According to many voters, journalists and politicians, including plenty in the party itself, the answer to that stubbornly recurring question has always been: not that much. Labour governments can’t restructure the economy, radically redistribute wealth, truly empower the disadvantaged or adopt a genuinely ethical foreign policy without upsetting too many powerful interests, from the British rich to the US government to global financial markets. This endlessly repeated conventional wisdom – internalised by some on the left as well as centrists and the right – has haunted many Labour governments, from the first, tentative ones in the 1920s to Keir Starmer’s diligent but failed administration a century later.
Yet conventional wisdom can be wrong, especially in volatile periods such as the current one, when precedent may count for little. At last year’s Labour conference, Andy Burnham was widely derided for what was seen as a half-launched and clumsy leadership coup attempt. Much of the media and Starmer’s cabinet reckoned his chances of being prime minister were gone for good.
Yet, at this week’s unusually packed and perhaps unwisely optimistic gathering, Burnham’s can-do presence was almost as dominant as Tony Blair’s in his early leadership years: a constant point of reference, from the main hall to the merch stands to leftwing fringe events. Moreover, Burnham appears to want to use his personal dominance – which may well be briefer than Blair’s, given Labour’s more fragile position in a more fragmented politics – to open up an array of huge issues that his party has long been advised to keep closed. Electoral reform, social care, public intervention in failing privatised utilities, the pension triple lock, even rejoining the EU: announcements about exploring or pursuing all these punctuated his conference speech, in a sequence of softly voiced political shocks.
But he insisted: “More of the same isn’t good enough.” At an excited fringe event the night before, his ally Ed Miliband, the foreign secretary, who in that job and his previous one as energy secretary has pioneered Labour’s unexpected recent interest in confronting difficult problems and dangerous interests, summed up the party’s defiant new mood. Progressive politics is a particular risk,” he said with relish. Burnham might have similar charisma and communication skills to Blair in the 1990s, but New Labour ministers did not dare say such provocative things.
Defenders of that now remote-seeming political culture would argue that avoiding head-on clashes was one of the reasons Blair was twice re-elected. But Burnham, who served in the Blair government at a formative age, does also have a strong conciliatory impulse, such as his frequently stated keenness to cooperate with other parties. However, as with his reluctance to criticise them by name – his conference speech was almost completely free of the usual party-political attacks – this apparent absence of aggression is in one sense the opposite: a determined attempt to break with the ultra-partisan politics of the post-Brexit decade that has excited many journalists but increasingly exhausted and alienated the public.
Burnham might come across as a nice bloke but he is ruthless, wrongfooting opponents and rendering their tactics obsolete, as his supposedly formidable Labour enemies such as Morgan McSweeney learned this year. Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage’s perpetual outrage and tribalism suddenly seem rigid and unreasonable next to Burnham’s talk of hope and national togetherness, and his disarming admission this week that all politicians must do better, that “this country isn’t where any of us would want it to be”. Labour’s modest but persistent rise in the polls suggests that sufficient voters have had enough of the old high-argument, low-achievement politics to make Labour the leading party again for a period, perhaps up to the next general election and even beyond, when many of his ambitious reforms are actually meant to take place.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
