Is Burnham brave or naive?

The Politics Show

The episode dissects Andy Burnham's ambitious Labour conference speech, focusing on his proposals to adjust the triple lock pension, launch a national care service, and

Key takeaways

• Andy Burnham announced an adjustment to the triple lock pension system rather than a full scrap, aiming to control long-term compounding costs while funding a national care service.
• A National Commission on Electoral Reform was proposed, drawing cautious reactions from Labour MPs who fear proportional representation could threaten their seats.

Main topics

• Andy Burnham's Labour conference speech
• Triple lock pension adjustment

Notable quotes

"A commission is always a great way to make sure something happens later or maybe never."

Conclusion

The episode highlights the tension between Labour's ambitious policy agenda

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) U.S. voters abroad, have you got your ballot yet? All states are now sending ballots to overseas voters. So if you want to vote this year, you should request your ballot right away. Go to votefromabroad.org and click Request My Ballot. Ask to receive it by email. Questions? Ask our support team directly. Don't miss this chance to shape the future. Don't delay. Votefromabroad.org. Speaker 3 (0:28) The New Statesman. Speaker 5 (0:33) At this week's Labour conference, Andy Burnham announced bigger and bolder policy ambitions than anyone expected. Scrapping the triple lock pension, a national care service, electoral reform, a new relationship with the EU, public control of water, the Great British Grid and a major expansion of council houses. Two and a half percent deposit mortgages. It was a big swing from the new prime minister. Also, next Thursday, there is a by-election happening in Hoban and St Pancras. The seat vacated by Keir Starmer. I'm Olly Dugmore and this is The Politics Show from The New Statesman. Anoush, Tom and Alva have all been struck down with the notorious conference sickness, but I'm very happy to be joined by our business editor Will Dunn and political correspondent Megan Kenyon, both of whom managed to survive conference this week and produce some blistering analysis and appear to be a picture of rude health. So, hello to both of you. Hello. Speaker 4 (1:20) Hi. Speaker 3 (1:20) I've Speaker 4 (1:21) actually brought the conference flu into the room with me. Speaker 3 (1:23) Oh, Will. Speaker 4 (1:25) This is a small room. With poor ventilation. And because I've been to all of the conferences so far, it is a horrifying cocktail of germs collected from Reform, Liberal Democrat and Labour Party members. Speaker 5 (1:39) We're going to take a closer look at some of the announcements from the conference and try to make sense of them. There is a lot to unpack, guys. Megan, let's start with electoral reform. Despite the speech having a largely rapturous response to it. It seemed like, and I wasn't there, so you can correct me if I'm wrong, the response to that announcement was a bit more muted than perhaps it was some of the other stuff that Burnham said, despite the fact that the Labour Party conference has voted for this over its previous two conferences. So talk me through the reaction from the party, the members in the room. when Andy Burnham said that? Speaker 3 (2:11) Yeah, so what I think is really interesting about this is that actually there has been a sort of growing level of support for what Andy Burnham announced, which is a National Commission on Electoral Reform. There was an amendment to the Representation of the People Bill brought by the Labour MP Alex Sobel, which actually was ruled outside of the scope of the bill, so it didn't go through, but it's really... they view it as really positive that actually Andy Burnham has taken this on and announced it himself. Andy Burnham has been quite pro-electoral reform for some time. Like he said, I think in an interview with The Observer during the Makefield campaign that he would try and bring in proportional representation at some point. But this commission will essentially look at various different electoral options. Speaker 3 (3:00) Having said that, Alex Sobel and all of the people around that amendment who were supporting it were very pleased. But I did actually speak to an MP at, and this is a bit of a flex, of course, but at the Mirror Party on the final night, the hottest party in town. Was that a hot ticket? Speaker 4 (3:17) The second hottest party in town. Speaker 3 (3:18) What's the first? Speaker 4 (3:19) The New Statesman Party, obviously. Sorry, was it Speaker 3 (3:22) running at the same time as our party? And you just said Speaker 4 (3:27) that. Speaker 5 (3:27) No, it wasn't. Speaker 3 (3:28) It was on the Tuesday night and... This was the first year that I got invited and didn't have to like, you know, try and sneak in. Speaker 5 (3:36) Congratulations. Speaker 3 (3:37) Thank you. Anyway, I was speaking to an MP there who said that they had been sat with other members of the... parliamentary Labour Party and there'd been sort of standing ovations and tears and clapping for lots of different parts of Burnham's speech. So like the social care thing, the triple lock stuff, all of the things around public ownership, they were absolutely lapping that up. And then he comes towards the end of the speech, says he's going to do this national commission on electoral reform. And the MP I spoke to was sat with a load of their colleagues and they were just like, what, why, why