Mersey Mersey Me: Will Burnham pass his Labour conference test?

Inside Briefing with the Institute for Government

The episode examines Prime Minister Andy Burnham's recent diplomatic efforts in the US and his upcoming first Labour Party conference in Liverpool.

Key takeaways

• Andy Burnham's US trip included high-level meetings with Donald Trump and Ursula von der Leyen.
• The relationship with Donald Trump is characterized as unpredictable, transactional, and potentially volatile for UK interests.

Main topics

• Andy Burnham's US diplomacy
• AI regulation and global competition

Notable quotes

AI is either going to kill us all in 10 years or cure cancer in 10 years.

Conclusion

The episode highlights the delicate balancing act required for the new

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:08) I think you're up. Well, they're more now than they were with your last prime minister, let me put it that way. That was Donald Trump, and sorry, I resisted doing the impression, giving his verdict on the UK and Andy Burnham this week. So does the prime minister have a spring in his step as he heads from Manhattan to Merseyside for the Labour conference? My name is Alex Thomas, and this is Inside Briefing, the podcast from the Institute for Government. Burnham has been clocking up the air miles this week, racing across the Atlantic to speak at the UN, meet the US President, meet Ursula von der Leyen and plenty of other important people on a whistle-stop trip. So how did this first major outing on the diplomatic stage work out for him? Next up after New York is Liverpool, with Burnham heading to his first Labour conference as party leader and Prime Minister. We're going to preview one of the biggest dates in the political calendar. And then finally, a closer look at an issue that saw Keir Starmer stumble badly, and that's benefits reform. How could Burnham approach this thorniest of issues? A new IFG report has the answers. All of that to come. And this week, I'm joined again by senior fellow and party conference veteran, Catherine Haddon. Hi, Cath. Are you fired up for a few days of brown food and schmoozing? Speaker 3 (1:13) 100%. I'm well slept, well rested. I haven't been ill in months. I've been eating lots of fruit and veg, so I'm expecting all those things to reverse within a week. Speaker 1 (1:22) You've massively jinxed it now, Kath. It's downhill all the way from here. Senior researcher Ben Paxton is here too, who, like the Prime Minister, is on his travels and is dialling in from Norway. Are you there for the aquavit and brown cheese, Ben? No, sadly not, or at least I guess I haven't tried any yet. Speaker 2 (1:39) I'm actually here for a conference which has been co-hosted by some researchers and the Ministry of Finance here in Norway about what we can learn from different countries' approaches to the big fiscal challenges of the day, managing big major projects. But I'm having dinner with some people here tonight, so maybe the Aquavit will be on the menu then. Very on brand. What's the conference called, did you say? It's called the Concept Symposium. And yeah, it's a very kind of interesting collaboration here between the... the Ministry of Finance and researchers really scrutinising how Norway goes about spending its money. Speaker 1 (2:10) Very good conference, silly name. I'm also delighted, apologies to our Norwegian colleagues, I'm also delighted that we're joined by Emma Bernal, who is the editor of Labour List. Emma, you must have chalked up a few of these conferences in your time. Are you ready for this one? Speaker 4 (2:24) Ready as will ever be. This will be my second conference as editor of Labour List. I think something like my 25th altogether. Speaker 1 (2:32) Wow. And you were saying just before we started recording, you've come straight from the aqua aerobics. That's a tactic for the conference, is it? Speaker 4 (2:38) Yes. I needed to thrash it out in the water and get myself fighting fit. There Speaker 1 (2:44) we go. Tips for us all. So let's start with the prime minister's trip to the US, which mostly has been seen as a success after Burnham survived the always unpredictable experience of a press conference with Donald Trump. Emma, lots of positive reviews, but one of your reporters, James Tibbetts, wrote for Labour List. Yeah, that was the case with Starmer as well. He was once considered a Trump whisperer and it all went downhill after that. Speaker 4 (3:05) Well, I mean, it's the case for literally anybody who has to deal with Donald Trump more than once or twice, isn't it? And you just, you can't guarantee that what happened the last time will be the same as what happens the next. You've seen that with people as varied as Vladimir Zelensky, Mark Carney. Zora Mundami. So it's great when you get through it and it seems to have gone well at the time, but that doesn't mean that the next time will be any easier. Speaker 1 (3:33) Yeah, and Kath Burnham is a more sort of affable, personable politician than Starmer. Is that enough for Trump? Speaker 3 (3:40) I kind of agree with Emma. Like, it's so random. I don't think there's you can really go into it with like, this is the magic mix. Of course, the diplomats would have put in the hard yards beforehand, making sure that Trump and his team was sort of briefed about what Burnham cares about, you know, things that would chime with Trump. Yeah, he is so random. And I mean, actually, on first meeting, you know, Trump wants to be liked. So his first sort of instinct is going to be sort of showing off how he's got a great relationship with people until such time as a policy or a personality reason that he decides to go in completely the opposite direction. And I'm sure Burnham will experience the sort of fluctuating ends of that spectrum at some point. I think the big challenge for Burnham. is really more about sort of the policy aspects of that relationship with Trump now that he's, you know, nearly two years into. this presidency, and there are various sort of fault lines on which the US administration and other countries are finding it challenging. Trump likes to be impressed, whether or not Burnham's sort of folksy mayor, northern, sort of the thing that really is working well for him in the UK, whether that really appeals to Trump, whether it being too personable is probably something that might damage Trump's ego. So it's a difficult line to tread. really but to be honest it's just so random I don't think you really can go into it thinking I'm going to try and present myself this way and build the relationship I mean as you said at the start Starmer did try to build a relationship, found that he had enough sort of common ground or had managed to sort of please the president enough to get some positivity coming out of that relationship. But as soon as there were any policy fault lines or indeed just anything random, you know, found that