Emma Revell is External Affairs Director at the Centre for Policy Studies.
When it comes to Andy Burnham’s cost of living tour, at least he is being honest.
The Prime Minister told the BBC earlier this week that his plan is to deliver an “accumulation of smaller things” that “combine to take the pressure down“. Small indeed – measures announced so far include taking VAT off household electricity bills, capping bus fares, and accelerating an already announced plan to end the ‘subscription trap’.
I very much doubt anyone, even Burnham, would claim the path to restoring Britain’s economic prosperity lies in £2 bus fares and making it easier to cancel your Netflix subscription but you can see why he’s taking this rather superficial route in the early days of his premiership.
Firstly, he’s a new Prime Minister with no mandate taking over leadership of a Labour Party that has spent its first two years in office making just about everything worse. Every little helps, as the saying goes, and while these measures may not collectively add up to much, anything that relieves even a bit of pressure on households will, on the surface, be popular. Cue the cheery headlines and a bump in the polls, just what a new leader needs.
Second, he’s following a well-trodden path of summer giveaways. Keir Starmer, in one of his last acts as Prime Minister, announced the ‘Great British Summer Savings’ funded, as the cheery seaside-themed graphics noted, by the ‘UK government’. Or as we on this side of the political divide would more accurately say – by the taxpayer. Starmer’s big summer bonanza included free bus trips in August for the kiddies, a VAT cut for activities like the cinema or the zoo and cheaper kids meals in restaurants so in many ways, Burnham is just adding sprinkles to the taxpayer-funded ice cream cone his predecessor has already handed out.
He has also been blessed in the timing with which he entered Downing Street, right on the cusp of MPs’ summer recess, meaning no tricky appearances at the dispatch box against Kemi Badenoch who, as others have here and elsewhere, had made herself very comfortable during PMQs of late.
Of course, opposition politicians are trying their best to push back against Labour’s announcements but the summer period is always a difficult time for any politician to make headlines. With some of our collective attention more focused on our summer holidays than our impending economic catastrophe, it’s easier for Burnham to stick a pin in any difficult issues and focus on racking up some easy wins.
Unfortunately, for the country as a whole, it’s not clear when – if ever – Burnham intends to turn his attention to the more difficult bits of governing. The Budget is coming up in October and we’re likely to endure months of speculation and rumours laying the groundwork for some ‘difficult choices’, by which, of course, Labour mean using economic stagnation to justify ideologically driven tax hikes on wealth and profit. But I’m talking about the really critical things going wrong with Britain today, and how the hell we fix them.
Under Badenoch’s leadership, the Conservatives have gone some way to reclaiming their reputation as a party willing to have difficult conversations. She became leader promising not to rush into hasty headline-chasing announcements and to take time to think about what policies were needed – not just to help rebuild the Tory brand, but the country. With heavyweight thinkers like Neil O’Brien heading up the party’s policy work and experts like David Wolfson advising on legal matters, it should come as no surprise that we’ve seen solid announcements on stamp duty reform or a rigorous and defensible plan to leave the ECHR.
Reform are nothing if not willing to make enormous policy announcements that go beyond what others are willing to even contemplate – take this week’s announcements on the deportation of foreign criminals. There may be questions yet to be answered on how exactly these people will be removed from the country, but there’s no doubt that these things are being worked through as the gap before the next general election narrows.
But while I think parties on the right are more likely than those on the left to have honest conversations with the public about what policies cost and what the Treasury can afford, neither party has gone quite far enough. There is a difference between pointing out the need to do a difficult thing, and setting out how to get it done.
Take welfare. By now we’re all well aware of just how terrifying our current welfare spending trajectory is. Some have gone further and called out the ridiculousness of schemes like Motability, or the phenomenon of passported benefits, whereby successfully claiming one benefit or another unlocks a plethora of other discounts on everything from your wifi bill to trips to the Tower of London.
But actually changing things will be difficult. Policymakers will need to face down the combined might of organisations and charities who will oppose any reform, loudly and publicly, while steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the concept of trade-offs.
Then there’s housebuilding. We on the right recognise that our housing crisis is driving generation after generation to the radical left. Yet too many within the Conservative Party cling to outdated notions that the greenbelt is precious, agriculturally valuable and aesthetically pleasing as opposed to blots on the map, strangling our most productive towns and cities. Meanwhile some within Reform, and perhaps a smaller number within the Conservative membership more broadly, cling to the disproven idea that if we simply ‘fix’ migration, the housing crisis will solve itself.
Of course there are also examples of difficult things that need to happen, but where no party is willing to publicly acknowledge that at all. The most obvious example being reforming the unsustainable triple lock: no party is willing to tell Britain’s pensioners something they might not like to hear, not when there are votes at stake. The same calculations underpinned the Conservatives’ outrage when Keir Starmer tried to make changes to the Winter Fuel Allowance – despite the sums involved being small and the logic of the change reasonable, the need to win the communications battle outweighed the pure economic rationale.
The NHS needs fundamental reform but the public don’t have the stomach for it, never mind the unions. Everyone knows social care is broken but all the sensible solutions involve people taking some financial responsibility for themselves. There are innumerable damaging tax rates or thresholds that need to change but doing so would benefit the wealthier more than those on low incomes. Road pricing would be a more sustainable way to fund our roads but politicians prefer the easy headlines from yet another fuel duty ‘freeze’. I could go on – each in turn enough for their own columns here.
It’s easy for me, as someone who works in a think tank and has zero desire to run for elected office, to sit at my desk and tell politicians they need to do unpopular things for the good of the country. But the simple truth is that they do. Without it, there’s no route other than continued stagnation and inevitable decline.