are you doing this? He didn't get up and clap. sort of were a bit confused about it because I think there is a very interesting split in Labour of you were right, the membership's voted for it several times, the membership's really on board with this. But of course, the MPs who actually might be looking at their seats and thinking, oh no, if this comes in, I'm... totally screwed are more cautious of it. This Speaker 5 (4:34) is the thing, isn't it, Will? Typically in British politics, it's people who aren't in power who advocate for electoral reform. And then usually when they, if they win an election as a result of the electoral system we have, their passion for electoral reform seems to die away a little bit. that might be what's happening with those Labour MPs. Speaker 4 (4:51) Yeah, it's interesting that, I mean, obviously this is something that the Dems have argued for for a long time and watching PMQs so far that Burnham's been doing, there's been a lot of nice warm air between Ed Davey and Andy Burnham. There's been a lot of, yeah, I agree with you, you know, it's kind of, and I think perhaps there is a bit of the manoeuvring in this, but also, you know, a commission. And that's what you do when there's something you think you should do, but you're not going to do it. You have a commission into it. It's something that has been talked about for a very long time. And yeah, a commission is always a great way to make sure something happens later or maybe never. There was a fair bit of that in the speech, wasn't Speaker 5 (5:35) there? It was like, it felt like he was kind of throwing... rocks into a pool and seeing where the ripples land it's like well yeah everyone knows where i stand on the eu let's have a commission and see where it ends up he's sort of like picking fights drawing lines but not necessarily saying we're going to do this tomorrow and i suspect that's slightly downstream of the fact that he doesn't actually have his own personal mandate from winning a general election Speaker 3 (5:55) yeah and i i guess um the ed the ed davy lib dem point is really interesting because that same mp who made the point about the um sort of being a bit more muted on electoral reform actually described burnham's speech as the ed davy redundancy Speaker 2 (6:13) speech because there were so many things in it Speaker 3 (6:15) yeah there were so many things in it i'm not to be honest i'm not sure i agree with that but you know social care um electoral reform uh even some of the vibes were kind of you know more sort of Because it didn't feel Lib Dem-y, but it's kind of those issues. And so, yeah, they were like, yeah, Ed Davey's basically been made redundant by Andy Burnham, which I thought was really weird because I was speaking to a Labour MP. Yeah, Speaker 5 (6:44) I'm inclined to agree with you. You know, I don't think saying that you want to end the 40-year neoliberal consensus is necessarily a particularly Lib Dem-y thing to say. But then there is a gap, possibly a gap, right, between his rhetoric and what he actually does in terms of policy. Um, another one of the big announcements will obviously relates to the triple lock. Yeah. Um, can you just run us through a little bit of the detail before maybe we start to talk about the politics? Speaker 4 (7:10) Yeah, sure. So the old triple lock. which still exists, was a policy that uprated state pension by inflation or earnings or 2.5%. So what that meant was that it always, the state pension always leapfrogged the actual earnings of workers in the economy. Because if inflation was 10 % in one year, everyone would ask for a pay rise in the following year. A lot of people would get a pay rise. And so earnings would rise the following year. And so the state pension would go up both years thanks to the triple lock. Or if nothing really was happening, it would go up by 2.5%, which is more than the economy was growing. So it was ratcheted ahead, the pensions ahead of the rest of the economy. And it needed to do that in the time that it was imposed because, you know, Previously, you had horrifying levels of pensioner poverty and the state pension did need to be uprated by some mechanism. But what's happened now is it's got way too expensive. And because it's a policy that has this compounding cost, when you are the OBR and you're forecasting what everything's going to cost in years to come, it's one of those things that gradually just keeps getting bigger and bigger. So what has changed is the... triple lock has not been scrapped it has been adjusted so it is still is the case from april 2030 assuming assuming that labor has Speaker 5 (8:44) a Speaker 4 (8:44) majority in the next election that's the one of the big provisos in this is that it will move to um going up either by inflation or by two percent or it will to use Berman's phrase from his speech, it will hold its value relative to earnings over time. So what that rather clunky phrase means, instead of going up by if earnings was the highest figure last year, it won't go up by that because that was the problem, that ratchet effect. It will go up by the average rise in earnings since the policy was imposed. So it still is a triple lock. It still has three things that mean the state pension will continue to rise broadly in line with the rest of the economy and to keep up with how much workers are earning. The intention is that they won't then fall back into the kind of pensioner poverty that we saw in previous decades. Speaker 4 (9:43) Yeah, it takes some of the