’s representative in This Place. The PM moved Ed Miliband to the Foreign Office and Yvette Cooper to Health and Social Care; like Burnham, the pair of them served in the Blair-Brown government in a time before Cameron, Osborne, austerity and arguments over being outside of the European Union. By the way, good on the PM for saying Brexit ‘hasn’t given us control’ and has done ‘more harm than good’, and also for reminding us that Labour’s opposition were the ones who gave away the control of our infrastructure. (Jeremy Corbyn didn’t help, did he, but they kicked him out too.)
The PM also promised electoral reform so that ‘everyone’s vote counts’, but I reckon a cryptobillionaire’s vote will count a multiple of millions more than, say, a first-time voter in my constituency (hello if you’re reading this!). There was also something about abandoning the triple lock on pensions that I am sure will have the members of the Other Place spluttering into their subsidised beverages. But I can promise a waterslide on the high street if I wanted to, but that doesn’t mean I’ll deliver it, or can successfully convince council leader Berrygrove to cut some of the library budget.
Before I go home for the night and read a book – can a chap not enjoy some of his recess? – I’ll just type what the BBC’s man on the spot Chris Mason had to say during the duly impartial six o’clock news. He led with the tears shed by the PM for his late father, because the news always craves emotion, and noted the ‘sense of purpose’ Burnham gave the party. Mason finished with an agonisingly long clause which I'll summarise as: ‘do you think he’s telling you what you want to hear, given the hellish state the country and the world is in?’
He might as well promise the moon on a stick.