Could Andy Burnham be the most important PM since Thatcher?

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1:03This is a global production. Already I see the walls closing in around Burnham. There are deep structural and cultural problems about governing a society today which are going to require a deep set of economic, cultural and intellectual ideas, organisation, alliances, you name it. And that's the question for Burnham now. Has he thought about those things deeply enough or is he going to continue to think about those things deeply enough to set himself on the right course? If Burnham does fail, the backlash could be fast, furious and possibly fascist. You think that's the stakes? What is the cultural, technological zeitgeist?

1:42Where do people want to go? What do they aspire to be? I am going to do things differently. I am going to break with the more of the same approach that has got us here. I am going to give Britain the circuit breaker it needs. Four decades of the neoliberalism that began in the 1980s have not been kind to the places that built our party It is an end to trickle down economics which did not trickle down very much at all The change will be the biggest change in our lifetimes to the way the country has run We will take power out of here and carry it into every postcode in the land so that they can do more and in doing more, build a new economy.

2:30Andy Burnham, the new Prime Minister, is talking a big game. He isn't just coming out with the usual bromide you'd expect from an incoming Labour Prime Minister. A stronger, fairer society, a government for the people, for the many, not the few, addressing injustice. He's talking about something bigger, something more conceptual. He isn't just talking about making society better. He's talking about remaking society, about recreating the economic and political settlement in which we live. He wants to finally turn the page on as he seizes the world that Margaret Thatcher left us. In other words, he's talking about changing not just what the state does, but how we think about the state, how we think about politics to create a new common sense.

3:15In this, if he were to succeed, he would join a far more elite club than the burgeoning ranks of former prime ministers. he would become known as one of the great political teachers who leaves a legacy far beyond their years in office. A Clement Attlee, a Margaret Thatcher, perhaps a Tony Blair. But what does Andy Burnham think he's reversing when he talks about 40 years of neoliberalism? What is neoliberalism anyway? And what exactly does Andy Burnham want to replace the old settlement with? If someone knows, it would be Neil Lawson. He's an academic, a thinker, writer, intellectual, long-time doyen of Labour circles.

3:56Long ago, he advised Blair in the run-up to the 97 election, but he came to be sceptical of what new Labour was and has long argued that Labour must become a broader, more vital movement again. He has had a long-standing relationship with Andy Burnham and is credited with developing some of his thinking. He shares the belief that Labour cannot afford to simply govern better. It must govern anew, create a new politics. So he asked him into the newsagent studio to ask, why does he think neoliberalism has been so bad? What are his hopes for this new government? And if Burnhamism might replace it, then what might Burnhamism actually be?

4:35Welcome to the Newsagents.

4:42The Newsagents. Well, Neil, thanks so much for joining us. I want to kind of have that slightly more kind of like conceptual conversation about kind of what the intellectual forces are, which might be powering Burnham. But before we get there, just on the particulars of the week, how do you think he's done first three or four days? I think it's mixed, really. Well, yeah. I mean, I think, look, you know, it's been good that there's been a trial of announcements. But some of those have shown that making announcements is a tricky business. You know, you've got to work out where your funding's come from and you get tripped up if you've not done your homework.

5:15Look, you know, I think, by and large, I think the Cabinet is an upgrade on what was there before. It's good to see people like Miata, you know, in there. It's good to see Angela back. But, you know, I think the big but of the week is that, you know, which will segue us into, you know, the bigger conversation, is that if you are serious about rolling back 40 years of neoliberalism, the first person you think of as your Chancellor is not John Healy. You know, John Healy is a very decent, loyal, good, you know, Labour politician, a senior one, that he has not been spending his whole life thinking about how you roll back 40 years of neoliberalism.

5:54One person in the cabinet has been thinking about that and knows how to run the Treasury. And Burnham decided not to put that person into... To my head, Miliband. Yeah, yeah, into the Treasury. Now, that's, you know, I keep on wondering whether we should use the term red flags because they're not very red, you know. It doesn't have quite the same connotations with the Labour Party, does it? No, no, no, no. So, look, you know, we know that we'll get into the reasons why I was a keen supporter of him, you know. But, you know, he's a good communicator. He's good on his feet. But, you know, let's have a bigger conversation about the context in which this week is happening and where we're at.

