Written September 2026
I didn’t tune in to Andy Burnham’s conference speech, and I have just watched a couple of clips on social media (which both seemed to offer more emoting and teariness than I can really take from the political class). I decided to read the speech on the Labour Party website but I do have to admit it couldn’t hold my attention all the way through. Speeches are meant to be listened to rather than read I suppose.
We are assured that Burnham is an impressive communicator, and perhaps by the standards of today’s political discourse he is, but he leaves me totally cold. We are told that he brings grit, dynamism and will to bear. I don’t see it.
I think some aspects of Burnham’s analysis are fine, but it is so tinged with partisan memory that it is not really of much use. Perhaps I’m an old cynic but as someone brought up in a Labour family I’ve heard all the stories around the dinner table about the NHS, prefabs after the war and all the rest of it. I find all that stuff about his grandad driving a lorry around Liverpool Docks hackneyed and rather desperate, though I suppose it’s really supposed to get the party loyalists’ juices flowing.
One must make allowances for a certain amount of giving the troops what they came to hear, it was a conference speech after all, but the cartoonish version of history with everything being rosy until Thatcher arrived and destroyed it all really doesn’t wash; pre-Thatcher Britain was in structural decline. Thatcher’s administrations are an important part of the story of how that decline has proceeded, and they added plenty of stupid decisions of their own, but received wisdom and political myth are not reality.
The fact that politics and political life contains very much more myth than most in our rational times are prepared to consider is a huge subject in itself. I’m not going to get into it here other than to reiterate that political and economic reality are, in the end, impervious to the political framing that most participants try to impose on them. Everyone does it, and Andy Burnham is no exception. The issues that Britain must address are not susceptible to conference tub-thumping, and the sooner we get leaders who realise and act on this the better.
The country that Andy Burnham is now governing is a nation in little more than name. The ties that bind are weaker than at any time I can remember, and while some of this is due to factors outside of any government’s control, much isn’t. We are more than ever a welfare nation; the government spends about the same as a percentage of the economy as it always has but the SDP’s recent paper lays bare that the component mix is now dominated more and more by welfare than by productive national investment. The word games beloved of modern progressives where welfare is infrastructure and so on is for the birds. We are borrowers, not builders, we spend on welfare rather than productivity and infrastructure.
Andy Burnham imagines he has a vision of an independent nation building a future for itself but all he offers is moving ever closer to the globalist technocracy and stagnation embodied by the EU. This is a state of affairs with which Labour Party members are, on the whole, entirely comfortable with. A vision of the good that stands on managing stagnation, rationing, eco-austerity, bureaucracy and quotas with a client population ever more dependent on hand outs and subsidies. A huge portion of the population are understandably scared of change but without it we are just headed for continuing decline. It’s sad but I increasingly think only crisis will bring real change.
His speech may have sounded good but when set against the realities of our current state it was thin and unconvincing. I doubt it will be long before he founders on reality in much the same way as did his predecessor.