Ripping the plaster off…….
How do you handle the politics of the UK’s trickiest policy challenges: The pension triple lock, social care, our relationship with Europe and voting reform? The conclusion that the Prime Minister has clearly come to is that you announce your solution to them all at once and that you do so as part of a broader vision on where you propose to take the country over the next ten years.
Andy Burnham’s wide-ranging and often emotional speech to the Labour Party conference grounded his ‘pitch’ to the electorate in a vision of change that tackles the key sources of insecurity for many of the UK’s citizens: How do I pay for long-term care for an elderly or disabled relative, how do I pay for rising bills and how can I build a stable life when I don’t have a stable and secure home?
On the issue of housing – the policy area of greatest interest to our industry – Burnham has already announced the most substantive measures: Around £40 billion of investment in new social housing (money already allocated by Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves), the Your First Home initiative helping first-time buyers with a mortgage deposit and powers for Mayors of devolved regions to drive housing delivery in their own areas. To these he added giving local authorities new powers to take on properties from private landlords and rent out substandard homes. As well as the policy specifics, he sought to articulate the challenge to convince his target voters that he ‘gets’ it: “With a good home, everything is possible. Without one, it feels like nothing is.”
More generally, the speech reiterated his view that the nation can see the limitations of the Thatcherite 1980s revolution. Just as the 1970s saw the nation shift against the post-war economic consensus – after the nation had been persistently crippled by strikes and the average voter could see that the system clearly wasn’t working – so Burnham has taken the gamble that today’s Britons have come to the same view: “Everyone can see the position Britain is in. Everyone knows things are not working as they should. Everyone is talking about how life is too expensive.”
He directly acknowledged that he is dedicating significant political capital in the changes he is proposing and the risks are clear: No politician has dared to go near the triple lock for fear of upsetting a large, motivated voter group (the over-65s) even though many politicians of all parties would privately wish to (Michael Gove has said he’ll campaign for Labour at the next election if it pledges to abolish the triple lock). No Labour politician has dared to go near the issue of Europe for fear of alienating voters in the leave-voting constituencies, like the Prime Minister’s own.
Will his gamble succeed? We’ll have to see, but Burnham has acknowledged that he needs to go out to the country and make the case. Will the bond markets give the Government some much-needed breathing space? That will be more of a challenge. Their reaction will boil down to confidence in the UK’s growth prospects – which, so far, Burnham seems to be staking on devolution as a means of driving new economic activity and the prospect of a closer relationship with the world’s largest single market.
Finally, his speech was notable for what it did not include: Attacks on his political opponents. His is a much more consensual politics – it’ll have to be if he’s to introduce proportional representation.
Once the delegates’ spine tingles have eased and the Labour Party conference has departed its Liverpool hosts, it’ll be back to reality. The Budget at the end of October will be more prosaic and the Chancellor, John Healey, will have to make the numbers add up. That’s the ‘how’. The Prime Minister has just articulated the ‘why’.
Blog by Gabriel Abulafia
