Andy Burnham Will Save Britain — He Just Has to Destroy It First

On Tuesday, Andy Burnham stood up at the Labour Conference in Liverpool and talked for an hour without the usual Westminster anaesthetic. He talked about his dad dying. He talked about being the seventh Prime Minister in ten years and what that says about a country that can no longer hold a government together for the length of a mortgage fix. He announced a National Care Service. He told everyone watching that VAT would vanish from their electricity bill by Thursday — and today, it duly has.

If you’ve spent the last decade listening to British politicians deliver focus-grouped slurry, you could be forgiven for being swept away with the enthusiasm. The man can communicate. It would be easy and satisfying to dismiss the excitement his speech has generated by reducing it to “Our Andy” being good at PR, but let’s be honest: Burnham is not succeeding because the public has been hoodwinked. He is succeeding because he is giving the people what they want.

Many on the right like to pretend that Britain is a nation of frustrated Thatcherites straining against a socialist establishment. And sure, if you poll the British people in the abstract, support for higher taxes and spending has actually fallen — it’s at its lowest since 2013. But ask about anything specific and the picture inverts. 72% want higher taxes on the top 5%. 61% will pay more themselves for the NHS. 82% want water nationalised, 76% the railways — including 78% and 66% of Reform voters respectively. The British public is against tax and spend in general and in favour of it in every particular, which is the single most useful fact in British politics if you happen to be Andy Burnham. He is simply the first politician with the emotional range to leverage this without sounding like he’s reading a spreadsheet.

So he will get his way. And it will not work.

It will not work because Britain does not have a distribution problem. It has a production problem. We already have the highest tax burden in post-war history at 36% of GDP and the OBR expects it to hit 38% by 2030-31. We are not a low-tax country that has been starving the state.

The top 1% of income taxpayers earn around 13% of all income and pay 29% of all income tax. The top 10% pay roughly 60% of it. Those figures have risen sharply — in 1999/2000 the top 1% paid 21% and the top 10% paid 50%. The British tax system has become steadily more progressive over twenty-five years, not less. Whatever has gone wrong, “the rich not paying their fair share” is not it.

Our GDP per capita is lower today than it was in 2007. We are poorer than Germany, Australia, America, Singapore and Switzerland, and we are being caught by Poland. You cannot redistribute your way out of this any more than you can drink your way out of a hangover.

Meanwhile the arithmetic is getting worse on its own. We have an ageing population and a birthrate of around 1.4 children per woman, well below replacement. Every year, more people draw on the state and fewer people fund it. To his credit, Burnham has grasped at least half of this — ending the triple lock from 2030 is the first honest thing a Prime Minister has said about pensions in fifteen years, and he deserves credit for saying it to a Labour conference rather than to a think tank. But he is using that money to fund consumption, not production. He is reshuffling the deck, not printing more cards.

There is precisely one way out of the demographic trap, and it is productivity. Fewer workers producing dramatically more value per hour. That requires cheap energy, aggressive adoption of technology, and an economy in which work pays and the people who could be working actually are.

Now look at what we’re doing instead. We have the most expensive industrial electricity in the developed world because of Net Zero targets nobody can afford and nobody voted for. Instead of looking to the US which is steaming ahead to win the AI race, we follow the European model where we regulate AI before we have any AI worth regulating. And most damning of all: there are a million young Brits aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment or training. Fifty-eight per cent of them have never had a paid job.

And how have we responded to this? By importing millions of people to do the work, and paying our own young people to stay at home and rot. We have built a system in which a young British man is the problem and a young foreign man is the solution.

The decisions that led to this were rational: the employer who needed a shift covered this month, not a trainee next year; the Treasury official who scored an immediate taxpayer against a deferred return; the minister who had a shortage to fix before the figures came out. Add up thirty years of “reasonable” short term thinking and you arrive at a country that imports its workforce and warehouses its young.

So Burnham will spend. Taxes will rise, growth will continue to stagnate, the debt will spiral out of control and the whole thing will end in the kind of humiliation that lingers in the national memory for a generation.

I don’t want this to happen. It will be terrible. But I have resigned myself to the conclusion that it is the only way to save this country in the long run.

Because there is no argument that will break Britain and Europe out of the ideology we are trapped in. I have made the arguments. Many better people have made them better. It changes nothing, because the belief that prosperity is something you allocate rather than something you create is not a proposition — it is a faith, and faiths are not refuted by evidence. They are refuted by failure.

Someone has to run the experiment to its conclusion. Andy Burnham has volunteered. He may well be the most useful Prime Minister of my lifetime — just not in the way he intends.

Because of my concerns about rising inflation and the coming economic crisis, I have been investing significantly in gold. My bullion dealer is The Pure Gold Company. They deliver to the UK, US, Canada and Europe or you can store your gold with them for ease and convenience. (Minimum purchase: £5,000).