Andy Burnham has just ruled out a general election next May. As I wrote in my cover story this week, there are a lot of people at the top of Labour thinking about going to the country but – as I and most of my sources concluded – the polling numbers are just not there and the only meaningful policy freedom the PM would gain would be the ability to put up personal taxation. ‘He’ll raise your taxes to pay for migrants and benefit claimants’ looks like the easiest ‘No’ campaign slogan since ‘Take Back Control’.
The Prime Minister argued that calling a snap election would leave the country ‘arguing again amongst ourselves’
Party conferences are never much fun for prime ministers. They have to make the speech of their life (since the last one) and are not just competing with the dullards in their cabinet, but against Blair, Kinnock, Gaitskell and Bevan, the orators of the past. They have their days parcelled out into ten-minute segments, which are filled with truculent union barons, needy donors, opinionated newspaper editors and borderline lunatic activists – an experience leavened (if they are lucky) by rubber chicken and warm white wine.
Among the most onerous experiences however is the eve of conference regional media round, where the PM endures hours of back-to-back broadcast grilling from every regional BBC and ITV hack hoping to make a name for themselves by tripping up the leader of the land.
Burnham’s latest words on an election came from his chat with ITV Calendar. Asked if it would be in 2029, he said: ‘Yes, that’s when the next election will be. All of this speculation on an early election, I can, I can knock that dead. You know people want me new in office to be getting on with the job of delivering… rather than putting self-serving politics before that, which was what I would be doing if I call an election, I’ m not going to do that.’ Quite hard to see a way back from that.
In a separate interview with BBC West, the Prime Minister argued that calling a snap election would leave the country ‘arguing again amongst ourselves’.
One of the reasons Burnham doesn’t want to risk Labour’s huge majority is that he thinks he can do a lot with the mandate he has. But with the public beginning to ask where the beef is, it’s worth listening to some of what he said in the regional round. He made clear his speech to conference would set out details of a new way of running the water industry, with greater public control.
‘What I will do this week in Liverpool is set out a really big direction for the country,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot of feeling about how we’ve gone wrong with water in this country, and I share it… I think it’s been a pretty disastrous privatisation that has led to a situation where the shareholders never lose, the billpayers never win, and we have sewage in our rivers and our seas. It can’t clearly carry on like that.’ Hardly anyone, bluntly, disagrees, though not everyone agrees with Burnham’s solution – that power should be handed to mayors.
But the bigger choices Burnham will make on tax and spending remain opaque and there is plenty of evidence that when the decisions get tough, the PM begins to fudge. Just breaking as he began his ordeal was news that Manchester City have broken Premier League rules on spending on 114 counts. Burnham, a former Manchester Mayor of course, was uber cautious when asked about whether they should be stripped of the titles they won. ‘People shouldn’t jump to those kind of kind of conclusions,’ he told ITV Calendar, calling it ‘quite a contested process’. Classic Burnham people pleasing. I suspect the inhabitants of Liverpool, where the conference is being held, will feel differently.
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