Tag: Andy Burnham

The World Awaiting Andy Burnham

It’s a pretty unforgiving world out there awaiting our Prime Minister to be. If it was bad after the 2008 financial crisis it’s a damn sight worse now.

To start in apocalyptic mode.

A quote caught my eye recently – let’s take it as a sense of direction rather than an achieved reality – the objective of the very rich is to shift our gaze away from the imbalance of wealth and power toward everything else, not least issues relating to law and order, public services, immigration and gender. To turn disaffection into crises. And, I’d add as a rider, to minimise, to vilify, government action taken in response. We have in essence the aspiring libertarian state.  The state is denied, not just a role in helping direct funding to projects of benefit to wider society, but to any form of socially beneficial expenditure. Think Elon Musk, or Peter Thiel, portraying Greta Thunberg as Antichrist, or JD Vance finding justification in St Augustine for a notion of compassion that begins at home and doesn’t go much further.

They are a vast and malign distraction. The old issues are the ones that matter. How to achieve a balance between an entrepreneurial state on the one hand and a caring state on the other. How might the one best finance the other. How might a caring state best help create the social capital which underpins the invention and rising productivity of a thriving society. That is a characterisation I think Andy Burnham might recognise. And the countervailing presence of Trump and Musk and Farage notwithstanding, it is a mighty task in itself.

How to … achieve radically improved childcare, social care, health care and education. Reduce the rapid rise in health-related benefits and the numbers of young people un-  or under-employed. Recognising all the while that we can’t afford anything other than reductions in expenditure if we’re going to boost our defence expenditure and have a Defence Investment Plan which actually delivers a fortress nation, and a fortress continent.

To achieve his ends Burnham has to deliver on prosperity and productivity, where everyone else has failed. How can he, how can we all, generate those animal spirits that Keynes talked about in the 1930s? Where we look for opportunities as the default, rather than spend our lives grumbling?  It might have seemed that Thatcher or Clinton or Blair succeeded, or were they sowing the seeds of the problems, not to say disasters, we’re faced with?

As Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue in their book ‘Abundance’,  we’ve created societies where services have declined while prices have risen, and where those who can have prospered, while those who can’t find themselves without jobs, or chasing services they can barely afford, leading to societies which can easily tip into rage, and leave themselves open, at worst, to Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk-style (weird bedfellows) demagogues. There is a neat circular logic to the actions of Musk and Thiel and the anything but holy innocent JD Vance. Appeal to the so-called masses, undermine existing authority, and they are left unchallenged.

Back down to earth. Maybe the one place in the UK that has a positive vibe is Manchester. It’s lifted Andy Burnham almost to Prime Minister. Unlike the new Conservative Party convert Matthew Syed (and multiple other doubters) I rather like the Manchesterism that Burnham and his council leader predecessors, Graham Stringer and Richard Leese, have promoted, not least in working with local businesses to redevelop wide areas of the city, part of wider feel-good sense the city now enjoys. As a Mancunian born and bred I like what I see.

Manchester led the world on the 1840 because it was ruthless and only learnt how to be forgiving the hard way. Government could only stand by and watch and wonder. Now the role of government has to be about how it can ensure the structures are in place to allow business to be ruthless – to ensure we have the energy we need (will issuing further North Sea exploration licences materially influence availability beyond the short term), that the necessary talent is available (including from overseas), that homes are built (Burnham is a strong advocate of social housing), that tax is as fair as we can make it, and that long-term capital is available – arguably the most important of all.

We need talent and capital and that sense of optimism that gets and keeps you a step ahead. And making as much as possible home-grown, while rebuilding markets across Europe. All this, while enhancing our natural environment and limiting climate change.

All this… and the challenges of AI. We’re back to Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, to their tech-over-the-world over-exercised egos, and the Trump-pacifying social media moguls, Bezos and the like, and their billionaire fellow-travellers. I’m reading Karen Hao’s ‘The Empire of AI’, about Open AI, how altruism has no place when you sense you have at your fingertips a technology which will change the universe and leave you as one of the masters of it. How can we here in the UK, where we had in Deep Mind in the early 2010s a world leader, keep pace with – catch up with – the endlessly developing new generations and new frontiers of AI, turn it to the advantage of everyone and not the glorification of a few?

We’re also facing the reality that the USA is turning inward. The ‘abundance’ agenda has a very strong built-in-the-USA focus. Trump is denying Anthropic the right to sell its latest models outside the USA. What if the development of the internet had had similar restrictions imposed?

