Ross Clark

The Makerfield by-election – in which Andy Burnham swept to victory overnight – has been presented as a fight for the soul of Britain, but in a few years’ time we will look back upon it as a quaint sideshow in a long-lost world. As Britain spirals towards fiscal disaster, the days of having the likes of Andy Burnham trying to buy the electorate by showering them with spending promises are rapidly drawing to a close. Just how much could Burnham cost us if, as expected, he challenges Keir Starmer and goes on to become prime minister? Social housing: Burnham has promised to relocate £39 billion earmarked for social and affordable housing to purely new social homes, to be funded by borrowing.

If you thought that Net Zero couldn’t get any sillier, it just has. Remember how, according to Boris Johnson, Britain was going to become the ‘Saudi Arabia of wind’, exporting massive amounts of abundant power? Actually, we are importing record amounts of electricity: a net 330 terawatt-hours’ worth in 2024, equivalent to over 10 per cent of that consumed in Britain in 2024. This comes via subsea cables from France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Norway. UK households are also subsidising energy consumers abroad But, as the energy company Octopus pointed out before a House of Lords committee on Tuesday, even when we do export electricity we are often doing so at a loss, with UK households effectively subsidising their counterparts in France and other countries.

It was 20 years ago last month that the then Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that nuclear power was “back on agenda with a vengeance”. His white paper proposed to generate 40 per cent of Britain’s electricity in this way, double the proportion then made up by nuclear. It was on the advice of the then Chief Scientific Adviser, David King, who saw nuclear power as a big part of the battle against climate change. The company has already spent £700 million on measures to reduce its impact on wildlife, including a ‘fish disco’ Two decades on, an alternative scenario is beginning to look more and more likely: that Britain will have to spend a few years, at least, with zero nuclear power.

So, is an open labour market a good thing or not? There is little point in looking to the government for guidance on this. A few weeks ago, ministers were praising themselves for having reduced migration – legal migration, that is, not the illegal kind, which continues to grow. The government – or rather Rishi Sunak’s government, which introduced the rules now taking effect – has achieved this partly by making it difficult and expensive for employers to offer jobs to foreign workers. Salary thresholds have been increased. Costs and bureaucracy have been loaded onto the process. It can cost thousands of pounds to obtain a work visa. In April, a Skilled Worker Visa was increased in price by £75 to £1,235; a Global Business Mobility visa has been put up £114 to £1,865.

If we have learned anything from the Makerfield by-election campaign it is what a slippery character Andy Burnham is. Last September, in an interview with the New Statesman, you may remember, he said that 'We've got to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets.' The bond markets themselves responded immediately by reminding Burnham that governments spite them at their peril. Yields rose sharply as investors, who were already taking Burnham seriously as a potential prime minister, feared that a government under his control would borrow recklessly and lose control of public finances.     And now? Burnham claims that it was all a horrible mistake; he was misunderstood.

The Mandelson files have produced a truly damning revelation about Keir Starmer's government. But it is one which will be of little interest to many people because it doesn't reflect badly on Lord Mandelson. On the contrary, it shows why we would be a lot better off if the Labour party had more people who occupy the same centre political ground that he does. The revelation comes in the form of a WhatsApp exchange between Mandelson and Pat McFadden in which the latter opines: Every meeting I have is 'Who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others?'. They're asking the wrong questions. McFadden is the Work and Pensions Secretary. That he thinks Labour is being far too generous on benefits and too gungho on taxes is truly seismic.

Where the Tories failed on controlling Britain's borders, letting net migration surge to an unprecedented 944,000 in the year to March 2023, Labour has succeeded. It shows what can be achieved through hard work and strict adherence to human rights laws rather than heartless gimmicks like the Rwanda scheme.  That, at any rate, is what the government will want us to believe when the latest net migration figures are published this week. They are almost certain to show that they have fallen to less than 200,000, and possibly as low as 160,000. If the latter, it would be the lowest figure for 14 years, outside Covid. Some Labour MPs are planning to use the figures to call for the government's migration reforms to be abandoned on the grounds they are not necessary.

At any other time the GDP figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) this morning would have come as a huge relief for Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves. They show that the economy grew unexpectedly by 0.3 per cent in March. When February's figures were published a month ago showing impressive monthly growth of 0.5 per cent (revised down to 0.4 per cent in the latest release) it was widely interpreted as looking back on a lost age, prior to the beginning of the Iran war on 28 February. Now, however, it seems as if the uptick in growth has survived the surge in oil prices. In services, growth was 0.3 per cent and in construction, 1.5 per cent. There was a small fall, however, in output in the production sector, to the tune of 0.2 per cent.

The thing about white working-class voters, as Boris Johnson discovered in 2019 and Nigel Farage is finding out now, is that there are a lot of them. They way outnumber the other voting blocs who often grab more attention, such as students, middle class muesli munchers, Muslims and so on. Tap into the white working class and you enter a fast track to power. But having won over such voters, Farage now has the same problem as Johnson had in 2019. His voters have an expectation of high public spending, at a time when fiscal reality is demanding a sharp contraction in the size of the state. On many issues Farage and those surrounding him see absolutely eye to eye with his voters.

Just what were business leaders expecting when so many of them sucked up to Labour before the 2024 general election? Only Keir Starmer's party, 121 of them declared in an open letter, could deliver Britain's full economic potential. They swarmed around Rachel Reeves like drones around a queen bee. Richard Walker of Iceland even turned up to the party's manifesto launch to praise it for its economic plans. They are not cheering now. Only 17 of the 121 who signed the 2024 letter are currently prepared to restate their support for Labour. The rest are moaning – many of them anonymously – that they are being killed off by hikes in employers' National Insurance and business rates, as well as the rise in the minimum wage and the Employment Rights Act.

The worst thing about the government’s plans to force pension providers to invest their money in particular assets is that ministers and MPs themselves don’t have to worry about it. They, of course, are members of a gold-plated pension scheme that is underwritten by the taxpayer. They will receive their index-linked pensions whatever the economic performance of the country or of any particular assets. As for the rest of us, how well we do in retirement very much depends on how investments perform. That is why it is so obnoxious that the government is trying to force pension funds to invest some of their funds in UK assets and in particular public sector ventures.