It can be hard sometimes to understand the progressive mind. The new Prime Minister’s first speech yesterday was intended to show that he is going to ‘do politics differently’. The first sign of this was his dispensing with the lectern used on such occasions for the last few years. Was this innocent object really the problem with his string of short-lived predecessors? I can’t imagine Liz Truss sat watching at home kicking herself, muttering ‘of course! If only I’d junked that lectern’.
We hear a lot today about how people live in political echo chambers. But it is better to live with echoes of reality than echoes of fantasy
The problem for Andy Burnham is bigger than that. This is, after all, a man who can look at Britain in 2026 – overtaxed, crippled with debt, riven by uncontrolled mass immigration – and diagnose that its key problem is… Mrs Thatcher. This is more of a psychosis than an opinion.
Progressives like Andy and his (retained) Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy regularly accuse their detractors of being the victims of online misinformation. The thinking goes that if only the poor, benighted impressionable souls knew the truth about how wonderful Labour are, they’d be brimming over with glee and gratitude. Large sections of the public, they claim, are being misled by wicked villains like Elon Musk stirring up ‘divisive’ lies about ‘our communities’.
But I have a horrible feeling that it may be the other way around. That it is progressives who are horribly misinformed, and by each other.
A rare insight into this syndrome was the recent appearance of Alastair Campbell on the Triggernometry podcast. I found this a very hard watch, as Campbell makes my body go into fight-or-flight mode, but I forced myself through the whole long thing, in the hope that I might learn something. And thankfully, I did.
Hosts Francis Foster and Konstantin Kisin were exasperated by Campbell, but gave as good as they got with patience and good humour. I wouldn’t have been able to keep my rag if Campbell was in the same room. (A progressive TV writer friend of mine, after having a few too many, once encountered Campbell socially and delivered the incredible line ‘you destroyed everything that I ever pretended to believe in’. You won’t be surprised to hear that my chum has a wall full of Baftas.)
It’s tempting for us to look at the likes of Campbell and flinch. But the interview turned out to be worth my time because it exposed something quite shocking, that perhaps helps to explain the comical inappropriateness of Burnham’s prescriptions for sick Britain.
At one point, it turns out that Campbell has simply never heard of the police’s barmy Race Action Plan. He cannot accept that it is a key, current document from the College of Policing. His mind freezes and he cackles sceptically. He cannot register or retain the information. He seriously seems to assume it’s something the hosts have made up, or are exaggerating. This happens a lot in the interview, about nearly everything they discuss. Campbell, it turns out, is laughably uninformed.
We can see this progressive naïveté elsewhere. Look also at the BBC’s excruciating new advert for itself and the wonders of the license fee. Among the many, many dubious claims made in this tawdry spectacle is the astonishing boast that the BBC ‘verifies every news story’. This, from an organisation that has repeatedly served up dodgy news about the world: editing the January 6th footage, accusing the Jewish child victims of a racist attack of being racist, simply ignoring the resistance to genderism until there was absolutely no alternative – and treating the women who were against it like something they stepped in on the way to Broadcasting House.
The horrifying thought occurs – the BBC aren’t technically lying about their ‘trustworthy’ news. No, they genuinely believe in it. (As does Lisa Nandy, who wants to push its content to the top of everybody’s social media timelines.)
We hear a lot today about how people live in political echo chambers. But it is better to live with echoes of reality than echoes of fantasy.
Which brings us back to Burnham. I suspect that, at his core, he simply cannot accept that it is not 30 April, 1997. Nothing much can have happened since, because if things are bad in Britain well, it must be Thatcher’s fault. For Andy, Mrs Thatcher is a live issue, because she only left office a few years ago, and he has to put an end to the 18 long years of Tory rule that have just gone by.
Burnham literally cannot see the current staggering debt and immigration figures, and he has had almost nothing to say about them. They have been put behind the ornamental dog on the mantelpiece of his mind.
Progressives like Campbell, the BBC and Burnham have hornswoggled themselves, pulled the wool over their own eyes. It is they who are the misinformed.
This matters, because it means that Burnham cannot hope to succeed. His world view is almost comically out of true. Yes, this self-delusion is funny. But it is also terrifying.
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