6:34But just before we do, I mean, someone, I always think of you as someone who argues a lot for pluralism and working between and across parties in British politics, particularly on the left. And just in that guise, did you find the reshuffle too factional and insufficiently, I mean, you know, what the complaint is from the Starmites? Or do you think, sort of going back to what you just said just now, if you are serious about a big intellectual project, which is reversing so many of the trends we've seen over the last 40 years, that you need people who are all signed up to it? look i think you know the fact i think one of the you know the questions about andy's he said an end to factionalism factionalism is not a bad thing factionalism is a good thing there are different groups in the party who have different ideas and different thoughts and they should contest those ideas and out of contesting those ideas you get better ideas right but what you want is a kind of plural factionalism you know and here are all the voices and what we had under kia and Morgan McSweeney was a hyper-factionalism, which was about destroying every other voice in the Labour Party.

7:35Now, if Andy thinks that you can just have a unified party and we all agree and we're all the same, I think that's a mistake. You know, A, it's not the reality, and B, it's not the basis of generating new ideas and new thoughts. But they've got to be respectful and kind to each other and thoughtful. Hasn't been very respectful so far, has he? I mean, he's basically dispatched most of the people who backed the former prime minister. Yes, you know, and I think there's always a balance, let's be pragmatic about this, there's a balance between having a team that are going to support you and work with you and having a very broad base.

8:10Look, let's be honest, the left haven't done very well out of this at all. If you look at people even on the soft left, they've not been given many places. I mean, Ed not given the chance, Miata's a good one being promoted. But, you know, and Angela back. But across the piece, you know, who would you say were the real Burnhamites? You know, who was it? Lucy Powell, Lou Haig, Miata. And some of those people have backed Andy for a long time. Some of those people are very recent converts to Andy Burnham. True. And I think he's going to find that, you know, when it gets tough in government, and it will get tough very quickly, that you always need people around you that are incredibly solid and supportive of what you're doing, understand what you're doing.

9:01And I think that the reshuffle didn't bring enough of those people into positions that can support him and help him. You talk about the idea of backing Burnham for a long time. I mean, you have. I mean, you wrote in your piece in New Statesman, which people should go and read out this week, that you write about how attractive you think he is as a political figure and personality. You make comparisons between him and Blair in some ways, not necessarily in terms of their politics, but in terms of how they are as political creatures. What has appealed to you for such a long time about Burnham? Because obviously this is something that, as you say, parts of the Labour Party are now catching up with and affecting.

9:42Fawning all over him. Absolutely, indeed. He was unopposed, pretty unusual. What was it about him that has attracted you for such a long time? Well, people that were creating pictures of him morphing into Liz Truss at party conference over his bond market comments are now lining up and going, you know, isn't he wonderful? Isn't he wonderful? And they are fair weather friends, you know, and they will turn against him, you know, when, you know, when they see the opportunity. I'm sure he knows that. I hope he knows it. I hope he knows it. So there's two things. Firstly, you had to see that Starmer was never going to work, you know, and people hoped and they invested in him for all sorts of reasons, which were shallow, I think.

10:20And from the word go, from the moment, you know, frankly, I met him properly before he became leader, this person was never capable of being the leader of the Labour Party. Why did you say that? Because he was not interested in ideas. He was not interested in building organisation, alliances. He just thought, I think, that, you know, he was morally and managerially good enough, and that's all you needed. Just since you mentioned that, Neil, I think it's worth just exploring it slightly, because this is something that I've argued for quite a long time on this show and elsewhere. And you get a lot of, from, I wouldn't just say Labour people, but people who kind of really had so pissed off with the Tories and they'd had enough of them and they really wanted Starmer to succeed.

10:59You get a lot of opprobrium for saying that. And a lot of those people will say that people like me, maybe people like you, people in the media, they never wanted him to succeed. And that's why Starmer didn't succeed is because he was let down by the people around him, by the media who were out to get him from day one. What would your riposter that be? It was nothing to do with the commentary. It was nothing to do in anything other than he was, you know, to become prime minister, you have to have a project. You have to have a plan. You have to have people. You have to have vision. You have to be able to communicate.

11:31And I don't think he could virtually do any of those things. I mean, people talk about wanting a grown up back in. But, you know, and for someone to make, you know, good, good managerial technical decisions to do that. You've got to have a vision. You've got to know where you're going. You've got to be able to judge your individual management decisions against some sort of future benchmark. He was not interested in any of this stuff. The only person who's responsible for Starmer's downfall is Starmer. He wasn't interested in politics. And then we get Morgan McSweeney coming out and saying, we never prepared for government.

