There’s something disarming about the emotional tenor of this Government. In the background, it is composed of pain, asphyxiation and horror. But in the foreground, it is an all-singing, all-dancing, carnival of optimism. It is like going round to the house of someone who has just lost his job and finding them in a tip-top mood. It is disturbing. It makes you more worried for them than you would have been otherwise.
Andy Burnham has been handed a terrible political inheritance. He has to deal with the failures of Tory rule – a stagnant economy, battered public services, a neurotic bond market operating at the limit of its sympathies – and all the failures of the outgoing Keir Starmer premiership on top.
Rachel Reeves’s worst present for her successor is the spending review, due next summer. The former chancellor front-loaded a load of spending increases and backloaded the savings required to fund them to the end of the Parliament. To make the sums add up, she assumed spending would fall by 2030.
Burnham and his Chancellor John Healey now have to figure out how in God’s name they can make that happen – and this is just to pay for what has already been spent. Any new spending would require additional savings. This is a very severe problem, because Burnham wants to implement lots of new spending – on defence, social care and the cost of living.
The natural response is to borrow more money, but Burnham has also been left with a hypervigilant bond market. It became acutely concerned about the UK during the Liz Truss episode and was never fully placated by Reeves, because she often operated effectively within the margin of error on her fiscal headroom.
Burnham is therefore deprived of all the original ways governments have justified increased borrowing: private finance initiatives, defence bonds, a rolling future target date for balancing the books. The most tantalising option available to him is Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Defence, Security and Resilience Bank, which is really borrowing under another name, but even this was considered too dangerous by Reeves’s team.
If it’s not borrowing, you have to get the money through tax, but this avenue is politically treacherous. Reeves’s tax rises in last year’s Budget have not come into force yet but are speeding down the pipeline. To make things worse, Burnham has pledged to stick with Labour’s manifesto pledge not to raise income tax, national insurance or VAT, or to end the pension triple lock.
In my view this is a mistake, but you can see why he’s done it. Making a clean break from the 2024 manifesto raises questions of democratic legitimacy which are bubbling anyway under the surface whenever a political party changes prime minister mid-term.
Burnham lives in a world of pain, an amalgamation of all the worst possible circumstances for a Prime Minister to operate in. So, why does he seem so happy? Why does he project such a relentless sense of optimism when all around him there is death and decay?
“Let us make this the moment when Britain starts to believe again,” he said in his first speech as Prime Minister on Monday. “The moment we bring back hope.” When he first addressed his new Cabinet on Tuesday he said that “every day” was about giving people the “hope that things are getting better”.
Every time you see him, he is smiling. Each time you hear from him, he is upbeat. His initial media appearances have not been with broadcasters, where the remorseless critical questions create a sense of endless difficulty, but with young telegenic social media influencers who bring a sense of lightness and engagement.
This is partly a question of disposition. It is simply in his nature to be more upbeat. And a prime minister’s personality does eventually beam through to the public. You are aware – whether it’s Tony Blair’s messianic evangelism, Gordon Brown’s technocrat jealousy, or Boris Johnson’s giddy vacuousness – of the fundamental emotional components of a leader’s character.
But more than that, Burnham’s optimism is a concrete political strategy. It is, in and of itself, a plan which seeks to dissolve the constraints in which he is held. He aims to raise the mood of the country, initially through superficial means, and in doing so create the room with which to create a more sustained and meaningful approach.
Partly, this is an attempt to revive animal spirits – the sense of confidence and enthusiasm which drives private sector activity and provides economic growth. But it is also a policy designed to get the public behind his premiership.
Voters know that things cannot be solved overnight, but they have now spent a full generation – since the 2008 financial crash – being told by politicians that they have to wait for the long-term plan to kick in before there will be improvements. This is what David Cameron said about austerity, what Boris Johnson said about Brexit and what Starmer said about his 10-year plan.
Patience has run out. People need to see an improvement in their life now, not in a decade’s time. Effective political communication is therefore fundamentally a question of sequencing: buying yourself time for the long-term plan by providing affordable relief with a short-term plan.
This is what lies behind Burnham’s cut to VAT for energy bills and lowering of the national cap on bus fares from £3 to £2. These are relatively cheap proposals with moderate impact, but they provide meaningful assistance and the latter policy in particular is keenly felt by those who benefit from it.
They communicate a sense of urgency and empathy: we get what you’re going through and we understand the need to help as quickly as possible. They do little on their own, but they give Burnham the chance to secure a hearing from the public, to earn recognition and therefore buy him the time to implement his ultimate 10-year plan.
What we are witnessing here, in the early stages of Burnham’s Government, is fundamentally an emotional campaign, an attempt to secure battlefield advantage in a war over the country’s mood. He is fighting against the general sense of national malaise, against Farage’s narrative of national decline and against Starmer’s demand for endless national patience.
It is a testament to his core personality and his political instinct, but it is also a concrete political strategy, in which long-term aims are made possible by short-term popular support. It’s smart, it’s tenable, and a damn sight more politically astute than what we’ve seen over the last two years.
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