Happy Coronation Day!

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0:37Hello and welcome to Coffeehouse Shots. I'm Noah Hoffman and today I'm joined by Tim Shipman and James Heal. Happy Coronation Day, James and Tim. We ought to have some pipers or something, you know, heralds. Where's Penny Mornham with her sword? Lord Andy of Burnham is descending from his castle in the north to come and seize the imperial capital in the south. Excellent. So, later today, Andy Burnham will finally be crowned the new leader of the Labour Party at a special conference, but he won't become prime minister until Monday. He will, however, be giving his first speech as Labour leader. Tim, what can we expect?

1:19I think it'll be partly facing the country and partly facing the party. Don't forget he'll have another speech on Monday when he returns from the palace on the steps of Downing Street. So that one will be very focused on the country and voters. This one will have a bit more Labour material. I'm told he'll do a sort of riff on the history of the Labour Party, where it all began. It started in Wales and now we're losing by-elections like Kefili. You know, it went into the dark satanic mills of the north and fought for labour rights there. And, you know, the people in the early part of the 20th century fighting for workers' rights, all that kind of thing.

1:53And he'll sort of go toward a rise on around the country and effectively say, we've lost touch with a lot of these people and we need to win it back. And I think the Burnham Premiership means anything. It means trying to re-engage with some of that working class support that Labour was set up to represent and has now lost touch with. Burnham's been very clear to his aides that, you know, the party has moved away from those people. It's not that they have moved away from the party. So this is an attempt to go and stampede, as he did in Makerfield on Reform's patch. And we'll see a tour later over the summer of these kind of places.

2:28So I think that's what his speech will do. And I think we'll see that first kind of, here's Burnham, the optimist who wants to change Britain without slagging off his enemies and without getting into internal battles in the Labour Party. As very many wise men and women over the years have said, good luck with that. Yeah, according to the trail of the speech later today, he's going to say that Britain has made a series of mistakes since the 1980s. Economic power has been privatised, political power has been centralised. Now, I think I can agree with the second half of that to an extent in the sense of the 1980s, the government changes, the abolition of the GLC and the centralisation of power under the Thatcher government.

3:04And obviously, subsequently, since 2010, the sort of economic emasculation of a lot of local government. But of course, there's a few issues with what he's saying there, one of which is the growth of devolution of the last 30 years. Scotland and Wales, has that necessarily improved things? Debatable. And of course, the Metro Mayors over the past 10 years or so. But I think that does show that the metromerality was so important and the Greater Manchester Meralty has really been quite decisive in lots of thinking of Andy Burnham. The more interesting point, of course, is that over the past 40 years, we did have 13 years of Labour government, we've had two years of the Starmer government.

3:36Basically, Andy Burnham is very much sort of rebuking all of that, suggesting it was a great mistake. What does that mean for his economic agenda? And what does it mean, of course, because he's got all these party big beasts in the background. I wait to hear what Tony Blair's response is going to be to the new prime minister. And I think that's going to be very interesting to see how he addresses that. The other point I make is that he's released this video overnight, sitting in a town square talking to ordinary people. And on the one hand, yes, it's very upbeat. He's engaging. He finds a way to empathise with everyone.

4:01It's the I feel your pain Clinton thing. The other side is the point I keep making on this podcast, which is that he agrees with every single person he speaks to. I can understand that sort of sense of agreeing with someone and then taking them to a point of argument, etc. But the danger is in government, he tries to please everyone and he ends up pleasing no one. And I think, you know, the other significant thing here, which goes into what James is talking about, this sort of rejection almost of the past two Labour governments as well as the Tory governments of the period, is a kind of North-South thing.

4:28And if you look at, you know, we're told Ed Miliband will not be the chance of the Exchequer, but I've covered Andy Burnham on and off for 25 years, it's entirely possible that that decision gets changed in the next 96 hours. However, if it doesn't, I think it's because a lot of the people around Burnham, including Louise Haig and Annelise Midgley, who were known as the Northern Queens during the Makerfield by-election. They're both two tough cookies, politically canny, in touch with the kind of working-class approach to things. You know, they were against Miliband, not because of anything he represents economically or even that he would frighten the markets.