it flipped. And at that point, Starmer then started to stand up a bit more. And certainly Burnham going into this, I mean. more so in earlier weeks and months, but at various points was sort of implying he would try a different relationship. He would be honest to himself. But I think we'll see when the chips are down and it's a bit more difficult how Burnham really is in this relationship. Speaker 1 (5:52) Yeah, and as you both said, nothing lasts in Trump world, really. It's entirely transactional and kind of in the moment. Emma, I'm interested because obviously you follow Labour members and supporters and that kind of ecosystem. How does the sort of necessary relationship that... any Labour leader with their prime minister has to have with the US president and this particular US president kind of go down in in labour world. Speaker 4 (6:15) Just to have a little plug here I would look at the site in the days to come because we have got some polling on which countries Labour members see as more or less friendly to the UK which will be coming out soon. Labour members not unlike the British public actually are not that keen on Donald Trump it's not a shock. And not just considerably to the left of general American politics, but also to the left very widely of Speaker 3 (6:42) the MAGA Speaker 4 (6:43) movement and Trump. But I think there is kind of a difference between the heart of a Labour member that wants to see that love actually moment and the kind of understanding that there's actually a realpolitik and that any kind of... sugar rush you might get from giving Donald Trump a kicking in a press conference would not actually go so well for the future of our economy and all the ways that we're tied to the US. Speaker 1 (7:09) Yeah, it's what comes after the love actually moment, isn't it? I mean, just pick up on that economic point. I mean, the world's gone AI crazy or AI terrified, pick your analysis. It does feel like we're at a real kind of inflection point, even if we're not slightly beyond that around AI regulation. Europe is tending towards more regulation and more oversight. Trump seems completely uninterested in any of that and sees it in terms of a competition with China and meeting President Xi. Do you think there's any sense the UK can find a middle ground in that or are we going to have to pick a side or have we already picked a side? Speaker 4 (7:44) What's interesting is it's one of those debates where a year or so ago we were all kind of going, oh yeah, AI, we should probably think about that at some point. And now, honestly, my inbox is full of op-eds on AI. It's all everyone's talking about. My worry is with topics that bubble up like this is they bubble away again very quickly as well. And actually, we need to think about the very big long-term differences that AI are going to make. I slightly glibly like to say that AI is either going to kill us all in 10 years or cure cancer in 10 years. So either way, I'm not quitting smoking. This is not a public health Speaker 1 (8:20) podcast. Speaker 4 (8:23) I didn't use AI at all a year ago. I now regularly kind of use it to help me find stuff out. I don't trust it completely. I hope I have a reasonable journalistic scepticism of it. But it can save... Hours in the day when doing some fairly interesting admin tasks, for example. Now, I'm just one human being working in an industry where I hope I can't be replaced because I'm not sure any AI could ever understand the average Labour member's thinking. Speaker 1 (8:54) But... Speaker 4 (8:55) It's a task beyond Speaker 1 (8:56) even the supercomputer. Speaker 4 (8:57) Exactly. There is no super intelligence in the world that can get there. But all of us... have found our daily lives gradually and then suddenly changing. What does that mean? What does that mean for the ways that our thinking about politics and policy and government is going to be shaped and be different in six months, a year, five years' time? Speaker 3 (9:20) I do think this sort of inflection moment between, like you say, that difference between the US current approach and what we're starting to see come out of Europe and a few other countries as well, more regulation versus Wild West. certainly a reluctance to regulate the moment of growth. And the UK, we're definitely seeing more clarity around what the UK's positioning and sort of policy choices are. Don't think we really know Burnham's deep-seated ideas about this because it's another issue that he probably hadn't thought that much about until suddenly finding himself. Prime Minister. But the UK, I mean, one, it's up there in terms of data centres, along with the US and China. It's obviously looking for opportunities for investment and growth. And given its financial sector, it's... it's sort of an area that it's going to want to be at the forefront of. But also with the AI Security Institute, AC, it's got a fairly world-leading approach to thinking about the challenges of AI. And for that, what it needs is access to these models before they're sort of widely put out there. And that really depends on diplomacy. So I think a lot of those things are the reason why it's finding itself. sort of caught between the US and the European position, which frankly is nothing new. I mean, that's pretty much, you know, how the UK has operated for the last hundred years and tacking to one or the other, depending on what they saw was the best interest. So I think it's fairly standard for the UK to find itself in this position. But I think it is telling us a lot more about fleshing out the UK's... policy position a lot more. What we still don't know is what the public think about this, what MPs think about this, what Burnham thinks about this, and that could change just as dramatically over the next year as it has over the last year. Speaker 1 (11:10) You talk about Burnham stepping up and into new issues. Something else that he's had to step into is Russia-Ukraine security questions. Trump certainly had seemed to suggest that Starmer, as the previous Prime Minister, had gone too far on his rhetoric on Russia, whereas... Burnham slightly kind of changed tack, was talking more about misinformation, disinformation. Do you think that was a big move? Speaker 3 (11:34) I think, again, it's an area where, you know, there is a strong amount of policy work going on, diplomacy and so forth. And Burnham, again, not having those sort of strong, deep, these are my views on the international situation kind of credentials. This is a lot of... He's certainly a very thoughtful man, a man who's been thinking about his positioning on all sorts of policy issues. But some of this is newer territory for him. And again, though, the UK's position is... pretty classic, which is, again, being caught between very strong relationship with the US and seeing things from the European perspective, you're definitely getting much stronger