Kerry Postlewhite on moving from words to action
I’ve followed Andy Burnham’s career with a fair deal of affection ever since I first met him at Labour HQ in the 1997 general election campaign. As Andy’s politics have developed – on public ownership, devolution, inequality, public services and the redistribution of power – I have increasingly thought: yes, this is my kind of Labour politics.
Which, being very honest, made the first weeks of his premiership slightly uncomfortable. I wanted this to work – really want it to work – but worried that some of that politics might be getting lost. Would the pressure of governing narrow the ambition?
Then came Liverpool. Watching Andy’s first conference speech as Prime Minister, my overwhelming reaction was – he’s still in there!
Not just the communicator, or the politician who understands parts of England Labour desperately needs to reconnect with. What reappeared was the politician with an instinct for something bigger – that Labour exists not simply to govern more competently, but to fundamentally change the country for the working class.
A National Care Service; public ownership of life’s essentials; electoral reform; a new relationship with Europe; power moving out of Westminster and above all, a willingness to talk about inequality and power without sounding embarrassed by it.
Perhaps most significant was Andy’s willingness to frame his project as an historic break with the Thatcherite settlement, challenging assumptions about markets, ownership, the state and the distribution of power that have dominated British politics for more than forty years.
And how interesting that, just a week later, Kemi Badenoch appeared to put the culture wars largely to one side and reach instead for Thatcherism itself. The Conservatives’ The Right Way deliberately echoes The Right Approach of 1976, published under Margaret Thatcher’s leadership. Badenoch wants to renew that inheritance; Burnham wants to break with it. Bring that battle of ideas on.
I came away reassured, but not without questions. I want this government to succeed. But support worth having cannot just mean applause. Those of us who share Andy’s direction have a responsibility to keep making the case for greater ambition and help turn political instincts into a programme capable of delivering them.
You could feel the difference in Liverpool. Labour members have a new spring in their step. That matters because our members are an asset. They knock on doors and have the conversations through which politics becomes real. For too long, too many of those doors have felt firmly closed. Now we have a second chance – a door opening when we knock and a positive conversation with the voter on the other side.
I can see it in my own local party, with new joiners for the first time in a long time, and former members returning. But we need to reinvigorate internal democracy, debate and discussion inside the party too.
Andy put it well when Mainstream launched: “We’ve got to get beyond this culture where everything’s a threat. If people are speaking out, it can actually be an opportunity to make changes.”
For those of us in Mainstream, there was particular resonance. Almost exactly a year ago, Andy signed our founding statement for a left politics that was popular, principled and practical; prepared to disperse power and wealth, rebuild public services and transform the economy. A year later, some of that political territory feels much less lonely.
So the questions that remain aren’t predictions of failure. They follow from taking the ambition seriously.
There is much to welcome in immediate measures to tackle the affordability crisis, including cutting VAT on electricity bills and capping bus fares. People struggling now cannot live on promises of structural reform later. But relief cannot substitute for reconstruction. Britain needs investment on a scale capable of transforming regional economies and developing infrastructure; rebuilding public services after years of being hollowed out; an answer to the crisis in local government, where councils cannot exercise promised new powers while struggling to maintain essential services; and a rebalancing of the distribution of wealth.
That is why the fiscal framework matters. Andy has committed to retaining the existing fiscal rules. Of course, economic credibility and stability matter, but if we are serious about an historic break with Thatcherism, we must also ask whether our approach to public investment can support the transformation being promised.
I don’t expect that question to be resolved in a hundred days. Governments have to sequence things. But ultimately devolution needs resources behind it, public ownership needs investment, and regional renewal requires more than small pots of competitive funding. A state serious about rebuilding the country cannot permanently treat investment in its future as a cost to be contained.
The encouraging signs go beyond domestic policy. Ed Miliband is beginning to tell a compelling internationalist story about Britain’s place in the world, rooted in solidarity and international law. Andy has broken the Brexit taboo. We are once again talking about international development.
The challenge now is to join these things up into a governing project – to move from describing transformative government to making the big shifts in power, wealth and ownership that would bring it about.
For the first few weeks, I worried the constraints of office might prove stronger than the politics Andy had developed in recent years. His Liverpool speech put much of that worry to rest.
That doesn’t mean the questions disappear. It makes them more important, because there is something worth pushing forward. Those of us who want Andy to succeed should help make that happen – supportive when the government moves in the right direction, prepared to push when it could go further, and unwilling to lower our ambitions for what a Labour government can achieve.