Alastair Reacts to Burnham’s Speech and Rory’s Viral Stare

The Rest Is Politics

Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart analyze Andy Burnham's recent speech at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool, focusing on his communi

Key takeaways

Andy Burnham proposed replacing the triple lock with a 'double lock' to manage pension costs.
Burnham explicitly stated that Brexit has caused more harm than good to the British economy.

Main topics

Andy Burnham's Labour Conference Speech
Pension Triple Lock Reform

Notable quotes

He really only did the kind of rousing rhetoric when he was either coming to the climax. or when the audience were kind of, you know, getting going as he was speaking.

Conclusion

The episode illustrates how charismatic communication and bold policy

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) We like to say we want our politics to be about big issues and Andy Burnham has just given us all, friends and enemies alike, plenty to chew on. The building of a national care service, reform of the pensions triple lock, education reform, electoral reform, a VAT cut on electricity bills, greater public control of utilities, more council homes, leasehold reform, reform of right to buy, a warning to absent landlords, some pretty big claims on AI leadership. and clarity that Brexit has gone wrong and therefore plans for a new relationship with Europe. Barely a mention of the opposition parties as he renewed his call for a more consensual politics. Plenty of mentions of his deceased father, recently passed away, and a lot of emotion as he promised to dedicate his leadership to building a country his dad would be proud of. He got a genuinely rapturous reception in the conference hall here in Liverpool, But given the number of big debates he has launched on so many big issues, what matters is the reaction outside. How do the other parties respond as the debate unfolds and the detail is thrashed out? And what does the great British public make of it all? So many big promises at a time of so many big challenges. Speaker 1 (1:17) This episode is powered by Fuse Energy. £100. That is what one message to a friend could earn for you. Fuse Energy has one aim, keeping energy prices down for everyone, not just for those who ring up and threaten to leave. Speaker 2 (1:32) Their tariffs are already among the lowest on the market and now they're doubling their referral offer. Refer one friend and you will get £100 off your bills. And Speaker 1 (1:42) that's each of you. £100 off your bills. So the maths does itself. You save on the tariff and then you both benefit from the referral on top. Simplicity rarely seen today in today's political climate. Speaker 2 (1:53) And just remember the £100 is a limited offer and it drops back to £50 when it ends. Energy prices, as we keep reminding Speaker 1 (2:02) you, are not settling down. Switching takes three minutes. Go to fuseenergy.com slash politics. Use code politics. To get your free Trip Plus membership on top and start referring, earning money for both you and your friends, visit fuseenergy.com for full terms and conditions. Speaker 2 (2:33) Welcome to The Rest Is Politics with me, Alistair Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. Speaker 1 (2:37) And Alistair, you are in Liverpool at the Labour Party conference. You were there for the big speech of Andy Burnham. Give us a sense of what it was like. And how many conferences have you been to? You must have been to 30, 40, right? My Speaker 2 (2:51) very, very first conference was Neil Kinnock's big speech in 1985. Speaker 1 (2:55) That was my Speaker 2 (2:55) first Labour conference. I've been to most since, Speaker 1 (2:58) not all. That's a good 40 years of conferences. Yeah, it's Speaker 2 (3:02) a lot Speaker 1 (3:02) of Speaker 2 (3:02) problems. We'll come on to that. And in addition to talking a lot about the conference and the Burnham speech, Rory, we are going to have to at some point, perhaps towards the end of the episode, reflect on your meme virality, I believe it's called, of the, that. We're going to talk about that. We're Speaker 1 (3:21) going Speaker 2 (3:21) to talk about that, yeah. Anyway, let's start with Andy Burnham. You, I was there. It was a very, really interesting speech. I thought very, very powerful. I mean, it felt incredibly powerful in Liverpool, in the hall. It really felt like the guy was connecting in a way that very few speakers do these days. And I think partly that was because they really wanted him to do well. But also, I thought it was a well-crafted speech. I thought it was well-delivered. I did think that it was chunky. It was meaty. Speaker 2 (3:56) And so, yeah, I counted 11 standing ovations. Speaker 1 (4:00) And before we get onto the content, which is obviously what people can see a little bit more of on the BBC, give us