Ross Clark

Andy Burnham tells us that he left the House of Commons in 2017 because he was disillusioned with the place. It was not at all because he had lost the 2015 Labour leadership campaign to Jeremy Corbyn and fancied his chances of building a power base in the Manchester mayoralty, just as Boris Johnson had successfully done in London. But did he have to go and hide his head under a stone after he left Westminster? Burnham now seems to think that he has an answer to Brexit. Let’s discuss a slate of options and then all rally behind the consensus choice. 'We could stay as we are,' he told the Labour party conference: That’s definitely an option, if people think this is the right place to stay.

For Andy Burnham the biggest challenge is to avoid going down like Gordon Brown, who passed up the chance of calling an election in autumn 2007, when he was newly in office and public opinion of him was still quite high, only to crash to defeat two and a half years later. The memory of that time, when Burnham himself was health secretary, has no doubt fed into the reports that Downing Street advisers are considering the case for an election next spring. Has the moment of the progressive alliance finally arrived? The bad news for Burnham is that the decision is even more difficult for him than it was for Brown. He would be giving up a massive majority, and for what? Almost no one thinks that he can win any kind of majority.

Small boat arrivals are down a bit. Meanwhile, Reform UK has had a difficult year over its donations and seen its vote eaten into by Restore Britain. Compound this with the arrival of a prime minister more energetic and popular than the last one and it has become possible to imagine Labour winning the next election – and with a healthy majority. On the other hand, it is possible to see the cavalry arriving over the hill to bolster Nigel Farage’s troops – in the shape of the slavery reparations movement. The potential of slavery reparations to throw a hand grenade into UK politics should not be under-estimated.

First, the good news. The Commons select committee on energy security and net zero has called on the government to drop net zero. Now the bad news: they only mean the term ‘net zero’ not the actual policy of trying to eliminate net carbon emissions by 2050. They complain that the term has become a ‘lightning rod for opposition to climate action’, and that it has become a ‘distraction’, even though it describes perfectly what the government is – ruinously – trying to achieve. They want the policy to continue, but under a different name – though possibly not ‘net stupid’, which is Reform UK’s preferred term. Presumably it would be known by some propagandistic euphemism or other. How about a Sovietesque ‘glorious transition’?

Who – at least among those of a Conservative mind -- didn’t feel a pang of pleasure at the news that Sadiq Khan has been convicted of failing to pay road tax? Won’t that serve him right, he who has been merrily handing out fines to people who fall foul of his Ultra Low Emissions Zone? Well no, actually. Whatever you think of Khan and ULEZ, it shouldn’t blind you to the outrage against justice that has just been committed against him. Khan was convicted by a magistrate’s court in Herefordshire two weeks ago and handed a £220 fine, plus £85 costs and demanded to pay the £35.84 in road tax which he failed to pay. But here is the outrage: Khan says that he doesn’t own the car.

Will the government ever get around to reforming the welfare system? I ask because Andy Burnham seems to have bottled out. It seems that there will be no proposals in October’s Budget, and nothing before next year. The official excuse is that the government needs time to consider Alan Milburn’s review into youth worklessness and Sir Stephen Timms's report into Personal Independence Payments (PIP) before it can deliver a considered response. Both have, though, already produced pretty detailed interim reports. Milburn’s final report was to have been published before the Budget but has now been delayed until after it.

How lovely to hear Education Secretary Lucy Powell sending her ‘massive congratulations’ to children receiving their GCSE results. ‘More of you are hitting top grades in maths, and technical pass rates are climbing in every region,’ she said. But does she really believe in exam results? Powell did, after all, recently promise to end the ‘GCSE resits treadmill’, and has in the past described spelling tests as ‘draconian’. Powell laid out her philosophy in an interview with the Times Education Supplement in 2019 when she was a member of the Commons education committee. She did not seem at that point to be terribly interested in the idea of academic rigour.

Here it is, finally: Labour’s ‘growth’ strategy. And what does it consist of? Reform of planning laws to make it easier for travellers to set up encampments in the countryside, in places where any other form of development would be banned. Under the previous rules, councils could consider ‘potential environmental damage caused by unauthorised encampments’ when looking at applications for traveller sites. The rules also said that sites should only be approved if they ‘provide a settled base that limits the need for long-distance travelling’. Both of these regulations have now been scrapped. This will make it considerably harder for local residents to object to applications for encampments.

Well done to Reform UK for proposing to make chunky, £50 billion cuts to the welfare budget, more than twice the £23 billion cuts the Conservative have pledged to make. The left will scream about kicking away the crutches of the poor and sick, but the benefits system has become a voracious beast that is rapidly consuming the country. The bill has risen by 27 per cent in real terms since 2014/15. Try to reform welfare without touching the state pension and you are tying one arm behind your back We have opportunists claiming Personal Independence Payments for anxiety and food intolerances, and people hoodwinking officials who carry out online Work Capability Assessments into allowing them a public-funded life of leisure.

There are two words you will hear endlessly today: 'hollow victory'. Nigel Farage is back as MP for Clacton, but by doing battle with a bin, he has achieved nothing but embarrassed himself. Look, his refusal to attend his own count just proves it. That is what we will be told by many political commentators, but is it true? I would say the people who have been most embarrassed by this bizarre by-election were those on the liberal left who had this fantasy that Count Binface would win and put an end to Farage’s political career. By thinking that they have exposed the narrowness of their world. In their minds, most of the country, deep inside, possesses the values of Islington; it is just that all those dim, old people who live by the seaside get easily led along by populists.

Will Andy Burnham call an autumn general election and take advantage of his prime ministerial honeymoon, or will he go the way of his erstwhile boss, Gordon Brown, who flunked a decision on an election in the autumn of 2007 and went on to defeat in 2010? The latest polls have generated a swirl of speculation because they suggest that Labour has taken the lead for the first time in nearly 18 months. According to the Politico Poll of Polls, Labour is now commanding an average of 25 per cent of the vote, one point ahead of Reform on 24 per cent.