If Andy Burnham really has no intention to call a General Election as he says, then this Conference speech has not made a very convincing show of it, there were a lot of policy announcements for, "The next Manifesto." or 2030. (A year past the next scheduled election.) If he really is going to sit the full mandate Labour were elected on in 2024 then these policy announcements for what will be almost three years in the future ring like hollow attempts to keep his polling in place while in reality continuing the path of not doing nearly enough to resolve the big issues that face our country in this day and age.
Given these circumstances it is hard not to speculate whether the November General Election is going to happen should Polanski be defeated in Holborn & St. Pancras, Guardian polling is suggesting Burnham could squeak a majority thanks to tactical voting and if we're lucky Reform could even be inched into a distant fourth. But ultimately spending too much time worrying about General Elections is a futile exercise, we need to be much more proactive in our campaigning than we currently are, and in waiting for someone to give a special date for us to start we are already losing.
So what is the substance of what he has said? I'm feeling nice today so I'll start with what I liked best; getting rid of the Triple Lock on State Pensions. The Triple Lock has always been one of the more misguided consequences of Liberal Democrat thinking during the Coalition, creating a system that meant the value of Pensions was always rising above the average wage, inflation or 2.5% if neither were higher. This was intended to restore the value of pensions, which it did. But fifteen years in has had the unintended consequence of creating an fiscally unsustainable, exponentially expanding benefit for an increasingly wide aged population, one Governments were historically afraid to challenge, given the older a voter is the more likely they are to well... Vote...
This plan to switch to a Double Lock hasn't left Pensioners hung out to dry, however, as part of the savings made from this will go towards a National Care Service that will provide free social care at the point of delivery and support for existing carers. Given this costs of this are predicted to be around £15 billion more than the £2 billion saved from scrapping the Triple Lock, the question of where the money will come from under Labour's current spending rules is dubious, especially given the (appreciated) scrapping of VAT on electricity bills. My concern is, as was the case with the bus fare cap, this may yet again come out of the environment and international aid budgets to avoid having to increase taxation. Despite this, the cross-party talks on the matter are appreciated and may be able to resolve these issues, particularly as this has been a long-time Liberal policy
The rest of his policy announcements however, made me raise some eyebrows; the potential nationalisation of the water companies sounds like a good idea on paper, but how this would work in practice is unclear, the reason the nationalised companies began to struggle in the 80s was because the Regional Water Authorities had their power to borrow severely curtailed by the Thatcher Government, and while they had racked up about £4.9 billion in debt by the time they were sold off, the privatised companies now have £70 billion worth of debt, with anywhere up to 28% of it is put on customers bills depending on their region. How nationalisation will solve this, or the many other problems with our water companies is not outlined, which made the announcement feel very much like playing to the base.
Another thing that worried me was, once again, his insistence on giving Mayors the power to hold water (and energy!) companies to account; this feels ripe for exploitation along Party-political lines and confirms my worries from Liberator #437 about this serious concentration of power in the executive branch of Local Government that Labour has come to favour. It also raises serious questions over why Labour opposed the 44 Liberal amendments to the Water (Special Measures) Act 2025 that were intended to create a new stronger and independent regulator to replace the failed Ofwat as was recommended by the Water Commission. If Labour is serious about resolving the structural issues of our Water Industry, rather than just moving the burden to the State, then perhaps they should take notes from our recent Conference motion on the matter, as they clearly did with the National Care Service.
Perhaps the most egregious suggestion in his speech was yet another Commission for Electoral Reform - no doubt, commissions can be good when we need to fully explore options, but electoral reform has been explored to death - it was just under thirty years ago now that the Jenkins' Commission produced it's report on the matter, and just over thirty years ago the Plant Commission did the same. There hasn't been any significant development in electoral systems since then as far as I know, and the findings of these reports were both relatively comprehensive, regardless of your opinion on their conclusions, so I can only see this as stalling from a Labour Government that wants to avoid having to answer the question for another decade or so in hopes that they'll keep maintaining their own power, it is profoundly disappointing.
Overall, he's left a slightly better impression on me now than he did in my Liberator article, but none of my criticisms there have been invalidated, and in a few cases, they have been vindicated. His choice to save all these commitments for 2029 also begs serious questions as to why he fears fighting for his own mandate, given the existing Manifesto is so obviously failing to deliver the change it promised; a nicer face won't prevent that reality from sinking in forever.
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