Can Andy keep up with his promises?

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0:38hello and welcome to coffeehouse shots the spectators daily politics podcast i'm patrick gibbons and today i'm joined by isabel hardman and claire ainsley a director of project on center-left renewal at the progressive policy institute we're almost one day on from andy burnham's speech and a range of interviews came out from the prime minister this morning on the media round. Claire, on our podcast yesterday, my colleagues recognised the ambition and the skill delivery with the speech, but questioned whether the ambition was matched with the detail. You're a former advisor to Keir Starmer, and I believe this is the first time we've had you on the podcast during the Andy Burnham premiership.

1:12So I wondered, what's your verdict on the speech? I think that analysis is right. And I think the purpose of what Andy was trying to do yesterday wasn't to set out a load of policy detail. The point was to say something needs to change, and I'm throwing caution to the wind and I am going to say what I think should be done. And I think on the whole, people have responded positively to that. There will be a lot of questions about detail, but we're not going to expect lots of detailed documents to come out as a result. It's kind of, I think, missing the point of what he's trying to do. I also thought he set a different sort of timeframe for some of these discussions.

1:46I think he recognised that trying to sort of spring a policy like, I don't know, re-nationalisation of Thames water or here's the plan to rejoin would just be the wrong thing for this change in politics he's trying to create. So I think he should be given credit and we should also expect that there should be a full and frank debate with all of that detail about each of the changes that he's proposing. Isabel, what did you make of the speech? And do you think this was vindication for the Labour Party about changing the leader? Yes, I think it probably was vindication in the sense that Andy Burnham was able to give the Hall a sense of why he wants to be prime minister, why he wants to do the things that he is planning to do, what sort of drives him.

2:28He had fire in his belly. And I think that's important for any political leader. And, you know, of all the prime ministers I've covered, there's always been a sort of question mark over those who seem a bit too lacking in passion, but also entitled to do the job, I think would be the other thing. Whereas I think you did get the impression of a sort of raw hunger to do it from Burnham yesterday. And, you know, the tears have obviously been very well covered. I thought that was very sincere because he welled up just before talking about his father. It wasn't like Matt Hancock wiping away a tear that no one could detect whilst talking about the rollout of the COVID vaccine, for instance.

3:09You've just got the sense that the moment had overwhelmed Burnham. And unfortunately, given it was a very emotional moment for him, it did also work in the hall. in terms of sort of indication on policy I think it probably does underline why Labour wanted to and was right to change leader and Blair may disagree with me on this because some of what Burnham is suggesting Keir Starmer didn't suggest because it's not practicable but I think the sort of the incrementalism of of Starmer's premiership was something that that Labour party members and I think probably also the public found quite hard to understand and so and as somebody who's written about social care for the past sort of well ever since in fact one of the first pieces ever wrote as a journalist on Inside Housing magazine was about social care reform proposals unveiled by one Andy Burnham back in 2009 you know I've been writing about social care for a very long time and I have to give him credit for not only saying I'm going to deal with this there's going to be political pain I'm going to name the particular source of political pain, which is adjusting the triple lock on pensions.

4:17But I'm going to do it anyway, because I believe in this. I have to give him credit for that. And we'll get on to his broadcast interviews this morning and the detail or lack of detail that he's given. But as Claire says, you don't give a conference speech to unveil a white paper. You give it to set the direction of travel to actually, particularly, I think, in the Labour Party's case, to say to the party, this is what we stand for. Remember that when we go into the autumn, when it's going to be tough, that we're all pulling together for the same thing. And I think he's given them at least a sense of the thing that they're pulling together for, which I think was really lacking from Keir Starmer.

4:52The reason why Andy can make quite a big, broad brush speech now is because of the credibility that Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have won back. And I think there's an awful lot of people over the last 24 hours that are within the Labour Party not remembering that. And if Keir had gone out in 2020, 2021, and made that kind of broad brush statement after Corbyn, I just think people would have thought we were totally incredible. And therefore, you absolutely could argue that they perhaps lent so far the other way, it then didn't inspire people or didn't set that clear direction. But I would say that I think everyone within Labour has to remember what the context was that they were operating in, which is we had completely shot our economic credibility, which is our weakest point.

5:43It's why we lose elections. We'd lost our credibility on national security. And people just didn't think we were credible to govern. So I think the perhaps overcorrection of some of that just left people feeling cold. But I don't think here, I don't think here lacked will or passion. I just think we came almost locked into a formula that you're kind of never going to win on. And I really, really wish Andy, well, I'm now rooting for him after that speech in a way that I kind of did in my head. But when there was that emotional moment about his dad, I then thought, come on, because, you know, I've lost a parent, too.

