ANDY BURNHAM addressed his party’s conference in Liverpool as a heretic. Forty years of consensus? Shattered.
He had come, he said more than once, to say what none of his predecessors dared. He was “an outsider from the Westminster club”. He would be “the first prime minister to make a break with politics as usual”. “I have to break the mould today,” he said.
And heresies, it seemed, were spoken. He railed against privatisation. The verdict was rapturous, for Britain is tired of stasis and hungry for change.
He broached taboos: electoral reform, loosening the state pension’s “triple lock”, rejoining the European Union.
This echoed the words that launched the post-liberal revolution: Lady May turned on the footloose investor class who she thought paid too little deference to the locals. In an epic overcorrection, she took Brexit as a rebuke to the economic and social liberalism that had driven policy since Margaret Thatcher. Her premiership was a disaster but her intellectual victory has been total. Apprenticeships are the jazz standard of industrial policy. Or as Sir Keir riffed: “For too long, success has been measured by how many young people go to university. Or, in Lady May’s rendition: “For too long in this country, technical excellence has not been valued as highly as academic success. For too long, the sector has suffered less from neglect than hyperactive policymaking. Mr Burnham returned to Westminster after winning a by-election in Makerfield, a Brexit-leaning seat in north-west England. Hardly overlooked, party strategists have thought of little else. And then there is Europe. If that followed, history would remember him as a visionary. But the options are well known and for a decade, ministers have bounced between the imperatives of sovereignty and growth like wasps in a jam jar. Will another debate within a divided cabinet over the merits of the Turkey model resolve Britain’s strategic dilemma? Lady May might have doubts. Still, the era is not without its consequences. And how, precisely, is that going? A number of those citizens of nowhere are now citizens of less choosy tax jurisdictions, such as Greece. It’s hard to say whether Mr Burnham would call that a defeat, or, in heretical form, a triumph.
The real mould-breaker was Theresa May and her conference speech of October 2016.
Out went what Lady May later called “untrammelled free markets”; in came interventionism and price controls. Out went “the cult of selfish individualism”; in came the rhetoric of family, place and nation. Just as every great has a version of “Round Midnight”, so every post-liberal prime minister declares themself the first to care about practically minded teenagers in oily overalls. “For too long in this country, students have been told that you must take the academic path to do well and to be respected,” says Mr Burnham. It was the sort of place “long forgotten by national politics”, he said, heretically. Yet what Mr Johnson called the “forgotten people and the left-behind towns” of industrial England have been the axis on which electoral politics has turned for a decade. Mr Burnham said he would host an open debate on Britain’s future with the European Union, with rejoining an option. Mr Burnham railed at the fat cats who, he said, had plundered the people’s wealth through privatisation. “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere,” she said. Nothing said in Liverpool seems likely to tempt them back.
