Andy Burnham's conference speech in Liverpool was widely hailed as a masterpiece, full of emotive power and big policy ideas. In truth, however, his mawkish, theatrical performance exposed him as a peddler of illusions, according to Leo McKinstry.
A magician who deals in illusions
McKinstry draws a comparison with a wartime meeting where Winston Churchill praised the dynamism of Lord Beaverbrook, his Minister for Aircraft Production and Daily Express owner. “He is a magician,” beamed Churchill, referring to the latest figures on factory output. To which Minister of Labour Ernie Bevin replied: “Oh, he’s a magician all right. He deals in illusions.”
The same charge could be levelled today at Britain’s new Prime Minister – however, unlike Beaverbrook, he’s unlikely ever to deliver. Great leaders challenge the pieties of their parties, but the Prime Minister pulls his members deeper into their comfort zone with his gospel of unreconstructed socialism.
An agenda of statist expansion
At the heart of Burnham’s speech were the twin fallacies that the state is not big enough and recent governments have been insufficiently progressive. To remedy this, he proposed a strikingly left-wing agenda that featured the reversal of key privatisations like those of the water supply and the railways, as well as a vast new council house-building programme, the overthrow of Brexit, more co-operation with the trade unions, an end to austerity and the creation of a string of new public bodies like Great British Grid.
Yet the sustained applause at Labour’s Conference for this catalogue of statist expansion could not disguise the scale of Burnham’s self-deceit. Believing that Britain took a disastrously wrong turn when Margaret Thatcher came to power, he wants to put the clock back 50 years. But his nostalgia for the seventies is misplaced, a dark decade that saw the British economy paralysed by debt, taxation and industrial unrest. Denis Healey, then Labour’s Chancellor, thought that his party had been taken over by “lunatics”.
The costly National Care Service
Burnham’s attachment to structural dogma is reflected in his flagship policy of a National Care Service, supposedly funded by savings from the abolition of the triple lock on pensions. His scheme, modelled on the bureaucratic NHS, will not come cheap. The estimated cost will be at least £18billion-a-year, far more than will be raised in savings from the end of the triple lock. So pensioners will be hammered if Burnham gets his way – but the books will not even be balanced.
Equally illusory is the theory that all care will be free under the new service. In fact, families will still have to pay the residential element of any stay in a care home, so life savings and property will still be at risk.
Sophistry and teleprompters
At Liverpool illusion was piled on illusion. Boasting of his “honesty” Burnham resorted to the purest sophistry by claiming that the triple lock is merely being “adjusted” rather than abolished. Similarly he pretends he can call himself a “a patriot” even if he presides over another attempt to ditch Brexit. His claims that democracy will be enhanced by more powers for town halls or the introduction of proportional representation are just as hollow.
More tiers of grandstanding politicians and a permanent stranglehold on power by some kind of left-wing coalition will be the result. Even his much-hyped oratorical style was phoney. As he prowled tieless across the stage, he fed the illusion he was bravely speaking without notes or an any autocue. In fact, his script was displayed on four huge teleprompters suspended high above his audience.
This week Burnham enjoyed his flight from reality into fantasy. But the British people will quickly tire of this Misleading Messiah.
