Burnham’s small politics – can it last?

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1:02Hello and welcome to Coffeehouse Shots, the Spectator's daily politics podcast. I'm Oscar Edmondson, joined today by Michael Simmons and Noah Hoffman. And Coffeehouse Shots is 10 years old. We threw a party last night, sponsored by Valerian. So we must say, firstly, a big thank you very much to them for the wine. Yes, thank you for the booze. Thank you so much. And I thought it'd be a good place to start with one of the conversations that I had last night. I wanted to canvas both of your opinions. I was speaking to someone who is a prospective parliamentary candidate for the next election for I should qualify not for Labour.

1:32And they were saying to me how, in spite of themselves, they're begrudgingly sort of quite impressed by what Burnham's doing at the moment. This sort of politics by being a mayor, not really making any huge interventions, but doing these sort of small little things that impact people's lives. Noah, have you been hearing similar from people or not?

1:48Noa Hoffman: I mean, I'm afraid to say it just it honestly just depends who you ask. and if you look at all of the trends within the polls and within the parties who are more to the left and by that I mean the Greens the Lib Dems Labour SNP and then you look at the parties on the right reform Tories I'm not even going to count restore because that's extreme far right but it's basically the country is split 50 50 once you add up the various different parties it's pretty it's absolutely on a knife edge in terms of those leaning to the right and leaning to the left. And if you ask any of those leaning to the left, I think, yeah, they generally are impressed with Burnham.

2:28Noa Hoffman: And I would include more moderate Green voters and Green supporters in that, not talking about the extreme fringe within the extreme extremities of the Greens. But yes, he's, I think, among the left, he's popular and he's managed to unite the left. He's managed to win back voters that were being bled out to the Green Party. Frankly, most things he does is very appealing to a classic Lib Dem as they are now, which is quite left wing. The Lib Dems in their current form are quite left wing and they're happy. Definitely. If you ask someone leaning Tory or leaning reform, they're not happy at all. They think taxes are out of control.

3:08Noa Hoffman: They think immigration is still out of control. They're really upset about Shabana Mahmood's U-turn. They're really concerned by the ECHR. They're concerned by net zero. And so I just think it It comes back down to that fundamental debate that the country is having that is, as it stands, 50-50. And I don't think Burnham has won over any centre-right voters at all. What about you, Michael? Where do you stand as a disgruntled Scot living in London? Yeah, look, I think Burnham is doing better than a lot of people thought he would be. The budget has not unravelled. The Burnham bounce doesn't seem to have dissipated after the budget.

3:50And I think part of that is because of a miscalculation that his opponents have made and also people that are critical of him just because it's their job, like journalists have made. And I'm personally guilty of this is jumping on board with kind of slagging off the little tinkering things. I mean, I made a big fuss about how the budget had the most measures ever, but they added up to nothing. And people slag off the changes to the bus fares or things about phones or whatever it is as all being quite minor. and they are quite minor they're not going to fundamentally change the country but it is good retail politics because actually to criticize that you have to say well I want expensive buses or I want more expensive household energy or whatever so I think that is working for him and that's why he's still riding high in the polls my optimism and my kindness for him I think does end there though because eventually you do have to sort out the fundamentals we can't have every winter where there's some kind of crisis whether it's energy cost of living whatever it is and we sort it out by a hundred quid to certain council tax bans or whatever it is eventually he has to fix the fundamentals maybe he'll do that in his 10-year plan who knows i just add to that quickly

5:04Noa Hoffman: i never quite understood the backlash to policies such as at least professing to wanting to crack down on antisocial behavior on transport like playing loud music playing tiktok on your phone with a lot of things in life being difficult let's say the economy the cost of living the last thing you want when you get onto a bus is to have just that absolute nuisance that doesn't need to be there and for the government to say we recognize that this type of behavior is a symbol of decline and is something we want to tackle whether or not they actually do it is another question but just to recognise that.

5:44Noa Hoffman: It's not a bad thing. And so I don't know why people came down so hard on that. Well, I think it's also because that plays into Andy Burnham's style of politics, doesn't he? He's come from being a mayor of Manchester where he doesn't have a treasury behind him to dip into. He's doing politics that doesn't require a huge amount of funds behind it, but has material impact on people's lives. It is quite a clever way of doing things. Oh, absolutely. And I get in trouble for this because I do have a bad habit of trying to make everything about Scotland but he is such a Nicola Sturgeon and by that I mean early days Nicola Sturgeon in that there's not really anything fundamental or big or whatever but he's popular because he's doing things that as Noah says people actually care about in their lives and when something's wrong he's very good at holding his hand up and saying we'll learn from that sorry or whatever I guess we're seeing the long term of whether he goes the same way that she did.

6:35Noa Hoffman: As you said, so he's been focusing on easy wins, where now seeing the slow opening of the can of worms that is Brexit, which is there a more divisive issue than that. So how long this trend of touching on things that are universally popular lasts is, I think, not very long at all. But let's see what happens with the 10-year plan, which we now know is coming in time for Christmas, a Christmas gift for us all. Christmas miracle for everybody. Wow, what a time to be alive. But Mick, we do have some concrete stats to get into. We've got some news on GDP. What's happening? I'm not going to be negative for once.

7:12This is genuinely pretty good news for the government and for all of us, because the British bogey on our economy is off. We've suffered from this trend for the last few years, when in the first six months of the year, growth is looking kind of healthy by international standards and by what we've been used to since the financial crash. and then it gets to the summer and that all dies away to zero and it averages out at not very much. But what's happened this year? Not that. Because today, from the Office for National Statistics, we got Q3's growth figures, so after summer, and that came in at 0.7%.

