Did Andy Burnham just deliver one of the great political speeches?

0:02This is a global production. The United Kingdom my dad represented is the one I believe in. A union of nations that gave trade unions and the cooperative movement to the world. The National Health Service, a country that stood up to fascism, a country of solidarity, not separation. That's the Britain that my dad represented.

0:31Lewis Goodall:Andy Burnham has just concluded his first speech at a Labour Party conference as Labour leader and Prime Minister. It was one of the most remarkable conference speeches, certainly that I've ever heard. It was making a political and intellectual case for the state, for social democracy, but more than anything else, it was making an emotional case for the Labour Party. It was confident, it was commanding and it has set out a battleground ahead over the national care system, over electoral reform. And he says people may not agree with him. We'll soon find out. Welcome to the News Agents.

1:18The News Agents. It's John. It's Lewis. And I'm honestly trying to think of the speeches in my political lifetime that can we compare that speech by Andy Burnham to. And I suppose Thatcher after the Brighton bomb, Neil Kinnock taking on Militant in the 1980s, Tony Blair on the need to reform Clause 4 in the 1990s in Blackpool. and honestly I think that speech is up there with it for the confidence that he showed for the willingness to make an argument for the way he reached out to the public and I suspect what marks this out from those other speeches is the raw emotion of having lost his father earlier on this month, and that still being ever-present and causing him to well up.

2:15And certainly the delegates I spoke to afterwards and MPs were, I think, blown away by it. He had me moved to tears. But everything he said, I think he'll do everything in his power to do. You sound quite emotional. I am. It was magnificent. One of the best speeches I've ever heard from a Prime Minister. Told by Andy at the end that he'd given us honesty, ideas and a clear direction for the country that we love. And that really was his speech. Very, very open about the challenges that we're facing, but also about how he's giving people breathing space. You know, we've got that cut in VAT obviously happening on Thursday, but so much more.

2:58Long-term plans too. So very, very pleased, I have to say. I mean, so different from last year. Well, we really saw there, I think, the real Andy. We saw his commitment, we saw his absolute dedication to our country. And that was the point where you could see he really felt the responsibility on his shoulders. He really wants to change our country for the better. So I was delighted to hear what he had to say today. And I really hope the country will be as well. A very different approach. What people have been calling out for that. Honesty, ideas, clear direction for our country. Beautiful speech.

3:35Yeah? Just tell me more, why do you like it so much? I mean, everything that you said, apart from the triple lock, everything else I think is okay. So you didn't like the triple lock thing?

3:45Lewis Goodall:Removing it, but I think there will be something else that will come out in the future. Hopeful, very motivational, particularly as a young person myself, I think for a very long time we haven't seen a lot of a dialogue about young people's opinions and the services that we need. mental health, safety, security, homes, all things that we heard in the speech. And so, yeah, I'm hopeful. I mean, could Keir Starmer have delivered that speech? I mean, my vision personally is on the future ahead and not the past. I'm hopeful, I'm bright, and I think there are good things to come. And that's what my focus is on as a young person.

4:21You don't want to engage in that question, do you? It's not about not engaging. It's just that I think now more than ever, the country needs to band together to pull in a forward direction. And if we do that, I think the future is looking very bright. I think it was a great speech. I think Andy's tackled some of the big issues that people have been avoiding for a very long time, whether it's EU, whether it's pensions, whether it's big energy grid. I mean, it's one of my big things. Our energy grid has been failing, so we kind of put renewables on there. It was a powerful speech. How do you think it will play in the country?

4:57I think it will play really well. I think my constituents in Brent, especially the pensioners, one of the biggest fears is that they spent their whole life working hard, saving a little bit of money and buying their home, only to have, you know, they're lucky enough to buy their home, only to have that taken away from them if they have to go into care. Now, to say that that's not going to happen will have a huge effect on my constituents in Brent and many pensioners around the country and especially in London.

5:28Lewis Goodall:It doesn't do to be too dewy-eyed about this stuff. And, of course, inevitably, these speeches have an element of poetry to them. And as the old political cliche goes, the prose comes next. Nonetheless, I think what we can certainly say is the Labour Party have a political star of a leader for the first time, I think, arguably since Tony Blair. And what I mean by that, I don't mean that in a glib or a crass way. I mean by that someone who is a true political teacher. It's something that Tony Benn used to talk about, the importance of having a political teacher. Someone who is able, through their communication skill, without you really realising it, to be able to paint a picture of their own politics and slowly, subtly convince you of that vision.

6:16Lewis Goodall:And whatever the particulars of what Burnham announced today, I think it is clear that, well, John I think you and I could take our microphones out into this conference hall now and I think we would be very hard pushed to find anyone who is sat there thinking or would be willing to tell us I really wonder and I really wish I'd seen what Keir would have done this year and I don't again mean that in a crass way what I mean by it is that I think that we can talk about all of the particulars and the details but what is I think the biggest difference between say Keir Starmer's speeches as Labour Party leader and Burnham's speech just now.