a sense of feeling of it. I mean, watching it on television, it looked like it was very, very, very natural. I mean, he was walking up and down the stage, but it wasn't sort of stagey. It sounded incredibly sort of relaxed. He managed to... almost catch the tone as though he was speaking to a much, much smaller audience, working his thoughts out, when in fact Speaker 2 (4:30) he Speaker 1 (4:30) had this enormous call. Speaker 2 (4:32) Well, it is, of all the conference venues, I mean, they're all pretty big, but Liverpool is big and it's very wide and it's quite cavernous. He didn't have a lectern and therefore he didn't have a traditional autocue. I think he had a kind of Ed Sheeran type autocue somewhere down below. So he's kind of looking down a fair bit. But he was very natural. And also there were points of the speech where he allowed the kind of just very, very simple thought or concept just to land. He really only did the kind of rousing rhetoric when he was either coming to the climax. or when the audience were kind of, you know, getting going as he was speaking. Now, listen, I've got to say, one of the things I've said, I said this when we did the Becoming Burnham series with Steve Rotherham, the Liverpool mayor. He has grown so much as a politician. He really has. That was a, it was a pretty formidable performance, I thought. And so many kind of interesting angles to it as well. Speaker 1 (5:32) It's Speaker 2 (5:32) a Speaker 1 (5:32) speech. I wonder whether it's not a speech that really, a style that really benefits from having been mayor of Manchester, that it's not a House of Commons style. Nobody will let you make a speech like that in the House of Commons. Any pause you put would be interrupted by someone shouting from the back. It's not even the kind of speech you give to business people or fundraisers. It's the speech of somebody talking in a much more relaxed way to their constituents or their electors. I mean, it was, and you get a sense of real confidence that he's not. Speaker 1 (6:06) worried about where the laugh lines are, or he just trusts that his vision and story is going to be enough to carry. I also think he, maybe this is unfair, but I get the impression that he's also quite good at judging the eyes in the room and the reactions in the room and timing his rhythms to what he's getting back from the room. Speaker 2 (6:29) Yeah, there's a couple of things I'd say to that. The first is I spoke I did an event last night with Hamish Faulkner, the government minister in charge of Europe. And he was saying that his generation, younger MPs, he's in his early 40s, don't really think about big speeches as much as maybe my generation, let alone sort of, you know, previous generations did. But I think Andy's always been somebody who actually does think a big speech matters. I can remember when he became, I think it was shadow health secretary, ages ago. And he was really worried about making his first big speech. That was a really important moment. And so this was an important moment. But the style is very interesting. It's quite folksy. It's very emotional. I mean, there was a point at which I think everybody in the hall thought he was about to start crying. And he is somebody, again, back to the chat with Steve Rotherham, Andy Burnham is somebody who really wears his heart on his sleeve. And you've probably had moments like this where you're making a speech. I get this maybe doing eulogies in particular where you, there's a bit maybe when you've been practicing, rehearsing as it were, that you know there's a bit that can set you off. And you could see that he was coming up to a bit. It was obviously going to be about his dad. Everybody in the hall thought he's about to talk about his dad. But what was so interesting was the point that he made on the back of it. He mentioned John Swinney. the SNP leader who said on, coincidentally, he didn't know that Andy's dad had died, but he said that Andy Burnham will be the last prime minister of the United Kingdom. And he just, he went into this really, and I thought you, I actually thought of you, I thought Rory will love this bit because it was so powerful about kind of feeling for the union. And that sort of, that emotion kept coming out. And I don't know whether you could see it, but he was, when... When there was a lot of applause, he was kind of walking over to where there was a kind of podium and just sort of taking a sip of water and coming back. And he didn't mind long pauses and quite long pauses. No, I thought as a performance, as a speech, that will come onto the content, but I thought he delivered it extraordinarily well. And look, Speaker 1 (8:41) we spent the first five minutes talking about the... performance. And I know there will be people who will say, well, that's not the point. And in fact, a lot of journalists, when I was looking