Immigration, Europe and tax: the questions Burnham is avoiding | LIVE

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0:37Noa Hoffman: Hello and welcome to Coffeehouse Shots, live from Labour Party Conference in Liverpool. I'm Noah Hoffman and today I'm delighted to be joined by Tim Shipman and James Heal. James, why don't we start with Andy Burnham on Laura Koonsberg's show. It was a pretty seismic interview and I believe it's the first time that the Prime Minister has said the quiet bit out loud, namely that Labour will fight the next general election on a manifesto to raise taxes in order to fund social care, a new national social care service free at the point of use. What did you make of the revelations?

1:18Tim Shipman: I think the challenge is going to be for Andy Burnham, how is this such an important defining issue for our time and yet supposedly we're not having a general election until 2029 how is on one hand social care so important so seismic so satemic of a you know the way in which he's going to conduct his premiership and on the other hand well actually we're going to kick it into the long run for the next two and a half years or so which leads some people to conclude that there's going to be an election prior to 2029 despite what annie burnham did say this week i thought the other thing that was interesting was when annie burnham was talking very much about what he wanted to be as prime minister he was suggesting that he wanted to kind of bring the country together in some ways i think that goes back to the point about is not going to be a conference for hard reckoning.

1:56Tim Shipman: You see the slogans everywhere that says hope again. This is a party that needs some good cheering up over the past two years or so. And you talk about a sort of return to Labour themes. I've been reading for my sins all the Labour cabinet ministers' speeches today. I think there's been about eight or so so far. There have been three references on different occasions to Harold Wilson, the man who's been dead 31 years. But I mean, this is very much a party getting back to its Labour roots, talking about Labour values and sort of trying to reconnect with the faithful, potentially as a precursor for some kind of earlier than expected electoral reckoning, but more about sort of reconnecting Labour with those voters they lost in such droves at the May local elections this year.

2:29Noa Hoffman: And talking about disparity between the Labour membership and the wider public, why don't we talk about immigration? Because we've had Angela Rayner come out and double down on the call she made when she was out of the cabinet saying that she disagrees with Shabana Mahmood's ILR reforms. Of course, no final decision has been made and there's still back and forth negotiations but she's really come out and disagreed with the Home Secretary which begs the question about ministerial responsibility but Tim generally what do you make of the immigration debate within Labour at the moment do you think that Andy Burnham has the political capital to go ahead with this something that arguably the wider public wants even if it is at odds with the Labour membership?

3:15James Heale: Well look, I think there's several things here. Firstly, the policy is in flux, so I think it's just about tolerable for Angela Rayner to state a view. When there's a decision, if ministers then start slanging it off, then I think you've got a big problem. But clearly with a new Prime Minister, the policy is in flux, and Shabana Mahmood, who was one of the most vocal ministers for months and months, has basically been a submarine for the last three or four months, pretty much since Burnham came in, or actually from before that, from when it became clear that Burnham probably would come in. So from about February, we've barely heard from Shabana Mahmood.

3:48James Heale: I think Burnham has some understanding of this. He fought Makerfield. It's a constituency that cares about migration control. And frankly, the people, some of the people who installed Andy Burnham as Labour leader wanted him to fight Makerfield for precisely that reason, because he's not instinctively anti-immigration. He's instinctively someone who wants to be nice to everybody. And that includes being nice to all the world's bedraggled who want to come here. But fighting Makerfield kind of put the issue in his face. And, you know, during that campaign, he did say, you know, we do need to control this.

4:21James Heale: We do need to stick with the sort of basic outline of the Mahmood reforms, even if not every dot and comma is retained. But I do think it's not just that this is putting the party potentially at odds with the rest of the country, where 75 % of the public wants to drastically control migration, it also puts the party and the membership at odds with their voters. Seven out of ten Labour voters support Shabana Mahmood's reforms. 50 % of Green voters do. 50 % of Lib Dems do.

4:53Noa Hoffman: I think there was a following out that said now, under Burnham, the Labour members have sort of changed their mind. They've turned against it. They've been led by Andy Burnham.

5:01Tim Shipman: Tim, let's talk about voters as opposed to members.

5:03James Heale: I'm talking about voters.

5:04Noa Hoffman: But voters, yes.

