The hidden message in Andy Burnham’s conference speech

Three apparently separate causes — closer ties to Europe, proportional representation and a national care service — point towards one political destination: a Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition. ANDREW MURRAY makes the connection

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ONE question arises above all others coming out of the Labour Party conference this week — what is the government going to spend the next three years doing?

There is, this column will argue, an answer. But first, why does the question arise?

The announcements made by Andy Burnham and his ministers in Liverpool can be sorted into three groups — those that are rather less than they seem, those which confirm the status quo, and those where action is postponed until after the next general election.

The Prime Minister has indicated that election will not be called early, which in conventional thinking would mean not before 2028 at the earliest, and more likely 2029.

In the first group of announcements are several where better might have been expected. On water, which Burnham had pledged to restore to public ownership, there is merely a legislative amendment to permit, rather than impose, such a transfer.

It was accompanied by a pledge to work with the private water companies if the latter played nice. Ho hum.

Likewise, the establishment of GB Grid will simply add a public competitor to the electricity supply market, rather than putting an end to it.

In respect of the urgent question of housing supply, Burnham offered a further rhetorical endorsement of council housing. Yet local authorities have so far been at the back of the queue for state cash for new homes, and the government’s other initiative has been addressed at further, and unnecessarily, stimulating demand instead.

We earlier noted the mismatch between stated vaulting ambition and picayune action in respect of shipbuilding or insourcing.

Then there are the issues where it is not even pretended that anything is going to change. Military spending, Treasury rules, interference in the Ukraine conflict — all that remains exactly where Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves left them.

That is not to deny a different atmosphere in Liverpool. In respect of presentation, his own skilled political affability and an articulation of a nostalgic social democracy, Burnham is indeed delivering on his pledge to his Makerfield voters to restore to life the Labour Party of old that they supported as a matter of course.

It is not there yet. In its lack of real democracy, constricted grassroots involvement, red carpet for corporate lobbyists and detailed stage-management, the Labour conference today by no means resembles the one your columnist attended for the first time in 1978.

The work of Keir Starmer and Morgan McSweeney, never mind Tony Blair, has not been unpicked. But it would be churlish to deny that the conference was marked by an optimism, tempered only by regret at the two wasted years, not present since Jeremy Corbyn was at his peak.

Starmer was unmourned outside the diminished coterie of his Labour First supporters. His robotic leadership will surely be remembered as a sketchy first draft of a world takeover by AI, when the artificial part had been perfected at the expense of the intelligence.

Burnham is a man for the emotional connection instead. But he can also read the political runes. Three years is, for sure, a long time in politics, but there is nothing to suggest that Labour is looking at another parliamentary majority the next time the people are consulted.

Nor is any other party. Kemi Badenoch is not on the edge of a breakthrough, and even if the Tories and Reform could confect some pact of the damned it would still not command the Commons on present figures, what with Nigel Farage now in a box marked “somewhat rumbled.”

Thus to the third group of Liverpool announcements — those which we are invited to discuss over the next three years, but will not see any action on until we are well into the 2030s.

There are three — rejoining, or at least recalibrating relations with, the European Union; changing the electoral system; and instituting a national care service to be paid for partly at the expense of increases in the state pension.

It was only on a train returning south, as the conference fug dispersed and the indifferent white wine cleared the system, that the penny dropped: this is a programme for prolonged governmental alliance with the Liberal Democrats.

Ed Davey’s party is home to the most intransigent remainers and rejoiners — indeed his predecessor, the entirely forgotten Jo Swinson, advocated scrapping Brexit without a referendum in 2019. Consistently, the Liberal Democrats are the most pro-EU party in the country.

Likewise, proportional representation has been a signal Liberal cause for decades, largely because they were the main losers from a first-past-the-post system which consistently and massively failed to translate their popular vote into Commons seats.

Ironically, in the present Parliament the Liberal Democrats have slightly more seats than their share of the vote would deliver in a regime of strict proportionality, but that has not shifted their determination to introduce a system that would permanently entrench their influence.

And then, social care — this is something that Davey, a carer for his own disabled child, has made a personal mission.  

He has repeatedly offered to collaborate with the government on developing a sustainable solution to this particular crisis.

There is no way on Earth that the Liberal Democrats could resist entering a government committed to their top three long-term demands. Moreover, since nothing on the list is likely to be delivered fast, it could be a two-term coalition at least.

So there is the potential answer to the Liverpool question — Burnham is going to spend much of the next three years rolling the pitch for that Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition which polling presently mandates as the only likely alternative to a hard-right lash-up.

He cannot publicly avow it, of course, since a coalition implicitly sentences many of his MPs to a life outside Parliament for which they are ill-prepared.

And it is not to say that Burnham is not sincere in his own advocacy of those three causes. His record speaks to the contrary.

But he is making a big gamble — several in fact.

Firstly, reopening Brexit as an issue is, at least, a double-edged sword. Jeremy Corbyn took Labour to a 21st century peak in 2017 by pledging an end to neoliberalism with respect for the result of the 2016 referendum.

Two years later, that support wilted not because of an access of belief in neoliberalism but because the Labour leadership capitulated to the Remain movement and sought to return to the pre-referendum status quo, walking back its previous commitments.

Electoral reform has compelling merits, but it would mean an end to majority-Labour governments for the foreseeable. If that meant Labour governments in alliance with Greens, other socialist parties, radical independents and so on, then it would be an improvement.

But if it turns out to involve having to run every reform past the Liberal Democrats for ever more — well, the blessings may soon come to seem distinctly mixed.

Even the welcome idea of a national care service entails risks, if it is to be funded at the expense of old age pensioners. Those folk vote in numbers but have yet to instil the same attitude to a comparable extent in their grandchildren.

Anyway, it seems we have three years to discuss all that and more.

But while we are at it let’s not forget about reversing that 40-year wrong turn — it could actually be dated back 50 years, to Jim Callaghan’s 1976 Labour conference speech and embrace of the IMF — breaking the power of the bond market and ditching neoliberalism.

Because it sure as hell isn’t going to be on Ed Davey’s to-do list. And if it were to be accomplished ��� well, perhaps a coalition would not even be needed come 2029.

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