Burnham’s first conference - is there really hope again?

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0:56but hopeful. You could feel the clouds gathering over the political and economic horizon. Is this Labour Party really ready for what's to come? And how much has really changed? Welcome to the News Agents.

1:15The News Agents. It's John. It's Lewis. And it really does feel a different place from a year ago. It's just extraordinary. Keir Hu? What was his name? That bloke? He used to be here. He used to be the Prime Minister. The man with a nice hairdo. The extent to which he seems to be totally, totally forgotten about and just kind of no absence. You'd think that if there had been a coup, there would be those people who were the big supporters of him who would be kind of making noise and still very unhappy and unreconciled to the new leadership. there doesn't seem to be any of it it just seems to be he's gone yeah he was Prime Minister briefly but that's it I think what there is at this conference on my impression talking to people even to some extent from those who weren't necessarily Andy Burnham's biggest fans or biggest cheerleaders is a sort of palpable sense of relief and I think the relief is there because you only have to consider what the counterfactual would have been like if the make-and-fill by-election scheme hadn't come off, if Burnham had lost if, you know, because it was so contingent, if just something had gone wrong along the way, totally possible, totally credible, and Starmer presumably would still be Prime Minister and Labour leader now, you know, we'll be talking probably about a conference with the blood on the walls, you know, one of those classic Labour conferences where, you know, factionism was everywhere.

2:34The question is, how long can he, should he survive? You know, the Labour Party was seriously considering whether it had a future. I mean, as a political force, as a viable, live political force, that's not how it feels now. They know it's tough, They know that the Burnham bounce is still relatively modest, but what there is an assurance of, I think, is that Burnham has guaranteed them, at least for now, a second hearing, if not a second coming. Yeah, and that is going to be really important when you've got the budget coming up in October, the 10-year plan that Andy Burnham is going to unveil in November, where presumably we're going to get more detail about the kind of policies that he wants to see to transform Britain as he says it will be.

3:20I mean it was only a year ago that Starmer was hailing a victory over Burnham when Andy Burnham skulked away from Liverpool during Keir Starmer's speech and was catching the train back to Manchester the prince across the water had come and he'd been sent away with a flea in his ear and now he is the Prime Minister and listening to him he was on the radio on LBC with our colleague Sheila Fogarty he does a half an hour phone-in in content terms did he say anything that was that different from something that Kiyostham would say probably not but the way he said it the way he engaged with people I think it has given uh the party a renewed sense of confidence that has been absent and I think that that is important but you know we had the chancellor's speech today and John Healy again tried to sound full of hope and hope again is the kind of slogan of the conference um but you kind of thought actually the picture is pretty bleak and he talked about comparing the position we are in now, Britain we are in now, to the 1990s and New Labour and says it's a very different place.

4:23The 90s is having a bit of a revival. To Andrew's excitement, Oasis are going back on tour. To Angela's joy, Gladiators back on Saturday night TV. But I have to level with you, conference. The money New Labour had in the 90s is simply not there now. You know, economic growth under Gordon was more than double the Tory years that followed. And Britain has it harder now. We had 14 years of flatlining Tory growth and living standards, when Cameron's austerity gutted our public services, when Johnson's Brexit hammered our exports and Truss's mini-budget crashed the economy and collapsed confidence in Britain's fiscal strength.

5:14They lost control of Britain's finances. They left a legacy of sky-high debt costs for families and for government. And yet Camille Badenoch, her new chancellor, is the very minister that helped trust right that mini-budget. And even now he still claims there were lots of good things in it. So I say to them, your reckless actions are still causing pain to people today. You left crumbling public services and you left Britain spending more on debt, more on debt than the Home Office, Defence and Justice put together. And people won't forget, people won't forgive. The cost of the nation's debt is not just a number in a Chancellor's budget, it's the money that we can't spend on the NHS, on schools, on housing, on social care, on policing our streets, on controlling our borders, on defending our country.