5:05James Heale: Yeah. So, look, I think it's dangerous terrain for Labour. If you look at what's happened in the polls since he took charge, the whole of the burn and bounce insofar as it happened, four or five points probably head back to two, three points now. That's all come from the Green Party and the left. There's no inroads against reform. All of reform's reduced vote has basically gone to restore all the Conservative Party. If Burnham were, you know, to maintain the idea that he might like an early election, He would need to be winning a bit more back directly from reform, it seems to me, and to most of the pollsters I speak to.

5:40James Heale: Those two recent super polls showed Labour at best on 241 seats. Now, there's a whole raft of seats against reform in the north where a couple of points movement could win back swathes more of those seats. But that hasn't happened yet. And I don't think it will if the Labour Party appears to be at odds with public sentiment on this.

5:59Tim Shipman: It's really not complicated. I think also it's indicative of how he might want his premiership to be about one thing, but it could very well end up being something else. And we saw that at the Koonsberg interview, he wants to talk about social care, he wants the battle lines to be on tax and spend, he wants it to be around sort of intergenerational fairness. And I do think, for instance, there could be potentially some kind of grand bargain where he scraps the triple lock in exchange for having a national care system. Yeah, there's some interesting hints on that. Yeah, and I thought that could be kind of as a way of doing some fairness.

6:25Tim Shipman: But actually, the interview then goes on to migration, either illegal or legal, he's a bit more uncomfortable. Even this afternoon, we're dealing with an incident at RAF Fairfield from what's been reported. I remember talking to one of Richard Sunak's agents who told me how much of his time was spent taking up with things to national security, drones, terrorist plots being foiled, etc. It's an incredibly high amount.

6:42James Heale: Sunak told me 40 % of his time just disappeared like that in national security stuff. You know, he wasn't expecting, didn't want to have to deal with, and it just eats up your life.

6:52Tim Shipman: And it means that every time you're spent on that, you're not talking about the so-called labour values, the labour issues, the things you want to be selling. and so I think that when it comes to migration first of all I love that Angela Rayner used the interview in the Times and said oh it's not an argument it's a national conversation I mean that's one for your significant other next time you're fighting it's not an argument darling it's just a national conversation we're having that does show there is some an ease in the Labour family about this right now but I would make the point that in the voters I've spoken to people in focus groups extra they don't really distinguish between illegal and legal when they you know in the focus groups and I think for that reason given the inability to cross some of those crossing the channel it might be better potentially to keep on with the isla reforms and burnham just as you say

7:31James Heale: doesn't seem comfortable on this stuff when he when you get him you know he is one of the most natural politicians we know and he has done a very very good job at looking like he's enjoying the job for the most part being better at the communication taking this thing out of kemi badenock at prime minister's questions all of his public interactions you know he's doing this scheme to get people on the housing ladder and he's done a silly video with the ladder being pulled away and the whole thing's sort of daft but it's quite effective. More people will have watched that video than watched anything George Osborne did on the right to buy I would warrant.

8:03James Heale: So that's very good and actually what this conference is about really is making the Labour Party feel good about itself because those of you who were there a couple of years ago even when Keir Starmer had won a stonking great majority there was a sort of weird air of miserablism about the pledge. There was a kind of oh god we've got power now and it's all terrible and and the Tories have left an even bigger mess than we thought.

8:26Tim Shipman: You think they've lost the 2024 election?

8:27James Heale: Oh, I mean, it was utterly miserable.

8:30Tim Shipman: Only enlivened by Lord Ali. I remember being pursued everywhere. Lord Ali's suits were the dominant image of that conference.

8:35James Heale: Gives some free glasses.

8:36Tim Shipman: Yeah.

8:37James Heale: Frankly, I could do with some.

8:39Noa Hoffman: On ILR, I did think it was interesting this afternoon, Tim, I'm not sure if you saw, Jo White, Home Office Minister, she's about as hard line on immigration as you get among the cohort of Labour MPs that we have. put forward the argument that if the government doesn't go ahead with the reforms and hundreds of thousands of people in the so-called Boris waiver granted ILR, those who came here for the purpose of social care will actually just leave the profession and either, I presume, go off and do something else or, who knows, go into benefits. That was the sort of argument that she put forward.

