Does Andy Burnham really believe that cross-party consensus is going to resolve the decades-long stalemate on the funding of adult social care? Of course he doesn’t, not least because he wouldn’t be giving a speech about it this morning: he would have succeeded back in 2009 when he made his first set of proposals on the matter.
The new prime minister is probably the figure who bears the greatest scars on their back out of everyone who has attempted to reform social care – and that includes people who’ve been plugging away at this without much reward, such as the economist Andrew Dilnot.
When Burnham was health secretary in the last Labour government, his plans for social care had initial – and entirely superficial – ‘cross-party consensus’ from the Tories, who then branded them a ‘death tax’ in order to win votes. Now, he wants a meeting with Kemi Badenoch and Ed Davey to discuss moving things forward, a mere 17 years after he first had a go. What’s the point?
British politics is so unstable now that cross-party consensus does look a little more appealing
Badenoch and Davey can’t actually make the meeting: the former is sending Stuart Andrew, her shadow health secretary, and the latter is having to join via Zoom while caring for his disabled son. But Burnham might as well spend half an hour talking at cardboard cutouts of the party leaders, because this issue has never been something that can be resolved with cross-party consensus. The Conservatives and Labour, in particular, have such different views on the size and role of the state, of the family, and of private wealth that neither side is going to be able to get close enough to reach a compromise. You could say the same of the Lib Dems internally.
Burnham knows this, but needs to show that he is taking things seriously by appearing to ‘take the politics out of this’ before accusing his opponents of putting the politics back into it when they raise any objections. Instead, as a long-running enthusiast for social care reform, he will know that what has really scuppered attempts is a lack of individual political leadership.
No prime minister in the years since that 2009 social care green paper has made reform of the sector their defining mission. Theresa May came close in the 2017 election, but in the sort of last-minute, thoughtless way that someone might decide on 1 January to make going to the moon that year their defining mission. Even if she hadn’t blown up her own majority in that election, there is no suggestion she would have had the focus to pursue the reform all the way through.
British politics is so unstable now that cross-party consensus does look a little more appealing – given the chances of anyone lasting long enough to show focus are pretty slim at the moment. But once again, that instability is being caused by poor leadership, rather than some kind of unavoidable weather pattern. So once he’s closed the laptop on Davey and thanked Badenoch’s stand-in, Burnham should spend at least twice as long working out how it is that he is going to avoid the mistakes in leadership that his predecessors have made – rather than hoping an opposition politician might show more leadership instead.
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