6:20So John Healy, interesting speech in lots of ways, partly because, I mean, it was very clear, It's not one of those Chancellor's speeches that came with a whole suite of policy announcements. Clearly wasn't trying to commit news in any particular way. And I think it very well encapsulated the slightly odd tension at the heart of this conference. Because you've already said it, John. What is the slogan of the conference? On all of the banners, emblazoned on all the banners and the party literature around the Chancellor, it's hope again, which obviously is very Burnham-esque. And yet, on the other hand, in terms of the content of the Chancellor's speech, you'd have to look pretty hard beyond the sort of slightly florid rhetoric and a lot of the kind of Labour Party kind of lore and mythos, sort of, you know, talking about, you know, old strikes, nostalgia, battle of all grief.

7:14And at one point, I thought he was going to announce that he brought on Clemen Atley's ghost at one point to introduce to the entire place. But, you know, beyond all of that, the stuff to tickle the tummy of the Labour Party faithful, Actually, what you saw was a chancellor basically saying, as we heard there, it ain't glorious morning again. It ain't 1997 again. This budget is going to be tough. And you heard him talk about the idea that rising debt, spiralling debt costs, is difficult for a progressive government to deal with. You heard him talking about the need to clamp down on welfare. You know, in lots of ways, this was a speech which was preparing, I think, the Labour Party psychologically as a result of the increasing borrowing costs that we're seeing around the world, which is affecting Britain in particular.

7:59This was a Chancellor, I think, preparing his party for some tough medicine ahead. Yes, the lollipops were small and the doses of medicine are going to be large. And I think that the kind of what they cheered and applauded about, you know, in the conference. You sound like a paediatric doctor. Maybe that was my calling that I missed. Yeah, maybe. But I think that it's true that what you've got is a situation where it's going to be bloody tough. I also think that he just wanted to reassure the bond markets, the wider audience of the city, that Labour was going to stick to the fiscal rules. I think he wanted to deliver a slightly boring speech, an uneventful speech, which people wouldn't get too excited about.

8:42I mean obviously we wait for Burnham's speech tomorrow where he does say he's going to talk much more in much more detail about social care and how this could be paid for and that will be fascinating to see but that will ignite fresh speculation about when a general election is going to be held because he has said that under the manifesto commitments of 2024 I can't do any of this now Indeed and look and that's the thing I mean if you again let's imagine that counterfactual and Rachel Reeves was still Chancellor, would the speech have been much different? No. No. I don't think it would have been because fundamentally what you heard from Healy there and what we're hearing from the Chancellor, from the Prime Minister as well, is that, yes, there is no doubt that this Prime Minister has got tremendous energy.

9:29He clearly has things he wants to do, especially on things like social care. He clearly does feel hemmed in by the constraints of the 2024 manifesto manifesto and the commitment not to increase the top rates of tax. But those same structural constraints, which forced Starmer and Reeves to do things that they didn't want to do, and which to some extent guaranteed their demise, are now afflicting Healy and Burnham. And you can have no better encapsulation of that in a way, right, than their current policy on defence, which is basically the Starmer-Reeves policy on defence. That is despite the fact that the man who gave that speech today, John Healy, was the man who accused Keir Starmer, and by definition Rachel Reeves, of failing to protect the country by not moving more quickly to spend 3 % of GDP on defence.

10:20And he resigned. It was probably the final nail in the Starmer political coffin. And yet, yeah, you have John Healy basically more or less saying, if you strip away all of the language and all of the sort of commitment, he's basically saying the same thing. Now he's Chancellor. He won't make that commitment either because he's buffeted by exactly the same headwinds, which were so problematic for the previous government. Look, what we've got is exactly the same box of goodies, of, you know, debt too high, the cost of government borrowing too high, the impossibility of reforming welfare, where are we going to raise, you know, revenue from, the fiscal headroom having shrunk.

10:53And what, you know, Andy Burnham has done is he's put it in nice wrapping paper with a nice ribbon and a bow, but it's the same situation. The box inside hasn't changed at all. And that's not nothing as well, because, I mean, the truth is, is that, you know, what Burnham can do is he's, it goes back to that second hearing point, he's got more political capital, right? Because he's a new prime minister, and because the parliamentary Labour Party know that they can't, they can't do this again, right? They know that this is the guy they've got. So they are all in the Burnham boat. So that might enable him to do certain things, particularly on welfare or other areas where he's got to constrain spending, which could free it up for other areas, not least social care or defence or whatever.