9:13Noa Hoffman: So I think it's interesting that there is this sort of debate happening within the various fringe events that are going on at the moment about migration. And you can see the PLP sort of divided, obviously, with many more on the side against them. But there are some, some in the red wall and, you know, the likes of Jonathan Hinder, Mike Tapp, who understand that this is an issue that their constituents care about and where their constituents are in a very different place from the party membership.

9:39James Heale: And it's the tension in the Labour Party between their traditional working class vote, which is in those seats. You know, you talk to Jonathan Hinder, he knows all about that. He knocks on those people's doors and they talk to him. And a Labour Party, which for quite some time has been basically controlled by the North London liberal set, that is obviously not now the case that Burnham is there. All these Northern MPs have come to take over. Louise Haig and Annalise Midgley and people like that, they understand this stuff. They may not be very sympathetic with people who want to control migration, but they know those voters.

10:11James Heale: The days of the kind of North London, fancy-down kind of intellectual progressive elite are slightly numbered at the top of this Labour Party, but yet they can't really say what they want to do on drilling. They're deeply ambivalent about controlling migration or about any kind of culture war kind of thing about security. When you look at what's going on at Fairford, we don't know the full details yet, but it looks very like it might have been an Iranian-linked plot at a time when the Foreign Secretary is busy shaking the hand of the Iranian Foreign Minister. And it sounds like some of the intelligence was provided by the Israelis at a time when we're cutting out the Israelis.

10:47James Heale: It may not be what the Labour Party wants to do, but this stuff is all joined up. And in the minds of voters, it's quite joined up as well. These guys might not be migrants, but the idea of migrants coming in and supporting this kind of thing will reinforce the view that something needs to be done about it.

11:03Tim Shipman: The reason why, of course, these reforms are going on, why they're so controversial about social care, and of course, why does Angela care so much? Angela Reina cares so much about that? Because she comes from the union background and they'll have all the representations put to her by the unions who represent social care workers. But of course, the criticism, and one of which I have some sympathy with, is actually the reason why people are taking these social care visas is they come into the country and then as soon as they get their right to stay permanently, then they switch professions and they don't stay in the profession.

11:28Tim Shipman: And actually, they might be in their 50s as opposed to their 20s. And therefore, actually, you're only getting sort of 10 years or so whereby they're working in the care system, which obviously is under so much threat. So I think that is a debate that the Labour Party needs to have and to work out.

11:42James Heale: And on the economy, we're still waiting. I mean, you know, it's always good when the Chancellor's wheeled out for a pre-conference interview a month before a budget and is unable to say anything other than, oh, I might continue the freeze on fuel duty, which every Chancellor has continued for as long as I can remember. It's the most pointless concession that they always make before a budget. But beyond that, there was nothing in that interview. He deliberately said nothing and he can't. And, you know, partly that's because we're a month out from a budget and partly, you know, some of what I'm told is they're quite behind with it.

12:15James Heale: There wasn't a clear sense of direction at the start. And they've obviously been looking at a whole smorgasbord of potential tax rises and trying to work out how much money do we get from that and how much political pain does it cause us? and then that will be the approach for now. But when Andy Burnham wants to do the really big stuff, when he goes to the country where we came in, social care, he's going to have to find a way of changing those pledges on taxation, I suspect. There's been so much discussion of which tax to hike

12:46Noa Hoffman: and what public service to spend more money on and far less conversation about growth. Does Andy Burnham have a plan for growth? Is he focusing enough attention on it?

12:57James Heale: But he says he is, but there's not much evidence of it. And if you talk to the city, I'm afraid most of the people in the city, they've had quite a rollercoaster ride with the sort of Starmer and now the Burnham government. So before the general election, Rachel Reeves and Starmer himself made a heck of an effort to show we will be fiscally responsible, we will be sensible, we'll come in, we're not going to do all this crazy stuff. And then no sooner were they in, they said, oh, we've got to put up taxes, which everybody knew beforehand, but they hadn't had the honesty to say beforehand. And then they clobbered business.

13:28James Heale: And that, consequently, has hit jobs. It's hit growth. It's hit the sort of urge to hire and the urge to go out and start businesses. And this is what the Labour Party often does. And then there was a sort of phase where Reeves kind of convinced people that she was going to put the headroom back up, she was going to be more responsible. But I don't think the city's been sort of... The city trusted Reeves not to break her fiscal rules. Burnham had to immediately sign up to those in order to kind of get himself a hearing to become leader. It's only on that basis that Josh Simons agreed to stand down in Makerfield on the basis that Burnham accepted the fiscal rules.