7:53It means that the economy is something like 1.9%, I think, bigger than the same time last year. And also, before anyone calls me out on this, this is per capita GDP growth as well. So it's in theory, more wealth for all of us. So if this continues, that's genuinely a good thing. We genuinely now have quite impressive growth compared to other G7 countries. Where it could go wrong, though, is how the government wants to react to it. Because the ONS has been pretty clear that most of this growth has come from IT, and specifically within IT, they're talking about AI and cloud computing, and companies that are involved with that and utilizing that.

8:34So clearly we're starting to see economic benefits, at least, of an AI revolution. Now, if the government wants that to continue, they need to help these businesses with things like energy that we talk about all the time, whatever, planning for data centers, et cetera. So they've got a choice. They can be beneficiaries of this potential AI boom, let it grow in the economy, or they can get in the way of it. The other question, of course, is what happens next year? Hopefully this growth continues, but we are in a time where interest rates have just gone up. Inflation is expected to hit 5 % next year, which potentially means we're going to get at least another one, maybe even two interest rate rises, which eventually will slow down growth a little bit.

9:17But I said I'm not going to be negative. For now, this is certainly good news. OK, great. Good. We've had some actual good news on the podcast for once. It's a good start. Noah, we've also got the Milburn report being published on Tuesday next week. We have some further details on what might be involved in that. Can you take us through it? Yeah, so we now know that Milburn is practicing what he preaches and he will recommend a major overhaul of benefits and employment support for 18 to 24 year olds.

9:45Noa Hoffman: And what was quite new today is that he will recommend that under 25s should lose access to the health element of universal credit and personal independence payment, PIP. And instead, they'll receive a youth allowance at the standard rate of universal credit. And what that means is new claimants and existing claimants could end up basically with less money. But alongside this, young people will have a personal advisor to help them into a job, into an apprenticeship or a college place. there'll be more investment in employment support and they're really going to try and reshoot this crazy ratio that for every one pound that is invested in employment support 25 pounds goes towards benefits so the overhaul is going to come with an upfront price tag an estimate of around six billion pounds and milburn speaking to the media has been very clear that this investment is entirely necessary to reap the dividends that will come from it.

10:49Noa Hoffman: And ultimately, in the long term, it will save money, but you have to cough this up upfront first. Now, where are we with Labour MPs? Because we know that Keir Starmer tried and failed dismally to, I'm not even going to say shake up, but to tweak the situation with welfare. Milburn and Burnham have been very, very successful in the rhetoric they use around this rephrasing it from an issue of unaffordability to one of kindness and morality it is unethical it is immoral to leave 22 year olds to rot in their bedroom for life of course both arguments are completely true it's unaffordable it's unsustainable but it is also immoral and I think there is a sort of universal agreement on that But where things could get tricky is, can the Labour Parliamentary Party buy into this argument of a real terms cut for existing payments, let alone new claimants, when they, you know, they're allergic to the idea of a benefits cut?

11:57Noa Hoffman: And has this sell been strong enough? Now, this morning, we had a member of the socialist campaign group, Bel Ribeiro Adi, come out and say, oh, she started to ring the alarm bells about supporting a benefit cut. We had the Greens come out and rip into this idea. And often, where the Greens go, not always, but often where they start a fight, Labour will sometimes succumb to their argument or weaken their policy based on Green arguments. So the hard left are starting to slowly... It's the usual suspects, isn't it? But that's the thing is it's the usual suspects and the Labour majority is strong enough to overcome the usual suspects.

12:36Noa Hoffman: It's when it starts to creep away from the usual suspects and into the soft left that we have a problem. So far, the soft left, at least, you know, they're not kicking up a fuss and they seem to be on board. But the devil will be in the detail. And after this announcement on Tuesday, we'll have to wait and see whether you start to hear the rumblings of rebellion. not from the hard left socialist campaign group, but from beyond that. But I do think if anybody can get them on side, it probably is Burnham because he's just had a really, really impressive ability to speak their language in order to achieve a goal that on paper they might not be supportive of.

13:16Melbourne's done his job now. He's made it palatable for Labour broadly to say that actually health benefits are not necessarily the thing that young people need. but there's a job for society to do now that Milburn can't do on his own. And we all need to have a think about what we mean by phrases like unseen disabilities. We need to have a think about do we believe the government statistic that one in four of us apparently are disabled? Because until we tackle those trends, which are about how we view ourselves and how we view conditions like anxiety and depression, these problems will always rumble on.

13:52So I sort of think it's over to Britain now. So government's doing the job, but we've got to have a kind of societal conversation about where this goes next.

14:00Noa Hoffman: Yeah, I mean, just from a personal anecdote, I know we've had a Tory MP come out and say that he's been diagnosed with ADHD and he can't understand it. My own experience is actually my brother, who has very, very, very severe ADHD and takes medication for it. He's currently studying a PhD in aeronautical engineering. And when he hears about what happens here, he thinks it's really funny. I really do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's also severely dyslexic. He cannot spell to save his life. But he's working on some project with NATO doing something with AI and something with warships and beyond any capability I could ever dream of.

14:38Noa Hoffman: So I think Michael's right. We need to reframe this conversation. We can do it in a way that doesn't stigmatize, but we can also do it in a way that is firm and fair. And I think that's what Milburn has done. But as you said, the ultimate question is, will Labour MPs buy it wholesale? Let's find out next week. Well, you heard it here first. Over to you, Britton. Thank you very much, Mick. Thank you, Noah. And thank you for listening.

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