11:36It might enable him to do something which Keir Star-McLean could not do because all of his political authority was gone, and do certain things which might overall ease the political situation, likewise with the public. We are probably heading for a tough budget, and we're heading for a tough budget because of the increase in global borrowing costs. who would I have said has a better chance of persuading the public that maybe this ain't all Labour's fault which it isn't all Labour's fault by any means well I would say it would be Andy Burnham because of his communication skill and the fact that frankly he's not despised which fairly or unfairly Starmer had become by the end let alone his general lack of communication talk about one other policy area which is the speech we heard from Ed Miliband the foreign Secretary earlier today and I was just struck by the marked contrast from Starmer when he spoke in the wake of October the 7th and today Ed Miliband struck a very different note on Gaza and the conflict and Labour's position on it.

12:34As we think about our role in the world we will never be silent about injustice and suffering. Let us state the reality about the Middle East. The only route to peace is two states, a secure Israel and a secure Palestine, with freedom, dignity and self-determination for both peoples. We all know how far away we are from that. Hamas's murderous attack on October the 7th united the vast majority of the world in rightful condemnation. We stand, I say, against anti-Semitism wherever we find it and in whatever form.

13:19And this party will always recognise the threats Israel faces and stand emphatically against those who seek its destruction. But this cannot justify the suffering the Netanyahu government has inflicted in Gaza and the West Bank. This suffering is a stain on the conscience of the world. And I want to say to the millions of people in this country, and indeed elsewhere, who have been moved and outraged by the plight of the Palestinian people. We hear you. You were right. Well, and obviously the whore loved it. I mean, some people have pointed out that, of course, Palestine Action continues to be a prescribed terrorist group and so on, and people might look at the incongruity of those things.

14:16Nonetheless, I think you could see there, and I was thinking about the two speeches, is, look, there are still people in the Labour Party who would have liked to see Ed Miliband be Chancellor for precisely that reason. You know, whatever you think about Miliband, he has got a political verve, a political confidence. He's putting it all on the table. And he does have a very worked out theory, again, you can disagree with it or not, of political economy and probably of growth. And if I were to have a criticism of John Healy, look, John Healy is very well liked across the Labour Party. He is, he is, he has been around for a long time.

14:50he's considered a safe pair of hands. I can totally see why the Prime Minister chose him. But if you were to be a little bit less charitable, you might say in that speech, it was a little bit like Keir Starmer without the hair. You know, even like his delivery, the way he delivered it. But also, like, he said to the Labour Party what it needed to hear. No doubt. He said to them that growth is not some Tory capitalist thing. It is something that is essential for social democracy. Because if you don't have growth, We don't have money to spend on all the things that we social democrats, socialists, whatever, love, health, education, public services, whatever.

15:24But then he didn't say the next bit, which is, and this is how I'm going to do it. This is my theory, my Labour theory of growth. Now, I've got a feeling that if Ed Miliband had been making the Chancellor's speech, I think we would have heard more on that precise point. All that makes Ed Miliband supremely qualified to have been the Chancellor succeeding Rachel Reeves is what stopped him. becoming the next Chancellor of the Exchequer under Andy Burnham as Prime Minister. Because do you want someone who knows the economy so well? Do you want someone who is so worked out in their own economic theory and the way that the government needs to progress, that he is going to be imposing that in a way that goes back to the days of Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, where Gordon Brown would do things without even consulting Tony Blair about it.

16:13And, you know, Andy Burnham probably thinks, I'd rather have John Healy, who I can sort of manage, and therefore I can impose my will on him, rather than have someone as Chancellor who would go his own way, and you'd be back to the kind of TBGBs that we had in the early 2000s. I completely get that. I can imagine it's a finely balanced decision. But I mean, obviously, these the economy is going to be so central. And, you know, he he's got a he's got he's got a task, I think, to prove that he's not just a sort of placeholder chancellor in that way. I mean, the other thing I'd say, the other big theme, which was notable, you know, that he talked about, was that we need this new age of industrialization, you know, which is a big commitment to make.