14:10James Heale: But his whole life has been wanting to put up tax to pay for things. And, you know, I got a message earlier from a quite senior person in Labour saying, you know, the only plan seems to be to raise tax and to spend money. Where is that we need to shave a bit here and there? And even on welfare, where Burnham accepts that the bill is too high, we've got this review coming in from Alan Milburn, which will effectively say we need to spend more money first in order to drive the bill down. So and that's not even come to a head yet. So how long will it take before the extra money starts saving money?

14:45James Heale: Well, several years, and you're getting towards that general election in 2029 before you start to see any benefit from this stuff.

14:51Tim Shipman: Tim's right to point out welfare, and I think it's quite striking that when they talk about things like tough love, a lot of people in the Labour Party are keen to talk about the love bit, but less on the toughness. And again, we've heard interminably about the Milburn and Tim's reviews. We'll wait to see what those actually come, but will there be a crunch point? The other issue I'd flag would be housing. You know, we came in and there were some people in the party who were hoping there'd be a kind of supply side social democracy route to growth, which is, OK, the Labour Party will be in some ways quite pro-tax in its instincts, but will also liberalise the planning laws.

15:22Tim Shipman: They've got the political coalition to do that. And we will get that 1.5 million homes, which you take, for instance, Neville Chamberlain as chancellor in the 1930s. That was a great boost in the southeast to getting Britain out of the Depression back then. You look at what Angela Rayner announced this weekend. So it's 2.5 percent mortgage. I mean, frankly, I want everyone on the housing ladder, but 2.5 % for a mortgage is quite worrying, I'd say. And second of all, you look at how their plans to seize houses has gone from two years when it's been an empty house to now six months. I think that potentially could have massive problems in the housing market in terms of at what point the government starts intervening with that.

15:54Tim Shipman: So they're fiddling around on the demand side rather than the supply side. I think that is indicative, unfortunately, of a political economy that is not thinking sufficiently about growth measures. and just talking, I did a column this week on AI I think that Burnham in some ways he was happy to go with the mainstream, he's not particularly a kind of technophobe but you look at what he did when he was Mayor of Manchester, he was instinctively in favour of kind of old school issues buses, bit of social housing he wasn't really someone looking towards and maybe a Rishi Sunak would have done a kind of opportunity as what's coming around the corner So you talk about Harold Wilson, we've heard the white heat from various people today

16:26James Heale: haven't we? But it's not the white heat of technology, it's not Blair looking forward to the future it feels a little bit retro and while that vibe will reassure the Labour Party and indeed perhaps some of those working class voters who they've lost that may be an appeal, you know, reform play the sort of Halcyon days card as well, but it feels to me like he's not yet the sort of leader who feels like he's zooming us into a sort of exciting future

16:57Tim Shipman: I would just add on the point about retro causes Europe is the other one and Sadiq Qarnas done an interview with the Eye talking about the need for Britain to get ready to rejoin the European Union 10 years on. I had a lot of this at the Liberal Democrat conference this week. I can understand the point, but Europe is the panacea for all growth. It's not going to be the answer to the silver bullet. And as you'll know, Tim, better than me, having written a million words on this subject, the EU moves very slowly. And I'm not quite sure why the EU would want us back at this early stage. The EU doesn't want us back.

17:22James Heale: The vast majority of the EU doesn't want us back. And most importantly, the French don't want us back. And if the French don't want us back, we won't be going back. And as Andrew Neil said on Question Time the other night, the view of a lot of the people in this sort of, call it a sort of Remainer bubble, if you like, desperate to sort of go back and re-establish trade relations, as if Europe hasn't itself changed in 10 years. Us not being there has made it more protectionist, more heavily regulated. And on all of that stuff, it's less palatable than it was. and that's before you get into a row about whether we're joining the euro and on how much we're paying into the budget.

17:57James Heale: I do find it astonishing that politicians, maybe some of them are younger politicians who weren't really involved in those brutal battles that are iconical for a decade, but they need their heads testing if they want to go back and have an argument about paying money into Europe, reopening the border. I mean, Labour's official policy, according to Nick Thomas-Simmons, who used to run the negotiations, is as close as possible without freedom of movement. So they can go off and negotiate as much as they want. But if they want anything more sort of constructive on the growth front out of Europe, they're going to have to reopen the border.