6:24And that 20 years on, it could overwhelm me in grief if I had to speak in a speech. So let alone what that was like two weeks after losing his father. and now I'm rooting for him in a way that I perhaps was wanting him to do well but I feel it much more emotionally now and when he said that bit at the end about you don't have to agree with all of this but if there's enough in here that you can get behind then get behind this kind of pitch and I thought yep there's quite a few policies I don't really agree with but there's actually so much there in that sentiment I would get behind that I think if he can do that in the country I think he will create some kind of step change in political leadership, which I think people on all sides of the political spectrum think we've been badly in need of.

7:08I think Labour is a much more emotional party generally than the Tories. You see that at party conferences, you see that in the way they do politics. But almost in the past year in particular, Labour sort of ended up behaving a little bit more like the Tories. And I think that's the sort of, you know, the habits of instability that we've all ended up in in politics. But it did feel like a more authentic Labour conference. I think when I go to Labour conferences and MPs are speaking on panels, quite often they'll introduce themselves with an emotional story about why they're Labour. You never get that, Tories.

7:46Never, ever, ever. It's quite often with the Labour guys. It's, you know, our roof was falling in at our school and I just thought this was an appalling way to treat teenagers. And from then on, I wanted to be a Labour MP. They've always got some kind of gut reaction to the status quo that made them want to become an activist and then a politician. And I think we did see that from the stage with Andy Burnham. I wonder also, I remember Alison McGovern, who's a Labour minister, explained this to me years ago, where I was mocking Labour MPs for being quite a lot like sheep in that they were much more likely to just support something and not complain and not have a big moan in conference fringes and so on.

8:34I think that's fallen apart quite a bit since the conversation about 10 years ago, to be fair. But she got very cross with me and she said, Isabel, you don't understand what drives Labour people because we are from a culture where we stand together on picket lines in the rain. And I think there was a little bit of that sentiment in the response to Andy Burnham's speech and indeed in the way that he delivered it as well. I wonder whether we'll go back to a sort of more emotional, supportive Labour Party or whether that's just a feeling that people will take away for a few days and then we'll be back to business in Parliament in a couple of weeks.

9:07Well, Isabel, just on the Tories, you know, I'm not the first to mention it, but it was notable that Burnham didn't mention his opponents much, but he did rally against Thatcher, privatisation, the British right. You know, that opens up pretty clear dividing lines between Burnham's vision for Labour and the current crop of Conservatives. You know, how happy will the Tories be about this? And will they relish a sort of ideological battle? Oh, delighted. I mean, firstly, they absolutely love the fact that his reference point is Margaret Thatcher, because as Kemi Badenow points out, you know, loads of voters weren't born when Thatcher was in power.

9:40You know, she's someone in a textbook. She's not something that a lot of voters have lived through. So they love that. They find it hilarious. They think, you know, at some point he's going to catch up and start talking about John Major and then we'll, you know, move on to William Hague or whatever. But they find that hilarious. But the triple lock stuff is brilliant for them as well, as would any social care policy proposal. Actually, you know, the last leader who was brave on this, brave but daft, I think, was Theresa May, who tried to use her assumed majority she was about to win in 2017 to announce reform of social care.

10:13And I remember a lot of Labour MPs who were about to lose their seats in that election saying, well, this is not the worst proposal. But yes, I'm definitely going to go. I can call it a dementia tax because I'm about to lose my seat. So anytime any leader makes a proposal on social care, it's a gift to the opposition because the public aren't really aware of the costs involved. they don't think about the trade-offs unless they've got someone in a care home they're not really aware of the fact that it's it's not free at the point of access i think that's one of the biggest stumbling blocks that you often come across and and so even if he had you know as claire and i were saying at the start of this even if he had presented an entire spreadsheet of costings for this people would still be cross or no costings but you know it works for the tories either way.

10:56The issue really for the Tories is how much they take on Labour and how much they take on reform. And I actually, I thought during his speech, he was starting to talk about, he was saying a divisive government on 30 % of the vote. I thought he was about to start talking about reform. Then I thought he was about to say, this is why we can't have proportional representation. And then he said, this is why we're going to announce a national commission on electoral reform. And I thought, have you not just made the case against electoral reform in your previous lines. But Burnham knows that the words National Commission are basically a politician saying, right, I don't want to take this decision, so I'm going to delay it for maybe 10 years.