12:03Well, what did you think was going to happen if you never prepared for government? I was lucky enough to be around Labour in the run up to 97. and Blair and Brown, whatever criticisms you might have of them now, were responsible for a deep political project of ideas, organisation, project management, etc. They knew what they were doing and this lot didn't do any of their homework at all. I think just on Starmer for a second, I actually think some of the reaction from people like that, and you see pieces about it and so on, I think very often the reaction from that certain type of kind of liberal progressive is because from a type of person who basically wanted politics to stop and thought that Starmer would.

12:42I think they thought, I think they were so almost radicalised by the sort of Tory years and the 14 years and Brexit and all those sorts of things. And they were so pulled by it that when Starmer came in, a man who almost admitted anti-politics, as you say, almost seemed apolitical, that the very fact of his being there would make the chaos stop and make the politics stop. And they could just get back to their reasonably normal lives, back to when they thought that politics didn't really affect them. But the truth is, actually what it seems to me, the Starmer period sort of tested to destruction, is the idea that actually having someone who is apolitical at the top of politics won't make politics stop.

13:15It'll make all of the kind of instability around him and around British politics even worse. Yeah, look, I agree entirely. There's a class of, you know, the liberal intelligentsia who are quite comfortable, who are appalled by Brexit, who are appalled by the kind of Tory chaos. I mean, you know, quite rightly, but wanted to return back to that stuff and as you said it's just a captain of the ship who could sail it through calm waters as if brexit you know wasn't going to throw us as if the crash in 2008 hadn't happened as if starmer could just take us back to 1998 yes just and that's all this was about and i think what what it tells us is there are deep structural and cultural problems about you know governing a society today which are going to require a deep set of economic cultural and you intellectual ideas, organisation, alliances, you name it, in order to put right.

14:06And you need a prime minister who thinks about all of that stuff. And I think Blair thought about some of that stuff. I think Thatcher definitely thought about some of that stuff. And in the long march, the 100-year conversation to what Labour did in 1945, a whole load of people thought about those kind of things. And that's the question for Burnham now. Has he thought about those things deeply enough, or is he going to continue to think about those things deeply enough to set himself on the right course? Well, he's certainly talking a big game. He is echoing the language that you're using in your piece, talking about rolling back neoliberalism.

14:44You know, 40 years, that's what he's talked about. 40 years, as he sees it, failed political economic settlement. Now, this term neoliberalism, it gets banded around all the time. It's sometimes a bit of a canard on the left, it seems to me, sometimes. But what do you mean by it? What do you mean by neoliberalism? because I think a lot of people listening and watching to this will have heard it. They'll hear political theorists talk about it. They'll hear Andy Burnham talk about it. It is not self-evidently obvious what it means. What do you mean by that? I think it's good to unpack it. I mean, I think it was a body of ideas that wants to replace the state, replace democracy to a large extent, and impose the market and the nostrums of the market, competition choice uh profit um advantage you know for for some not just to to push the market into areas of the state but in in terms of the state to kind of commercialize that to to bring in choice and competition and but but more deeply and i think this is that this is one of the worries about andy's view about how you roll this thing back because he just sees it i think in terms of the privatized industries yes you change the privatized industries and that's your privatised water and rail and the rest of that and that equals rolling back but it was much more than just a kind of you know economic ownership issue it was a cultural issue it was the way that we you know turned from knowing ourselves as producers to understanding ourselves as consumers to being parts of you know working class communities to being you know to being individuals you know so there's a whole panoply of cultural deep cultural changes which happened you know around that time and unless you get us back to you know we're citizens first before we're consumers um that we're not you know that we're you know we need each other we're not just individuals and everything about that then you're not going to roll back the frontiers of uh you know of of 40 years of neoliberalism and i guess that's the question does and and how and then then the question is how do you do that can you just do it from the steps of downing street or do you need something much bigger and broader.

16:50I suppose the way in which to think about it maybe is that at the very least what feels new to me about Burnham is the way he talks about, let's for the sake of not just talk about neoliberalism, let's talk about the 1980s and Margaret Thatcher. I mean the way he talks about that is different it seems to me than the Labour leaders, let's leave Corbyn out of it for a second, certainly all the Labour prime ministers that have come since then because although I would argue that New Labour in lots of ways, I think you probably agree with this, you know it had lots of the fundamentals of social democratic projects.