16:56You know, it's a big pledge. The question, though, is, I think, to some extent, like, what does that mean? And we've heard the prime minister talk about it as well. I mean, I asked Johnny Reynolds, the business secretary, a couple of Sundays ago on my LBC show, like, what do you mean by re-industrialization? Is it a certain percentage of extra employment in the economy devoted to manufacturing? Is it a certain extra percentage of output which is going to be generated from manufacturing? Is it growth which is spread via manufacturing in different parts of the country? Is it industrial? What is it?

17:33What is going to be different? And even the business secretary, whose job or portfolio it is, he wasn't really able to say. And the thing is about promising re-industrialization is that it is a very tough thing to pull off. And even if you do pull it off, even if you could nudge up the percentage of output that we've got devoted manufacturing in the country, chances are it's not going to lead to many new jobs because that manufacturing is always going to be high-tech, advanced employment. And if you want proof positive of that, look at the United States of America. Absolutely. President Biden, President Trump have both been committed to this agenda for the best part of 10 years.

18:09They threw huge inflation reduction acts under Biden, Trump with tariffs. They've thrown huge, the full weight of the US federal government and US Treasury behind it. And if you look at a lot of the independent studies, it may have made a bit of negligible difference here and there. But it's not a renaissance of American manufacturing, not going back to the 1950s. So it's one of those things that it sounds great. We're still a big manufacturing economy. We are. But is it going to lead to mass employment? No, even if you can pull it off, which I don't know if we would even be able to do it anyway.

18:39And you talk about the tariffs policy that Donald Trump has introduced. The rumour is that Donald Trump is about to introduce an export ban on diesel from America, which could hit the UK economy very hard. In a moment, we'll be talking to the Transport Secretary, Heidi Alexander, and asking her what lies in store.

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20:14Well, we're joined now by the Transport Secretary, Heidi Alexander. welcome to the news agents hi john thanks for having me all right it's a pleasure can i ask you where you stand do you support the third runway at heathrow airport because a little while ago we had rachel reeves as the chancellor she was in support of it you were the transport secretary where do you stand now so i've long believed that we need more airport expansion in the southeast of england and if you look at some of the decisions that i've taken in the recent years expanded decisions for a second runway at Gatwick, the expansion at Luton.

20:49I've got to be quite careful what I say to you about Heathrow because I'm the potential decision maker on any future planning application that may be submitted. But previously you've talked about what a good idea it would be and the jobs it would create and the investment it would bring. So what I've always talked about in the past is about the four tests that the government have consulted on in the draft planning policy framework that we put out earlier this summer. The consultation closed at the beginning of September. And in that, we talked about the potential economic benefit that a third runway could bring.

21:22Independent analysis suggests that it could create tens of thousands of jobs up to£2.6 billion on GDP by 2056. But what we were also very clear about is that this is a very significant infrastructure project. And when it comes to our climate obligations, when it comes to the need to think carefully about protecting communities in the local area in relation to things like noise, air quality, also thinking about how people get to and from the airport. I mean, if you listen to the interviews I've done in the past on this, the statements I've made in the House of Commons, I've always spoken about balancing those different considerations.

22:03And given that the consultation has now closed, Heathrow this morning have said that they are going to go out to pre-application consultation with local communities on the community impact. And it's completely right that, you know, this was always going to be a step-by-step process. Did the previous Chancellor back Heathrow expansion, yes or no? So when Rachel made her speech in January of last year, she asked Heathrow to bring forward proposals for the third runway at Heathrow. She backed. She was the cheerleader for Britain's economy, Lewis. That's her role. Let me give you her quotes, Transport Secretary.

22:40We cannot duck this decision any longer. She explicitly announced this government supports a third runway at Heathrow. This new government doesn't. What has changed? So what we are doing is we are consulting on expansion at Heathrow, Lewis. And so, well, you can say how dynamic, but let me tell you this. the previous Conservative government, when they instructed Howard Davis to run the Airports Commission, they took five years to get to the point where we are now. We've taken 18 months from the point at which the previous Chancellor stood up. I'm sorry, Transport Secretary, you're gaslighting these listeners.