6:54Lewis Goodall:Andy Burnham, it's clear, is a prime minister and a political leader who is not afraid of having an argument. In fact, he sees clearly, as central to his politics, the need for Labour to fight the battle of ideas. And frankly, Keir Starmer, we talked about it a lot on the show, I went on about it all the time in particular, I know boring people to death, but Keir Starmer was not only uninterested, He was actively hostile to the idea of the battle of ideas. He thought that politics was about showing, not telling. But the truth is, you have to do both. And as Nigel Lawson once said, you know, Margaret Thatcher's, one of Margaret Thatcher's chancellors, generally speaking, the party which wins the battle of ideas tends to win general elections.

7:40Lewis Goodall:And Andy Burnham is not resiling from or retreating from ideas or political conflict. He's running straight to them. And there was a political analysis there as well about the failure of the past decades and what has gone wrong in that time. And that, you know, the great slogan of Brexit was we were taking back control, but actually successive politicians have given away control and people don't have any say, kind of, it feels in their own lives. And so you get to that as the kind of diagnosis. And then the prescription, which on some of the specifics, he said, look, I know that people are going to disagree with me, but I'm going to fight for this because I think it's right.

8:17and I think that willingness to kind of go beyond what your focus groups have told you but to do what you think is a fundamental to reshaping British society whether it be the National Care Service and the system you know that we've got at the moment this very broken system or whether it is electoral reform you know he may lose those arguments it may be that the you know the politicians the opponents will deploy all the familiar arguments that have stopped this dead in its tracks before but what you saw from Andy Burnham was the confidence and the willingness to expend political capital to try to make this happen and it was a big argument that seemed to land incredibly well in the hall certainly I mean the people we've spoken to but I suspect in the country as well someone who says guys I know you might think this is absolute horseshit what I'm saying but I'm telling you I've got a reason for saying this and I want to make this argument to you and I'm going to carry on making it And I think that sort of thing, from a politician with a degree of authenticity and telling it how he sees it, I think could go down well.

9:17Lewis Goodall:Well, I mean, there's only one guaranteed way of losing a political argument, isn't there, John? And that's not to have it in the first place. Exactly. And as I say, I think that's the sort of big division between the two Labour leaders that we've most recently had. And I think you're right about the analysis. Look, I think that that was an important moment in the recent history of the Labour Party, because I think the big difference or one of the big intellectual differences of Andy Byrne, and by comparison to his predecessors, I mean, this is a man who does not seek, as pretty much every previous Labour leader or Labour prime minister, I should say, not Jeremy Corbyn, every previous Labour prime minister has done.

9:55Lewis Goodall:He doesn't seek in any way to emulate or to praise or to admire Margaret Thatcher or parts of her legacy. Tony Blair famously said that he sought to build on Margaret Thatcher's legacy rather than undo it. Rightly or wrongly, he is actively addressing most of the ills, political and economic and social, of our country squarely at her door. Now, you might say that that's sort of Labour Party comfort zone or whatever, but it is a notable and significant thing that you, intellectually speaking, that you have a Labour Prime Minister who is seeking very explicitly to undo her legacy. And he is doing that or seeking to do that by using this word, which we heard again and again and again, which is control.

10:43Lewis Goodall:And I thought one of easily the most arresting parts of the speech is when he invoked perhaps the most potent slogan, political slogan of recent times, take back control, take back control, and he wrested it from his enemies. Listen to this. Energy, transport, care, care. Care.

11:10Broken up and sold off. The British right talk about taking back control. Never let them forget. They are the ones that gave it away in the first place. The other thing he did was he talked about how, and this is where he was sort of maybe more supportive of Tony Blair than we'd seen him in previous speeches, where he's talked about 40 years of neoliberal failure. He talked about, you know, at the great moments in history of 1945, when Attlee won the general election in 64, Wilson, he also talked about 97, you know, what the reforms that Blair brought in at that time. I think it was also interesting.

11:54I mean, maybe this seems a really kind of arcane point, but the crafting of political speeches at party conferences are normally things which are written by a committee. And our understanding from what we've learned is that this was very much Andy Burnham alone in his room. And this was a speech that, I mean, you know, arguably it took 10 minutes to write or 10 years to deliver. Like, you know, he's been wanting to deliver this speech for a very long time and just hasn't had the means to do it. But pretty astonishing in terms of the turnaround. He's only been prime minister a few weeks and there was this detailed diagnosis of what needed to change.

12:32And the way he framed it and the way he phrased it, I thought showed a degree of political craft. And I'm not suggesting that people should agree with the speech or disagree with the speech. But just as a piece of political craftsmanship, it was pretty damn sophisticated.