11:31So you can tell that social care is the thing he wants to get on with and electoral reform really isn't, even if he likes it in principle. Well, Claire, you know, Burnham's obviously happy to have that battle with the Tories. But from a Labour perspective, what are the dividing lines? Is electoral reform one of them? Well, like Isabel, I think that it's such a long range issue that I think there will be a lot of divisions. There's a big constituency within the Labour Party who have wanted Labour to commit to electoral reform for ages. And there's lots of people who don't. But I don't think that that has the same sort of division that who pays for social care might do, for example.

12:10And that will also be the case when we come on to the budget. And there is, I've got lots of praise for what was in the speech, but there was quite a lot that wasn't. And the big thing to me that I want to hear from the Chancellor or the Prime Minister is how we're going to make work pay and how we're going to incentivise getting on, earning more, reducing the tax burden on workers, making sure that people feel that their efforts are being rewarded. And that to me is the central challenge in Britain. And therefore, I think he has opened up a potential for a really big attack. And I think it will be between Kemi and Nigel Farage as to who owns that better.

12:52But he talks quite a lot about working class aspiration. But if you're going to do working class aspiration, then you actually need to give people the tools to do that. So I want to see much more centrally tax reform, how you're going to incentivise people to work, earn more, and how you're going to make sure that education and skills are absolutely transformed for the generation of jobs that's going to come through. We didn't really hear a huge amount about that. That said, he did make, I think, some more nods to that than we perhaps had heard from the Chancellor. So perhaps more of that to come.

13:26And I'm not necessarily convinced that sort of the re-nationalisation agenda is one that is going to make people feel like they've got more control over their lives. And so therefore, I think he's choosing that as a symbolic issue. But I would like him to talk much more about people's personal control and work. And we will see whether the oppositions make hay of that or not. Yeah, it felt to me like there were a few things that were deliberately left out of the speech to allow some sort of room for the budget at the end of October. And I think he has, it's OK, and he has that breathing space now for a couple of weeks.

13:56But if they're not then referenced in the budget, that would be a problem. Isabel, I just wanted to ask you specifically about Burnham's care proposals. You wrote on Coffeehouse yesterday that Burnham's tears of hope alone won't solve the care crisis. Did the fact that he's put care so centrally within his message, you know, yesterday and since he took over as prime minister, has that given you some hope? Yeah, no, I mean, as I said, giving full credit for taking this issue head on. My argument really is that one of the issues with social care reform has not been lack of solutions available. There are a number of different options.

14:34It's not even been lack of will to solve it. Because I do think, to be fair to him, I do think David Cameron did want to solve this. He was very concerned about what happens to elderly people who had a real interest in dementia. I think what gets in the way for social care reform is everything else. And I think a lack of obsession with it. So if Burnham is able to be obsessed with it, brilliant. But there's a lot of things that can become unexpected priorities for a prime minister that you can then quite reasonably use, as Boris Johnson did, another prime minister who said they wanted to solve social care once and for all.

15:09You can use those as an excuse not to get on with the long slog of the reform and of making sure that local authorities are ready to deal with whatever proposals you come up with for capping care costs or, you know, ensuring that people don't have to sell their homes. Or maybe they do have to sell their homes, in which case you have to level with the public on that. I think one of the big issues that we've had for all governments over the past 20 years is one of implementation. and I suppose we've had so much political turmoil over the past 10 years in particular that no one's really had a chance to warm up their desk seat and settle in for a long period of implementation.

15:47And Claire will tell you how interested Starmer was in delivery. It was one of his early obsessions, but he didn't really get the chance to do that either. But I think that the sort of boring but important slog of ensuring that the thing that you actually want to do is going to happen is something that has eluded a lot of modern politicians. Often they think that giving the speech is good enough. This is going to take, you know, is it obviously going to take burden beyond the next election when we don't know if we'll have a majority or not, if we'll even be in power. But it's really the sort of the policy detail, the design, the whole web of things that fans out from this in terms of the NHS, in terms of councils, that can actually just mean that this just takes years to get going.

16:31And is he in it for the long haul? Is anyone in it for the long haul? I don't want to sound completely sort of despairing, but it's quite easy to see how even somebody who's as passionate as Burnham about this could end up walking away from Downing Street saying, I'm sorry I didn't get the chance to deliver what I wanted to do. Yeah, we went from hope to despair very quickly there, Isabel. But I think as we've learned with British politics the last 10 years, we don't want to be talking about long haul or making predictions about the long haul, but we shall see. Well, thank you, Isabel. Thank you, Claire.

16:59And thank you for listening to Coffeehouse Shots.

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