at some of the reporting, have tended to ignore that and focus largely on what are the policy announcements in it. But I would say that It's incredibly important. I mean, what in the end brought down Keir Starmer? It was the inability to communicate. What do we know about Donald Trump? He is an extraordinary communicator. And so I think so much of modern politics is about this. And look at Mamdani. It's not exactly as though he's actually brought through an incredible number of radical policies yet in New York. It's the feeling of the guy. So I would begin by saying, actually, that communication thing is worth sitting with because policy analysts are going to miss this, that one of the reasons why Andy Boehner might be in a position to win the next election is if he can keep that degree of confidence and communication. Because the fundamentals, and this is, I suppose, where we can flip it around to policy, the fundamentals remain unbelievably difficult. So, let's sort of step back and take a policy one, look at the position he's inherited. Britain has had basically zero growth since 2008. Basically zero growth for almost 20 years. It's unheard of. Britain's not been in that position since probably the Napoleonic Wars, like 200 years. And at the same time, median incomes have stagnated and inflation has grown and debt has grown. And in the last five years, particularly, The amount of tax we take as a proportion of our national income has gone up by 5 % of national income. It's a huge increase in tax, which again, is without any peacetime precedent. Massive transformation of the British economy. And he's stuck with a situation where, broadly speaking, people don't really believe that the British economy is going to be able to get growth, and we can come on to that later, where he can't borrow. because they've maxed out the borrowing and already they're paying, you know, they've added about 180 billion in tax revenue. They're spending about 160 billion just in servicing their debt. Speaker 1 (11:00) incredible amount of money. And he therefore has basically to raise taxes a bit, cut services a bit. And then on the side, he's trying to deliver a project of transforming and changing Britain and rebuilding the Britain that his father was proud of. Speaker 2 (11:17) The thing that really struck me as well, I was at a business event last night and I was talking to this businesswoman and we were talking about this vibes thing. And She said what you just said. She said, it really does matter because you need confidence breeds confidence. And she said, we have felt just a bit more confident since Andy Burnham has replaced the rather sort of doom and gloom. Everything's going to get worse before it gets better, et cetera. And so I thought with all these big challenges that he set out, and I listed them at the top, there's some really big challenges. I mean, every single one of them, you think there's a lot of details got to come out on that. But on all of them, it was this kind of, you know, we can do this. We've done this sort of scale of thing before. We can do it. And I think that is a very, very important message. And I also thought, I thought, you know, we'll come on to the big policy stuff. I also thought it was genuine interesting that he, I think the only non-Labor politicians he mentioned were John Swinney, who I mentioned, Liz Truss as a bit of a gag, Boris Johnson because of the Boris, so-called Boris wave on immigration. and Margaret Thatcher in basically saying we're going to roll back a lot of the Thatcherism in relation to, you know, public control and public ownership. And he did it, as you say, with such kind of confidence and not, I think, not caring. People sort of say he's a people pleaser. And I was actually watching a few of the, some of the journalists who were kind of, you know, nodding to each other, talking to each other, whatever. And I could see them not quite knowing how to go at this speech. It'd be very interesting to see how they try to. But I saw one journalist saying, actually, I think we'll have a go at him for almost crying. Well, of course, the public won't mind him almost crying at all because what it shows is a man who loved his dad. We talked this week on the podcast about the triple lock. And I can't remember if it was you or I, but I know we both discussed before this idea that if you're going to do the triple lock, don't just do it by saying get rid of the triple lock. Link it to something big. And he's done that to social care. Now, I think that will settle down, maybe settle down the bond markets a bit. But again, a lot of detail still to come. And it's a long-term thing. And he's putting it into Speaker 1 (13:32) the next parliament. Let's start with the triple lock because it's a good central place to start. So the triple lock was this weird thing introduced by George Osborne.