17:21And it certainly had lots of social democratic outcomes in the sense there was redistribution, there was reinvigoration of the public realm, blah, blah, blah. What is absolutely true to say is that Blair did not cast himself as like an aberration with Thatcher. In fact, he explicitly says, I saw my job as to build on what she'd done. Gordon Brown, similar-ish. I mean, he invited her in famously to number 10. And Keir Starmer sort of, it's hard to kind of tell, he was sort of all over the place on this. Sometimes he spoke of her admiringly, sometimes he didn't. Burnham is the first one, it seems to me, who actively talks about trying to reverse what she did.

17:53And that at the very least, even if he hasn't necessarily thought about how he's going to do it, that is a change, intellectually and politically. It's big and it's important and he's reframed the debate. And that's, you know, if he does little else, which I'm sure he will do, you know, many other things, that is incredibly welcome. The fact that someone stands on the steps of Downing Street and says they're going to do that. I was talking to a kind of Corbynite earlier today who said that they can't remember Jeremy Corbyn actually making a statement as bold as that, that he was going to take that kind of big stance, rolling back 40 years of Fatterism.

18:26So it is remarkable that he said it. He's absolutely right to say it. Now we've got to think about, you know, what is the intellectual and organisational wherewithal to do it? And we'll talk about that just after this.

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19:24When we're talking about, it's because it's an easy thing to say, let's roll back Thatcherism and let's roll back neoliberalism. But I mean, Thatcherism and neoliberalism was itself an intellectual response to what was considered a failed settlement, or at least a settlement that was failing, i.e. by the time you get to the late 1970s, you've already referred to it the kind of broad economic post-war settlement from the Second World War, which itself took a long time to develop and incubate and come to pass, for all sorts of reasons, not just in Britain, but across the West, were seen to be failing, especially in Britain.

19:56And Thatcherism was a response to that failure. So isn't there a danger in a way of, even if you say, let's roll back 40 years, is there a danger that that project seems very regressive? Yeah. That it's just going back to something that itself in many ways, people who remember it might think that it had failed or is it about creating something new well i think to march again this is another worry um is that it does look nostalgic it does look like returnisms like the 1970s were wonderful and you know and rightly andy talks about you know um uh you know his his you know youth in in 1970s on the you know on the edge of liverpool secure job secure housing you know good education millions of strike days an economy and inflation at over 20 percent i mean it wasn't all rosy was it no no it wasn't all rosy but you can understand why that's sort of secure floor that gave a kind of essentially sort of upper working class boy from the edges of liverpool into cambridge and then a job in london and and and and you know but but the thing about you know thatcher you know thatcher wasn't saying she wanted to go back to a pre you know post-war settlement um she wanted to kind of do something which felt new, you know, the big bang, consumerism, privatisation, everyone owning shares, popular capitalism and all of that.

21:17And then you get to Blairism, which was very kind of forward-looking, zeitgeisty. We've got to serve the waves of globalisation. We've got to prepare everyone for this great new dawn. Well, Labour, when Labour wins, it tends to win because it has a sense of modernity, right? Yeah, like Wilson did that, Attlee did that, Blair did that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think there is very little, you know, so far about the or not enough about the burn project which has that sense of what is the cultural technological zeitgeist where do people want to go what do they aspire to be how do you use the kind of context around you of way people are acting and behaving how do you jump on social media not just as a platform for yourself which is very good at to project and narrate your own story all day but how do you use our network society you know in order to bring people together in ways that are that are going to help roll back 40 years of neoliberalism but take us to a new future my critique of new labor was always that it wasn't new enough and it wasn't labor enough you know and it actually wasn't surfing the wave effectively but it but it wasn't being true to its labor roots i think andy is true to his labor roots and labor values but he's got to append onto that a very modern, futuristic, entrepreneurial, innovative kind of platform of ideas, thinking, etc.