5:06I think they'd probably tell the markets to get stuffed. They thought partly it would be too much psychodrama. They thought too many Milibands around could be a problem. I think they partly thought that it was a gender thing and that sacking the first female chancellor and not having enough women at the top of the party is always going to be embarrassing, particularly to women in the Labour Party. But I think the other thing is that there's a sort of northern common sense disdain for the sort of intellectualism of the North London set who come out with all these policies that don't really have any great sort of impact on your average man in the pub in the north.

5:40And the great irony here, of course, is that Ed Miliband is the MP for Doncaster and has been for a very long time. And what everybody talks about Burnham, they say this is a guy for whom place is more important than party. That's the line he uses himself. He is of the people of Liverpool, Manchester, Wigan, where he represents. They feel he's our Andy. Ed Miliband, there's nobody in Doncaster who's going, oh, our Ed. he's great with his high intellectual thought about Fabianism and all the rest of it. Ed Miliband cannot wait to get on the train from Doncaster back to North London to survey his two kitchens.

6:17But I think if Miliband is out, it's partly because he's a man. It's partly because he's a bit frightening. It's partly because his surname's Miliband. But it's mostly because despite being the MP for Doncaster, he is viewed by the Northern Labour Party as a bit of a southern ponce, frankly. Yes, this is what the Cabinet is so interesting about. Yes, Miliband is one thing. I had a chat with the Conservative MPs. He said, yes, it's not like Miliband ever holds a grudge. Not like he ever pushed his brother out the way to get the job. Not like he's been talking for weeks to Andy Burnham. I think that's a bit unfair, actually.

6:46I think the grudge was held by his brother because Ed didn't have the temerity to sort of back down and tug his fool off. I actually have a lot of time for Ed Miliband's ruthlessness on that matter. That's one of the things where I think good on him. You know, David Miliband is the moaning sort of, you know, presumptuous idiot who thought that the job ought to be his. It's not like – and Ed Billaband hasn't been thinking for 30 years about what it would be like in the Treasury back from the days when he was the junior to Ed Balls. But the other thing I'm interested in is the cabinet is those kind of people associated with different sets.

7:15So we've had the London Labour set being pushed out of the way. Now to caricature and give a terribly unfair pastiche, Richard Hermann would be perhaps the embodiment of much of the kind of London Labour sets, priorities, international human rights, an agenda which very much fits with a multilateral view of the world which I think does seem to be drawing towards a close. So issues such as Northern Ireland veterans, interesting. Who is he going to put in as Northern Ireland secretary? You think Hilary Benn is someone who could be pensioned off. He potentially has been linked with some of the blockages in government about trying to resolve the issue on veterans, something that Al Khan's been very concerned about.

7:49Richard Herrmann might be seen as another. So it would be interesting to see not just in Miliband and not just kind of MPs in Northern seats or whatever, but that kind of weird, perceptible sense of vibe. Do they sit with the North or South? That's going to be key next week. We shouldn't caricature the views of the North, but I'm going to do exactly that now. The people we're talking about here in the Labour Party and outside it, and let's be clear, the membership of the Labour Party is very London, very Southern centric, but the voters of the Labour Party are not. And certainly the voters they want and need if they're going to repeat their election win are not.

8:19And they don't think that giving away the Chagos Islands and paying for the privilege is a good idea. They do not think that defending the rights of terrorists and fighting for them tooth and nail rather than for their victims is the right thing. They do think violent criminals should be locked up. You know, these are all. So I think what you're going to see with Burnhamism is quite socially conservative, tough-ish on migration compared with what the left of the Labour Party would like. They're perhaps a little bit less tough than Shabana Mahmood's been so far. Tough-ish on crime. They want those things parked.

8:51Burnham wants to focus on decentralisation and on getting money to a lot of the causes that he supports. And it's worth pointing out that there's some interesting characters already emerging in Andy Burnham's Downing Street that do pose questions about the priorities when it comes to voters and social conservatism. So, for instance, Matthew McGregor, who will be head of political strategy I wrote about yesterday, Today is the trustee of a charity that campaigns for ISIS brides and wants to abolish citizenship stripping, which is an interesting position given we're in the midst of a debacle where we're trying to deport the ringleader of a grooming gang back to Pakistan.