23:14The previous government, the previous Chancellor, backed it explicitly. She said it was worth potentially£100 billion to our economy, 0.3 % of GDP in the short term alone. She said 100 ,000 people would be employed by it. She was absolutely explicit that it was essential for growth and there was no planning application then either and now the prime minister is turning around saying i can't really comment about it why so we're at a different stage of the process when rachel made her speech last january she also announced that we would be reviewing the airport's national policy statement which is the planning policy framework against which any future planning application the development consent order application which is the process by which nationally significant infrastructure projects are consented, that we would do that work.

24:00That is work that we have done, but we now have tens of thousands of responses to that. We need to do a rigorous piece of analysis on that, and we will respond in due course. Are you honestly saying that the policy has not changed at all from when Rachel Reeves said what she said in January 2025, talking about all the advantages and how this government supported it, and today when Andy Burnham is saying well it's difficult for me to say. So what I can tell you John. Has it changed? Is that the process that we set out. Has the policy changed? I'm going to answer your question. The process that we sent out in January of last year we have followed that process.

24:41We are still following you know the next steps that we need to do. We said that we would consult on a new planning policy framework. We actually got that out earlier than anyone anticipated. the consultation closed a couple of months ago we said that we would instruct the CAA to look at the economic model of regulation because any airport expansion does need to be affordable and you will have heard the airlines also saying you know if this expansion is going to be funded through higher landing charges which we may then need to pass on in the form of cost increases to people who are using the airport the airlines are right to say this has to be affordable but she didn't the industry.

25:21I'm sorry, right? She literally told the country that this was a bold decision in the national interest. And now you're saying, actually, it might never, ever happen, because as a result of the various different consultative processes that have to happen, we have to look through all of the reviews, that actually, maybe it wasn't a bold decision in the national interest. Maybe we didn't need it in the first place. Like, is it any surprise that we are gradually slipping down the rankings of major players in the world where we can't even build a third runway at Heathrow? And is it any surprise that people, frankly, lose trust in politics when they have a Chancellor one second saying this is essential and we're going to do it and then 12 months down the line the same Transport Secretary, i.e.

25:55you, is saying oh it might never happen. Lewis, I think if you look at what I've said and you interrogate the interviews that I've given and the statements that I've made in the House of Commons, the questions that I've answered there, I have had a completely consistent position on this which has been that we need to review the planning policy framework. I've always said that. Things have changed since the last government designated the last airport's national policy statement. Remember, that was dragged through the courts as well. But actually, what we've done is update the planning policy to take account of, for example, our new international obligations around things like climate change.

26:32We are looking at the advances that have been made in terms of technology and planes because we've got quieter aircraft now. And so we've also looked at things like passenger demand because actually after Covid, what you will have seen is a huge rebound in people travelling for leisure using our airports, but not quite so much on business. So when the previous Chancellor stood up in January of last year, I was there in the audience for her speech. The chief executive of Heathrow Airport was there in the audience for her speech. She did set out the process that we would be following. So if I'd been there and I'd asked you, oh, but the Chancellor just said it's going to be done by 2035, you'd have turned to me and gone, no, actually, it might not actually.

27:16What you just said was not true. And actually, Lewis, if you look at the way I've described this over the last two years, I would have said, and I have said, it's challenging, but not impossible. OK, I want to take you on to a different topic, which is the price of diesel, which is now about£2 a litre. So if you've got a 20-gallon tank, that's about£180 to fill your vehicle up. That's a fortune. The possibility is that it's going to get far, far worse if Donald Trump imposes a diesel export ban. Are you making representations to the US government for Britain not to be affected by it? So, look, I think in a very challenging international context where we've got the Straits of Hormuz restricted, a choke point in the Middle East.

28:01You know, previously, 20 percent of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas came out through the Straits of Hormuz. and we've seen the Hooties in Yemen actually making advances to try and close the Bab al-Mendeb Strait now and actually what has happened in the Gulf is that you know a lot of those exports are now coming through that pipeline so that is a cause of concern and it's really important that we work to de-escalate the situation. Donald Trump has got midterm elections coming up where the price of gas is going to become a central issue and the one thing he could do his Hail Mary pass in this is to say right we'll put an export ban to lower prices in america which would absolutely screw the uk so look my understanding is that the president is due to make a statement on this later today um my understanding is also that refineries in the us might have to drop their production and i'm sure they would have something to say about the impact of constraining supply and what that might do to their commercial prospects moving forward.