18:33James Heale: And we've just been having that conversation. That is cloud cuckoo land. I mean, the people on the Leave side, about three weeks after the referendum, came up with the new slogan for the next referendum, if there is one, tell them again. I mean, it is the simplest victory. Can you imagine if Nigel Farage and Dominic Cummings came roaring back into politics, Boris Johnson suddenly, you know, the coffin lid creaks and out he comes, and they go into those working class communities and say, this lot, they want the border back open again. It's bad enough as it was when we'd had Brexit. But now, you know, it's nonsense.

19:10James Heale: It's absurd.

19:11Noa Hoffman: On that topic, James, you've just finished writing a book about reform and the rise of reform. I understand completely that the EU argument will not go down well with a lot of reform voters. But equally, I imagine a lot of reform voters have really been done over by the state of social care at the moment. so if you're Nigel Farage and and extending that further if you're Kemi Badenock as well how do you respond to the question of social care while also of course highlighting the tax issue

19:40Tim Shipman: which they will very much both be opposed to so I think it's quite striking to me that Nigel Farage seems happy to kind of subcontract that question out to Robert Jenrick he's the one as the so-called shadow chancellor he's been leading on this he was there already trying to define it as a death tax when I think Ali Burnham first floated this back in August ago went along to a press conference I don't think social care is particularly the thing that animates the reform leadership or kind of main political party. I mean, it's quite telling to me that they're all talking right now about an election.

20:07Tim Shipman: Nigel Farage is reportedly going to go on a bit of an election tour. They love campaigning, but I don't think social care is one of the top five, six priorities. So I don't think it'll hugely feature.

20:16Noa Hoffman: I imagine they're members. There will be many among them who have been really screwed over by the system as it works now.

20:23Tim Shipman: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that the question for reform, how do you frame that answer? I'm just saying I'm not aware of any sizeable work that has gone on in Millbank Tower at this stage. But I agree that is an attractive thing potentially. And of course, it's not just sort of the elderly voter. It's also the elderly voter's family, etc., different generations.

20:39James Heale: I think it's more of a thing for Tory voters than for reform voters. Reform voters tend to be less wealthy than Tory voters. And a lot of them don't have houses that are worth, you know, a large sum of money that then gets eaten away by care costs. So I think that the risk is much lower for reform voters in the north than it is for Tory voters in the south. I mean, the Tories will say they want to resolve it as well, but they will talk about a mixed solution, which involves some kind of social insurance scheme, which is what they do in most countries. You know, coupled maybe with some changes to pensioner benefits.

21:12Noa Hoffman: I mean, they won't touch the triple lock.

21:14James Heale: Well, they they may have to ultimately. I mean, I think what Labour will try to do is some kind of grand bargain with pensioners. Well, they'll say, you'll get a bit of this and you'll lose a bit of that. And the Tories will be quite glad, I think, if the triple lock is resolved by somebody else. They'd be delighted to heroically fight to defend the triple lock and see it defeated. That is the honest conservative position. In the same way that honest conservatives also desperately need Labour to sort out the planning laws, because the Tories are always riddled with nimbies and completely incapable of doing that.

21:47James Heale: All their MPs have an aneurysm when any attempt at planning is done. And the same with the NHS. The Tories can't reform the NHS. Labour has to reform the NHS. Those are sort of three of the big things.

21:58Tim Shipman: That's a lot. There's no sign of it.

22:00James Heale: The onus is on the Labour Party to sort these out because the Conservative Party never will. But any honest Conservative seeing the triple lot lose by two votes in a late night 2am vote in the House of Commons will be secretly celebrating because it is an absolute drag anchor around the neck of any government.

22:17Noa Hoffman: Well, on that note, I think we will bring the podcast to a close. Thank you to our live audience. Thank you, Tim. Thank you, James. And thank you to those at home for listening to Coffeehouse Shop.

22:41Noa Hoffman: This is the story of the one. As a shipping manager, he's running the dock, stocking supplies, and making sure every order goes out on time. And Grainger helps him stay prepared. From shipping supplies to PPE to hand tools, he counts on Grainger to keep products moving and trucks rolling. So his operation runs smoothly no matter the shift. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click grainger.com, or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. Thank you.