What the gaps in Andy Burnham’s speech reveal

Politics At Sam and Anne's

The episode provides a detailed deconstruction of Andy Burnham's recent speech at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool. Hosts Sam Coates

Key takeaways

Andy Burnham is using Reddit AMAs as a deliberate communications strategy to ensure his policy wording is crawled by LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini.
The Prime Minister's speech included a 'triple lock adjustment' intended to fund the National Care Service, though funding shortfalls remain a concern.
A proposed Royal Commission on electoral reform aims for fairer voting but faces significant political and procedural hurdles.
Polling indicates 48% of the public supports changing the triple lock if it is linked to social care improvements.
The speech was noted for its lack of concrete, immediate measures regarding economic growth and welfare reform.

Main topics

Labour Party Conference analysis
Triple Lock and Social Care funding
AI and Government Communications strategy

Notable quotes

The idea is if people put in a prompt about Andy Burnham or Labour... there is just a much higher chance of being answered with the Prime Minister's own words.

Conclusion

The episode highlights a leadership attempting to set long-term politi

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) I'm Adele Robinson, a correspondent for Sky News, and I wanted to give you a recommendation for when you finish this podcast. I've made a documentary for YouTube called The Com, Online, Sadistic and Deadly. It takes a look inside one of the darkest corners of the internet and the disturbing community that exists there, exploring how young people can be drawn into it and the devastating consequences that can follow. It's a story that's difficult to hear, but one I think is really important to understand. You can find The Com on the Sky News app. website and YouTube channel. Hello, good morning Speaker 5 (0:34) and welcome. It's Wednesday, September the 30th, a giddy Labour Party here in Liverpool, waking up many with fever dreams of listening to the Transport Secretary, Heidi Alexander, belting out Waterloo very late last night at the Mirror Party. Question on everyone's lips, would Sam and Anne be performing? I said next year, people, next year. The reaction, of course, huge relief and massive excitement about what follows for British politics from that barnstorming Andy Burnham speech that was palpable and kept a lot of people up late and on the dance floor. Speaker 2 (1:17) There was also relief that there wasn't a Seminand karaoke number. I thought that Heidi Alexander... Waterloo rendition was best watched on social media this morning. Our own deconstruction of Andy Burnham's 66-minute opus came out last night on the Politics at Sam & Anne's feeds on YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts. So for a full analytical deep dive, go to that. We're not going to rerun our analysis. It still stands. So head to see it on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. It should be the last thing in the feed. But Speaker 5 (1:47) the job of dissecting this conference in Liverpool and where those pledges by Andy Burnham leave the broader task of government and the trade-offs, that is really what will be focusing minds today. The Prime Minister himself will be doing a big round of interviews. a handful of speeches remaining before they sing the red flag in good heart and head home. Speaker 2 (2:12) Certainly they will. There's also a notable addition today. As well as doing all the traditional broadcast interviews that have already kicked off, actually, Andy Burnham is going to do a Reddit Ask Me Anything, AMA, the internet chat forum. Now, this is really interesting to me because why is he doing it? Well... I think we may have mentioned this in the podcast before, but if you do a Reddit, the results of that pop up on AI. So the Reddit online forum is a big trusted source by, you know, programs, large learning models like ChatGPT, and it often throws up Reddit results when you ask. So the idea is if people put in a prompt about Andy Burnham or Labour or government policy, there is just a much higher chance of being answered with the... with the prime minister's own words, if they form part of a ready answer and is up on a sort of, on a forum webpage that could be crawled by the AI's large learning models. And that is an absolute win for government comms and for government policy, relying on that rather than a kind of third party interpretation or somebody else analysing it. You just get... the Prime Minister's words straight in front of people's eyes on chat or Gemini or other big AI programmes. Speaker 5 (3:35) Coincidentally, it is the day the ex-News UK executive David Dinsmore steps down from his role as head of government communications, separate, of course, from a number 10, but no sign of a formal... process to replace him there. He wasn't very long in the job. Sami came in after discussions with Keir Starmer in around March, but pretty quickly after having talks with Louise Haig at the Cabinet Office, he was out. But that new media focus has been amped up in the time he was there. Ed Berryman is actually the head of that big new media portion, will have focused on exactly that kind of detail. you've just been talking about. Get your key content somewhere where AI can find it and hoover it up so it's your account of policies that gets out there before anybody else's. Not that the Burnham team need much encouragement to get into whizzy new Speaker 2 (4:37) media. Now, clearly, not only the contents of the speech was important, but how they sold it. So we were just talking about the public selling, but there's also been quite a... big job internally selling the speech. And yesterday, I understand Andy Burnham did something that Keir Starmer never did. The first, he summoned a political cabinet just before the speech to tell them what was in it. Then after that, he summoned a bigger number of ministers, so there's more junior people on the government ranks to talk to them. And I did hear a bit of inside the room of the political cabinet. He sort of brought them in. And in quite a sort of matter of fact, collegiate way, he said, look, here's the speech. Here's the main things. I know that there's going to be some stuff in here that you don't like. And this was a very specific reference to the section of the speech about electoral reform. Apparently, I hope I got this right, he looked at Louise Hague and I think Shabana Mahmood, who haven't been supporters of electoral reform in the past. And in that political cabinet, I think he just went a little bit further than he did in his speech and said, look, when we get this Royal Commission to look at the various options, he said, I'm absolutely acknowledging that, for instance, I want to keep the constituency link, which is one of those things that would actually end up meaning that the system that we evolve to, if these changes go through, would be less proportional. He was saying that there are lots and lots of different options that they'll look at, but by no means does this... implied that we're going for a fully proportional system. And he said that to reassure the actually quite large number of Labour sceptics of electoral reform that he was going to sort of throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are alternative voting systems, which he thinks are clearly fairer. Funnily enough, there's the supplementary vote, which is used for English mayors. people like