12:47Lewis Goodall:I agree. I mean, look, he doesn't... For me, the important thing about this speech, and I think the reason it will be remembered, is that it's clear that he doesn't have the means to bring all of it about. He doesn't have the money, for a start. He reaffirmed his commitment to the fiscal rules and the importance of bringing the cost of government debt and borrowing down. But I think what you can say is that it was the most comprehensive case for social democracy, for a more traditional type of Labourism, to be honest, and Labour Party, something that was more akin to the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s than what we saw in the 1990s and 2010s.

13:30Lewis Goodall:And it was the most sort of, and again, you can disagree with it or agree with it, but it was the most unabashed and unadulterated vision of that type that we've had from a Labour prime minister. And, you know, if you think about, like, this isn't a speech with short news lines, was it, John? You know, sometimes when you do these speeches and you sort of think to yourself, what was the top line? What are the clips going to be? What are the clips going to be? Oh, my God, the clips write themselves. Absolutely. And if you think about kind of, you know, just some of the news lines from it, changing the triple lock, something that's been talked about for over a decade.

14:05Lewis Goodall:It's not a complete sort of transformation of it, but it is changing it. It will save money. It will take money away from pensioners that would have gone to them. He's talking about reopening the Brexit settlement. I think it's very clear from the briefing that we're getting that Keir Starmer's red lines, that he went into with the 24th election, no customs union, no single market freedom of union movement. That's going to be on the table. Social care, again, details aren't there entirely at the moment, but he is completely committed to it now. He's going to have to, you know, come up with something.

14:36Lewis Goodall:I mean, I sort of tweeted out halfway through the speech, you know, he's putting it all on the table. Electoral reform as well, electoral reform, you know, just that tiny little matter of changing the electoral system that has basically been in place for a century in one form or another. You know, I tweeted out halfway through the speech, he's putting it all on the table here. And someone who works in Number 10 texts me saying, that is exactly what we're trying to achieve. And you can understand as well the political benefit of that, right? Because if you're moving really fast, if you're setting the term, so often with Starmer it felt that there was a vacuum and it allowed his opponents to fill it.

15:17Lewis Goodall:If you're moving so fast, you're just leaving your opponents behind. You're leaving them dazed. Where did they even begin? And one of the most, just briefly, notable things I thought, John, I think sort of vindicates that view, not once, not once, unless I missed it, you tell me if I'm wrong, did Andy Burnham mention any of his political opponents by name, neither party nor individual. and again if you contrast that with Keir Starmer's last speech which was basically all about last year as kind of dark invocation of what a Farage government would bring and what reform government would bring. Burnham made this speech entirely about himself and his beliefs and about Labour and not about those who would oppose him.

16:00And I tell you else another contrast from Keir Starmer last year. Keir Starmer just gave you endless lists of what was happening to waiting lists and what was happening to school building and what was happening to roads and what was happening to railways and what was happening to this and what was happening to that and what they'd done about these things and what they'd done about those things. There was nothing there about school buildings. There was nothing there about road building. There was nothing there about NHS waiting lists or, you know, waiting times in A &E. He didn't do that. It was a political argument that he was making today.

16:33And it wasn't just a recitation, a recital of kind of our greatest hits where you had no idea what was the most important thing there. But it was just this endless list of things.

16:44Lewis Goodall:Let's be honest, John, it was a Jaguar versus Robin Reliant, wasn't it? I mean, if we're going to be a bit unkind, I mean, you know, and just to... I mean, I admired Starmann in lots of ways, but the truth is, I mean, I've been texting... Today was the absolute vindication of the Labour Party's quite unusual decision to get some guts and replace one prime minister with another. It is a complete vindication. There is no world, there is no world in which Keir Starmer, whatever his virtues and merits, would have been able in analysis, conception or delivery to give a political speech like that. Quite frankly, it is vindication of the fact, and it's a simple thing in politics, that the Labour Party has got a leader now with some serious political skill.

17:30Lewis Goodall:There are some big clouds coming down over the horizon, big problems to come. But guess what? If you've got no political skill, there is no way you can navigate that. And Burnham might be able to because he does. We'll be back in a moment with the Secretary of State for Scotland, Douglas Alexander.

18:02Well, we're joined now by the Secretary of State for Scotland, Douglas Alexander, who is also a bit of a student of politics and has been to many a party conference. Where would you put that speech in terms of, I mean, just the kind of command that it had of the room and probably outside as well? It was genuinely an impassioned, a personal speech, but others have given impassioned and personal speeches. I think it exceeded all expectations today. The first Labour Leaders Conference speech I helped write was Neil Kinnock's in 1991. I then wrote for John Smith, I wrote for Tony Blair and I wrote for Gordon Brown.

