Ross Clark

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.

For anti-airport campaigners it is a double setback. In the space of 24 hours, legal challenges against the expansion of Gatwick and Luton have failed. As a result, Gatwick’s emergency runway will be moved 12 metres away from its main runway, to allow it to be used for routine take-offs and landings, enabling an extra 100,000 flights a year. Luton will gain a second terminal, allowing it nearly to double the number of passengers it can handle. So long as the 2050 net zero target remains, airline travel will ultimately be doomed The rulings reverse an assumption on the part of campaigners that airport expansion can be blocked on the basis of Britain’s legally-binding 2050 net zero target.

I am not having an election because I am going to stick to the 2024 manifesto on which Labour was elected. That’s Andy Burnham’s position, but could he be about to undermine it by levying a new form of income tax? It is being reported this morning that the Prime Minister is considering a new 1.8 per cent levy on income in order to meet the estimated £18 billion annual cost of his National Care Service. This is being considered as an alternative to the 10 per cent levy on estates that has already been floated. It would run alongside income tax but apparently wouldn’t count as income tax because it would have a name like ‘social care levy’, or somesuch.   No, I’m not going to be fooled by it either.

Does anyone really believe that Andy Burnham will succeed in cutting welfare benefits for 16–24-year-olds, as is being reported? Good luck to him if he really does have a go, because it is absolutely needed. The percentage of 16–24-year-olds claiming out of work benefits on the basis of long-term sickness climbed from a low of 5.2 per cent in 2018 to reach 9.3 per cent in 2024. Have we really bred a generation of sickly youths, or are some, just possibly, taking the mickey and claiming to be too unwell to work when they very much could?

Keen to keep up the momentum on his big (or not so big) ideas, Andy Burnham will apparently announce on Friday that in future some revenue from income tax will be distributed directly to local government so that they, rather than Whitehall, can choose how to spend the money. Will he really want to give up power and money to Reform-led councils who might be minded to do all they can to thwart Labour party policies? Or spend their money hanging the St George Cross from every lamp post? In Britain, only around 5 per cent of total government revenue is collected by local government, which is markedly lower than many other countries.

We keep hearing that Andy Burnham’s government will be the most left-wing since the 1970s, when the namesake of the new chancellor promised to squeeze the rich (Denis Healey actually said ‘property speculators’) ‘until the pips squeak’. But Burnham is about to give the better-off end of the middle classes a huge handout. Rumours abound that the new prime minister is mulling the idea of a National Care Service which, like the NHS, would provide old age care which is free at the point of delivery. How will we afford the £19 billion annual cost? Burnham is reported to be considering abolishing inheritance tax and replacing it with a 10 per cent ‘social care levy’, applied to all estates. There would be some very significant winners and losers from this policy.

Why not blame Herbert Asquith or Lord Aberdeen? Andy Burnham’s line about reversing ‘40 years of neo-liberalism’ – i.e. since the Thatcher government’s reforms – is beginning to grate somewhat. ‘Britain took a series of wrong turns in the 1980s,’ he told us, while accepting the Labour leadership. We ‘surrendered control’ of water and electricity, while ‘large parts of Britain were deindustrialised’. It might have been an appropriate line for Labour when fighting the 1997 general election. For Burnham to deliver it today is a little ridiculous, given that Labour has been in power for 15 of those past 40 years. Indeed, Burnham himself was in the cabinet for three of those years.