Pundits lament that Andy Burnham will be the seventh Prime Minister in the past decade, or to be strictly accurate in the past decade and one month.
They are wrong to be so gloomy. Our idea of liberty includes the right to sack any PM of whom we have had enough.
The House of Commons can usually tell when the PM of the day has become insupportable. MPs register popular discontent with a sensitivity born of the fear that they themselves will be thrown on the scrapheap if they sustain a useless leader.
And backbenchers are well-placed to gauge what chances the leader of an unpopular government has of turning things round.
Sir Keir Starmer’s MPs have mutinied because he gives no sign, either when speaking in the Commons or on other occasions, of being unpopular for a purpose. When he finds himself getting into difficulty, he turns around and leads his troops back along the road just travelled, while pretending this is the route he all along intended to take.
No instance springs to mind of Starmer pressing ahead with a correct but unpopular measure which should by 2029 begin to bear fruit.
One must take care while saying this not to fall for what might be called the Fallacy of Efficient Government. There is a kind of pundit for whom the art of politics consists of choosing the correct policy, i.e. the one recommended by the pundit, and sticking to it until the problem is solved.
The apparatus of the state is presumed to be adequate to every challenge as long as the right people are in charge. Failure is blamed on bad political leadership.
Starmer has often implied, and seems even to have believed, that once immoral Tory ministers were replaced by virtuous Labour ones, all would be well, and the Whitehall bureaucracy could proceed on its omniscient way.
This assumption has deep roots. It was stated by Douglas Jay in The Socialist Case, published in 1937:
“Housewives as a whole cannot be trusted to buy all the right things, where nutrition and health are concerned. This is really no more than an extension of the principle according to which the housewife herself would not trust a child of four to select the week’s purchases. For in the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman from Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves.”
Few politicians and pundits can claim never to have asserted this doctrine. It is virtually impossible to engage in political debate without claiming one could do better, and from claiming one could do better it is but a step to claiming one can do brilliantly.
Politics as the choice of the lesser of two evils – the basis on which many millions of people cast their votes – is forgotten. We find ourselves engaged instead in a politics of perfection.
Our lot can make the schools, or the hospitals, or the railways work. Put us in charge and all will be well.
Is this Andy Burnham’s view? One cannot yet know. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard suggests, in The Daily Telegraph, that Burnham
“may snatch the dividend of a powerful economic renaissance that is gradually gathering force and which could deliver the highest growth rates for a generation.”
In Manchester, he avoided wrecking a revival which was already under way when he became Mayor. The same could happen in Downing Street.
All big problems in politics take at least a generation to solve, and often several generations. The first Labour and Conservative politicians who tried to bring the overmighty trade unions under control failed to do so.
Failure is more instructive than success. This maxim holds true not only for politicians but for voters, with the latter at length becoming willing, through bitter experience, to tolerate the high costs of reform.
The instability of the 1970s – inflation out of control, public finances collapsing, industry in desperate trouble, a murderous insurgency in Ulster, Conservative and Labour governments brought down by overmighty trade union barons – rendered the measures taken from 1979 by Margaret Thatcher and Sir Geoffrey Howe, and the appallingly high unemployment which was one of the immediate consequences, tolerable to a sufficient proportion of the electorate, in a way that would not have been the case from 1945-1979.
In order to succeed, it is necessary first to fail. Whether this logic yet applies to welfare reform is hard to say. Labour MPs are today overwhelmingly middle-class – an undesirable side-effect of the defeat of the trade unions.
And for the middle-class socialist, cutting welfare is extraordinarily difficult. Let the state provide for the less fortunate: that surely is what any compassionate socialist must say, disregarding the ever rising cost of the policy, the pernicious dependency it creates, and the anger of industrious members of the working class at the fecklessness of their neighbours.
But what a chance Burnham has here to steal Tory clothes. If he can reform welfare, a virtuous circle in the public finances could soon result: lower borrowing, lower borrowing costs and rising tax receipts enabling reforms to the tax system which reward hard work, encourage enterprise and unleash animal spirits.
One would not wish to fall into the error of suggesting that if only the present writer’s prescription were followed, a politics of perfection would ensue.
But it is just possible Burnham has learned something from the complete hash Starmer made of welfare reform.