That said, talk of AI won’t inspire the nation. That for the moment is for the geeks. For Burnham the immediate reality is to convey a vision which we share and buy into and build on. Can he demonstrate that there is still life in social democracy? We have to hope so.

Beyond the Red Wall

Travelling in India last month I was struck by the continuing interest in the UK. All, on the surface, appears to be going well in India. The economy under Narendra Modi has momentum, a contrast to our own. Modi has a 77% approval rating. There was a sense of optimism among the people I spoke to. And a concern for us, as for an old friend who’s not in the best of health. (Unless it’s cricket, where they acknowledge we lead the world at the moment.)

An Indian commentator (Swapan Dasgupta, writing in The Times of India) refers to a distinction made by Tony Blair between party activists and ordinary voters. With the UK and USA in mind Dasgupta continues: ‘It is largely the angry and dogmatic Right and Left who have the time and inclination for political activism. …. They can inspire the faithful but ordinary voters aren’t driven by doctrinaire concerns. The problem is that no-one can define what they want. Hence the appeal of identity politics as a fallback. Caught in the pincer movement of woke and the menacing xenophobic, liberal democracy should be worried about its own future.’

Applied to the UK, how did this work out?

The economic crisis and the years of austerity which followed brought to the fore deep divides in the UK. They were defined in various ways: north/south, city/country, as levels of education, ‘somewheres’ vs ‘anywheres’ in David Goodhart’s contentious formulation. The European Reform Group and Farage and sections of the media weaponised this divide. Notions of ‘Global Britain’ held back by the EU’s restraining hand gave a false economic credibility to the argument.

Janan Ganesh writing in the Financial Times has a useful take on the same subject. ‘People do not work out their beliefs and then join the corresponding tribe, they join a tribe and infer their beliefs from it. The sense of belonging, of group membership, is what hooks people…’

Come the 2019 election the group identities born of the Brexit ‘debate’ and the Brexit vote were firmly established.

Sebastian Payne’s Broken Heartlands (published 2020, revised 2021) focuses on the 2019 election. Interviews across the Red Wall (northern seats which switched to the Tories in 2019) with MPs, activists, business figures and a few old political warhorses attempt to explain why people voted as they did.

The explanation doesn’t lie in hyped-up fears over immigration – that was Brexit. It is, Payne concludes, twofold. Two personalities in fact. Johnson’s can-do enthusiasm, focused on get-Brexit-done and levelling up. And Jeremy Corbyn. That takes us back to 2010, when Ed Miliband diverted Labour’s focus away from the New Labour path and opened up the way for Corbyn’s disastrous election.

Payne’s new-Tory-MP interviewees, with their big plans for their constituencies, have reason to feel embarrassed. They’ve been relying on the magic money tree, which the last sane chancellor, Philip Hammond, had kept well-locked away in a cupboard. They’ve also been mesmerised by Johnson.

Where do we go from here? All sides of the argument are focusing on the regions. Andy Burnham, Andy Street and Ben Houchen, mayors of Manchester, Birmingham and Tees Valley, are cited as examples of what can be achieved at a regional level. We’ve also had Gordon Brown’s recent report on the regions for Labour, with its big ideas, not least an assembly of the regions replacing the House of Lords.

The polls suggest people are looking to Labour for answers – but primarily for want of alternatives. They are not convinced. Sebastian Payne approves a simple formulation, arising out of a conversation with Neil Kinnock. If Labour could ‘manifest itself as the “security” party, in terms of personal security, employment, education, enterprise, national security… it would be capable of getting over the identity demarcations that produced the referendum result’.

High-flying sentiments but the emphasis is wrong. Enterprise would be a better starting-point than security – enterprise supported by education, and enterprise put in the service of transforming social care and health care more widely. Business entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs, and government agencies, working side by side.

Payne quotes a striking statistic: ‘just 17 per cent of over sixty-fives voted Labour in 2019…’ Security might be a watchword for the over 65s but it is surely more important to get young people engaged, and young people voting.

Politics needs to be about challenge, even exciting. (A big ask, given where we are at the moment.) It is extraordinary how the younger generations have been left out of current arguments and deliberations. If we’re to break out of our small ‘c’ conservative mindset and take on the future they have to be put centre stage. They deserve their own ‘triple lock’.