22:40But Labour does have to. Any kind of new social democracy, let's put it that way, a new centre-left settlement that replaces neoliberalism, for want of a better expression, it's got to work with the grain of what we've had for the last 40 years, hasn't it? I mean, it's very difficult to imagine, it seems to me i mean you talk about individualism being at the center of that nonetheless that is how we have generationally now including my own generation from the one that came before that the one that's come after that that is how we've been encouraged to think of ourselves that is the intellectual environment in which we've literally been kind of incubated it doesn't seem to me particularly with technological developments as well which have hammered home that individualism we talk about how constantly each of us creating content our own sort of constantly sort of streaming ourselves, all of this sort of stuff, that has hammered that home and amplified that individualism.

23:28Surely a new left-wing project would have to work with that and actually talk in those terms, talk about, it seems to me, how to enhance our own freedom as individuals, rather than trying to sort of hark back to a slightly more sort of stolid collectivism of the 70s. Well, I don't think collectivism has to be stolid. You know, I reference in the New States and the book called Hyperpolitics. And what the author of that book talks about is the way that kind of social swarms happen now. We are still incredibly collective. We like to come together and do things together. It's why bands make their money now out of shows, not selling albums.

24:12It's why you see these big kind of groups of people. And we've seen it recently from Black Lives Matter to Hashtag Me Too, to all sorts of the big marches around Palestine. you know, etc. And you get it on the right as well. You know, people on the right like to come together. We are collective beings. We can't help ourselves. Why do we go on to social media to narrate our own individual lives? Because we want to be seen with other people. We want to be compared. We want to join in with other people. We can't help ourselves. So how do you do that in the 21st century? How do you look at kind of, you know, the way in which the growth of, you know social enterprises co-ops mutuals b corporations there's loads of inspiration out there for a kind of new form of social democracy if you've got a government that wants to tap into them and support them mrs thatcher said the economy is the means the goal is to change the soul all right how does andy burnham and this new government use its economic levers um and legislative power to to boost those practices those sectors those groups which are in tune with that kind of new social democracy.

25:19Well, how does he? Well, looking around and understanding the kind of groups I've just mentioned and promoting them. Look at kind of things like media. There's all sorts of interesting, new, independent media happening across our country, from newspapers to, you know, to podcasts, to websites, to, you know, people want to, you know, express, you know, their views. They want places to talk. Why not turbocharge all of that stuff? Why not give that sector big tax breaks? Why not invest in those kind of organisations? Because that would be the terrain in which, the rich soil in which something new could emerge.

26:00and maybe you can answer me this neil and um because it does seem to me a potential tension or even impediment to achieve what burnham wants which is he's talking about as you say profound economic political transformational change in britain he wants to be it seems to me at least if we're to judge him on the basis of what he said this week and in the last weeks potentially the most transformational prime minister we've had since since margaret thatcher and yet at the same time he has talked about his signature political idea devolution and the devolution of power now if you and i were sat here in the 1970s your average labor your median labor politician would have been very skeptical of that idea right they would have said the way that you achieve transformational economic change within britain is a strong central state that's why the labor party historically was pretty skeptical about devolution and devolution of power, Scottish devolution, you know, and so on.

26:53Is there a tension between Andy Burnham basically wanting the most interventionist and activist state that we've had for decades and at the same time saying, we'll give power away to our political enemies, to cities, to towns, to regions, to nations? No, look, I think, you know, there's two, well, at least three very good bits of Burnham. You know, firstly, you know, he knows that the current democratic and state system is not working, not functioning, and it doesn't allow our economy and society to function properly. So you've got to change the democratic and state structures. One aspect of that is his belief in cross-party long-term consensus.

27:32And he's already mentioned on issues like social care that he would like to develop a response which had that kind of deep cross-party support. We know that he's rock solid behind proportional representation. And that would underpin that kind of new consensus. But the devolution thing is absolutely central. Power and money has got to go to people locally. There's no doubt about that, that we'll get buy-in, you'll get better decisions, you'll get deeper, more meaningful answers to how the state operates and what it does. Why? Because people will be involved in the process then. Not necessarily.

28:11Well, you have to design it in a way that they are. But Neil, if we were sat here in 1948 and we'd applied that principle, but we wouldn't have the National Health Service. We would have kept all the friendly societies and would have kept all the local little hospitals and would have let people make their own decisions. And some of that wouldn't have been a bad thing. And my worry about things like, when he talks about a new social care settlement, that he's modelled it because he's already said he wants it to be like the NHS. Well, that was in a very Fordist, very centralised, very top-down mechanical era.