Mick Hartley

Matthew Syed knew Andy Burnham when they both worked for Tony Blair’s Labour. They’ve got a lot in common – except for their views now on the problems we’re facing…

But there’s something weird when I look at what Burnham says about the nation we both live in. He thinks we have become a “neoliberal” state with “40 years” of policies built around “deregulation, privatisation and austerity”. We left too many things to the market, allowed inequality to soar and permitted the state to retreat. Given this diagnosis, it is perhaps understandable that he wants more regulation, less austerity and a new dose of public ownership. He hasn’t quite used the word to describe this but many of his supporters have: socialism.

Perhaps I might say this: I have watched the same events over the last few decades, observed just as obsessively as Burnham, but seen a rather different reality. Indeed, not just a different reality but a diametrically opposite one. It is not unlike watching a football match and coming to a different conclusion about which team scored the most goals. One of us strangely, almost comically wrong.

So what’s the reality? Burnham sees governments that have indulged in austerity, failing to invest in people when they really needed it. I see governments that have offered bailouts at ever more extravagant size and scale, not least with the furlough and the Truss energy package. The rise of welfarism has reached the point where 53.3 per cent of British people live in households that take more from the system than they pay in. Burnham sees a government that hasn’t taxed enough and has failed to redistribute. I see taxation at its highest level since 1948 with levies on the upper middle class rising to the point where the top 10 per cent fund more than 60 per cent of income tax receipts…..

I don’t doubt Burnham’s sincerity. I merely boggle at how we have witnessed the same events and observed diametrically opposed realities. It is noteworthy that Blair — whose manifesto in 2001 Burnham and I both campaigned for — sees things as I do. In a magisterial essay last month, he repudiated every aspect of Burnham’s diagnosis (and thus offered radically different solutions). I have rarely felt such relief when reading a political document: it was like being told I could believe the evidence of my own eyes.

In the last days of the Soviet Union, as queues lengthened, debt grew and immiseration became more widespread, many within the politburo became convinced that they could solve the growing problems with yet more planning. They came to the view that the dysfunctions of late-stage Sovietism could be addressed with more committees, more detailed five-year plans, more state control, more micromanagement. They struggled to see that the problem wasn’t a lack of planning; it was planning itself.

I believe we are in a not dissimilar position. I agree with some of Burnham’s policies: on the abolition of stamp duty, on the liberalisation of building and on some aspects of his vision of devolution. He did some very good things in Manchester and deserves credit for them.

But on the big picture, I fear he is going to fail because he is proposing a cure that involves injecting a higher dose of the same disease. He is seeking to solve the problems of socialism with more socialism; to alleviate the problems of a vast (and indebted) state with more spending, more taxation, more welfare and more intervention.

Well yes – but at least we’re assured that, under Burnham, Rachel Reeves will go. So there’s that.