9:32But one of Andy Burnham's top teams spends his life trying to stop such actions from happening. But with that being said, in terms of policy, Burnham's team has managed to keep an almost impressively tight lid on his plans. But we are hearing word that there could be some sort of policy blitz when he gets into Downing Street, particularly in the first sort of 10 days. What does seem almost inevitable at this point is some form of a wealth tax. Tim, how much support does it have? What can we expect in terms of wealth taxes? Well, in the Labour Party, I think it has huge amounts of support. There were some comments around from Steve Rotherham, the mayor of Liverpool, who said, what is the purpose of great wealth when it could be doing something useful for people?

10:16Well, I mean, it's the rewards for people working hard and being innovative, which is something you need to encourage if you want economic growth. So let's deal with that one. Wealth taxes tend not to work very effectively. They can bring some money in if they're correctly targeted. But taxing static assets is a very difficult business because you have to value them and then you can get into legal battles over what things are worth. There's a reason why houses have not been revalued since 1991, because it would cause absolute political turmoil. It might be easier to war with people over capital gains tax because most people don't pay it.

10:49But look, don't listen to me. I'm not an economic expert. Go out there and listen to the quite left wing tax expert, Dan Neidell, who basically says wealth taxes don't work. And there's some fantastic footage of him taking on lefty economists who have been pushing this. Mr. Stevenson, who I met in a pub the other day, yes. Yeah. And got a photo with. I mean, he appears to know less about economics than I do, and he studied it for a couple of terms at universities. But yet he touts himself as an economist. I mean, the problem is that a lot of people on the left don't care whether it works. They don't care whether it brings in money.

11:23They just want to punish people who are wealthy because they think that's fairness. But if you want fairness of opportunity, you need to encourage opportunity and innovation, and that's not the same thing as fairness of outcome. I would just say at this point that I've known Matthew McGregor for a very long time. And what you wrote is completely appropriate. I wasn't sure where that was going. And anybody who has been working for those kind of groups, it's entirely justified to point it out. I would say, though, that even friends of mine in the Conservative Party think Matthew McGregor is a decent sort.

11:55He's been around a long time. He's one of the sensible people. I doubt he's going to be pushing that agenda in Downing Street because while he was working for a pressure group, he's an astute political advisor and he knows that that would not be popular with the people that the Labour Party needs to approach. He also, interestingly, was a massive Eurosceptic back in the day and one of the key figures in the campaign against the Euro alongside quite a few people who are now in the Conservative Party and in reform. When I saw that name, I thought, oh, okay, they're getting yet another serious person in the building.

12:27You know, time will tell. We'll hold him to that. and if he starts doing the kind of stuff he was doing at his pressure group, then I will be ahead of you in the queue to write about it. It's a very interesting insight, though, because what you've just said just seems very at odds with his CV, but it's very interesting. He was also a digital expert. He went off to the United States and worked on American election campaigns and brought that expertise back to the Labour Party. So he's one of those people who's been around a long time. He's even older than I am and has a kind of big array of political experience.

12:58Yeah, I think that a lot of people who got passed over or face didn't fit under Keir Starmer now view this as their chance to redo over history. Lots of people who went into consultancy earning nice sums, I think are going to be potentially coming back to this government. And I do think reform is very much a galvanising force. then come on guys, we've had our issues, but let's all get together in one big Labour happy family. The other point I'd make on Steve Rotherham, who of course was on the Today programme today, talking about Andy Byrne potentially being quite a rude awakening for some people who have underestimated him.

13:28I think the Labour Party should be very careful and clear-eyed about how it chooses its coalition for next time. I think that, as Tim says, there can be benefits to a kind of so-called class warfare element, to kind of redistribution of council tax bans, some of the stuff that Angela Rayner was pushing, that could play quite well in some of those Labour seats, whatever they depend on the coalition. But what they have to be very careful of is that it doesn't tip into kind of just simple, we don't like wealth. You know, I interviewed Neil O 'Brien earlier this week, the Northern Powerhouse Project.

13:55He was very much involved with George Osborne. You need to have those anchor industries. You need to be talking about things such as public sector productivity. And you talk to the average Labour MP, a lot of them are keener to talk about things like wealth and productivity. But I do think that that needs to be very much at the top of the agenda if Andy Burnham is to be a success in number 10. Well, that's a lot to chew over from this conversation. Thank you, Tim. Thank you, James. And thank you for listening to Coffeehouse Shots.

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