Ross Clark

Is Andy Burnham plotting to base his premiership around a policy of 'cost of living populism'? That is what is being reported following the publication yesterday of a poll by Persuasion UK – and part-funded by the left-wing Global Fund for a New Economy – which claimed that Labour could win the next election on the back of a programme of measures to target the cost of living. Carry on as it is going, claims the poll, and Labour would be reduced to 19 per cent of the vote and 95 seats in the next general election. Introduce a package of cost of living measures, on the other hand, and it could win 34 per cent of the vote – exactly what it won in 2024 but this time translating to a lower majority of 66 seats.

Andy Burnham is not prime minister yet, but he has already outdone John Major. Whoever thought of putting him in a grey outfit against the backdrop of a grey door for this morning’s speech in Manchester certainly wasn’t thinking of injecting a bit of colour into national life. It was like watching Harold Wilson: the last PM before colour TV was introduced to Britain. Burnham’s big mission for the country – to devolve power to the regions and localities – also wasn't exactly calculated to set pulses racing. Rightly or wrongly, few things can be relied upon to provoke a yawn in British life than local government. Just look at the turnout in local elections and the increasing tendency for the electorate to use them as little more than a referendum on national government.

Andy Burnham is not giving much away as to what a government led by him would look like. Given that it seems unlikely there will be a leadership election, we are probably not going to find out very much before he takes office, either. But there is one way to shed light on the matter. East Germany has a similar socio-economic structure to that of northern England, where a few large cities are doing very well Two years ago, Burnham published, jointly written with Liverpool mayor Steve Rotheram, a manifesto entitled Head North: A Rallying Cry for a More Equal Britain. Anyone who lives in the South East of England might want to look away now. It lays bare Burnham’s plan for regional redistribution of wealth on a grand scale.

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.