18:41I had no responsibility today. That may be the causal connection. This was a speech that Andy wrote himself over recent days but I think he blew the doors off. I genuinely do. I think he spoke with candour, with passion but also spoke to the moment. I think it was Bill Clinton who once said the best politicians are in conversation with the temper of the times. And he spoke about the condition of the country and set a new direction. And I honestly think people watching that speech at home will think we've got a very different prime minister and we're about to have a very different politics. You're way better off, aren't you, than not having Keir Starmer now?

19:20Well, the truth is, Keir had many virtues. He helped win a huge general election landslide. But the reality is, Andy evidenced today that he is a supremely gifted politician. Not only in a facility for communication, but in really substantive contributions to our national life. Whether that's the National Care Service, we'll no doubt talk about that. Whether what he said on Europe, what he said about a commission on electoral reform, there was substance as well as a lot of style and a lot of elan on that stage today. And frankly, I think Andy's view is that it's not that the challenges facing the country are too big, but for too long politics has been too small.

19:58And he aimed and wanted to set the bar high for himself, admitting, where as a generation we've got things wrong, a determination to try and fix it. And I think you can tell the buzz in the hall, the Labour Party's rubbish at faking it, and people are really, really excited after that speech. Is this the first truly post-Thatcher, intellectually speaking,

20:22Lewis Goodall:speech we've heard from a Labour Prime Minister, in the sense that it strikes me that, you know, Tony Blair famously said he saw his task to build on what Margaret Thatcher had achieved, Gordon Brown, you know, clean all the Thatcherite, but nonetheless still sort of engaged in that settlement. Keir Starmer didn't really speak intellectually in this sort of way. I mean, Andy Burnham seems to me to be avowedly and explicitly saying that the country needs to turn the page on the Thatcher settlement. Is this a big moment intellectually for the Labour Party? Yes, because I feel for the last couple of years, it wasn't that we were losing the battle of ideas, we weren't really engaging in the battle of ideas.

20:58And I think Andy's vision of how to do politics as a Labour Prime Minister is undoubtedly rooted in values, but driven forward by ideas. And whether it is his description of economic power being privatised, political power being centralised or an economy being de-industrialised, he thinks, given the scale of challenges that the country is facing, you need to match them and meet them with big ideas. And that's what he sought to do today.

21:23Lewis Goodall:Is there a danger, though, that although it was, I mean, no one would doubt that it was compellingly delivered, and clearly, as you say, unlike Keir Starmer, he's interested in the intellectual and conceptual side of politics. but in terms of the tools he has at his disposal there's a danger that it just doesn't meet the scale of the diagnosis that he's given in the sense that for example let's talk about you talk about the privatized industries he's not really talking about nationalization and he didn't really explicitly say what greater control means did he so there's the option of public ownership but also a focus on public control but the reality is politics is partly the art of competitive of storytelling.

22:03And when Andy described a situation, for example, in the water industry, where private shareholders always seem to win, and the public interest always seems to lose, I think there will have been people watching televisions across the country nodding, saying, why is there sewage covering our beaches? Why do our bills go up? I don't think anyone would disagree with that.

22:22Lewis Goodall:My question is just more, it's clear that he's got a very strong diagnosis. The question is about the prescription. And I'm sure that in an ideal world, he would like to have the money potentially to re-nationalise these companies, but we know he doesn't. So what does greater control for the state actually mean? But in politics, analysis precedes action. And in that sense, the fact that he set out today a sense that we have gone wrong in relation to the privatised industries is the precondition of taking those larger steps. So whether it is we've rejected already the offer that's come back from Thames Water, we've said that we want to give new legislative powers to mayors and others, we have started a process.

22:59But Liz, you're right. The country didn't get into this mess overnight and we're not going to get out of this mess overnight. That, to my mind, makes the case for politics because the conventional critique of Keir Starmer's government was that we were, if you like, a victim of the impatience of the public for big policy change. And of course the public want change rapidly but actually I think the way to understand what happened over the last couple of years was a failure of political strategy. we were not able to take the public with us on a journey and tell a compelling account of the country in which enough people in the country could see themselves and when I listened to Andy today I thought he is telling a story and offering a vision of the country that most of us can see ourselves in and in that sense that isn't an alternative to significant legislative and policy change but to my mind it's the precondition of that and if you win the battle of ideas that is the foundation on which you then take the policy change OK, so you set out this prescription, you've set out this analysis of what is wrong.

23:59You know, you want a national care service to be established because of the kind of iniquitous system we've got at the moment of people, you know, falling sick and then having to lose their life savings, their home, because they've got to pay for the care bills. you've set out what is wrong with our politics and the need for electoral reform and a government going into a general election the governing party going into a general election with a commitment towards electoral reform astonishing then why not just have the election now if this is all so urgent and to be done at great pace because Britain is on the wrong track why wait for three years?