Sir John, Lord Redwood is a former MP for Wokingham and a former Secretary of State for Wales.
Mr Burnham has set himself up to fail. He looks backward to the 1980s. This was an era which most voters did not live through. He seeks to refight old battles which Labour lost by miles at the time. Having a distorted view of history is bad modern politics ignoring the experiences and preoccupations of modern electors and running the risk of getting them to tune out. It clouds his judgement about what is needed now to revitalise the economy, boost jobs and restore confidence as it is based on a false analysis of what happened in the 1970s and 1980s.
Most people who lived through those decades remember the financial and industrial collapse under Labour in the 1970s followed by the very strong recovery and rebuilding after 1981 led by Margaret Thatcher.
Mr Burnham wrongly thinks private capital and competition which blew as a reviving wind through the socialist 1970s economy a few years later are the cause of modern troubles. When tried in the 1980s they gave us rapid growth, many new jobs and a big boost to tax revenues. He should think again. Our car industry which had slumped in the 1970s doubled its output. Now as then the biggest problems come from monopolies, state mismanagement and ill directed regulation.
Labour already has a Post Office and British Steel in the public sector losing fortunes each year with no plans on how to save all the jobs and turn round the businesses mired in losses. They inherited a largely nationalised, heavily loss making, rail industry which does not allow competitors to bid to run different and better services.
They wish to double down on the poor performance of the monopoly by stifling what remains of private finance and initiative. More of the delays and cancellations came from mistakes of long nationalised Network Rail than from the private sector train operating companies.
No-one today thinks we should renationalise British Telecom and recreate a state monopoly. When we had one such it rationed access to phone lines, limited the equipment you could add to the network and kept the UK years behind the US in technological developments. Privatisation and the advent of competition led to exploding growth.
It rescued our services driven economy that needed so much more capacity and flexibility in communications and data than the old state owned BT provided. The great success in expanding our financial services sector depended on access to more and better telecommunications. It was the private sector that developed mobile phones and later the much needed broadband networks with fibre optic cable. Nationalised BT ran on copper cables, electro mechanical not electronic switches and wired in fixed telephones.
Today Mr Burnham wants to nationalise water, seizing on the strong public anger about sewage discharges to rivers and the recent high price rises these regulated private monopolies have inflicted on customers. He will discover that nationalisation will make the problems worse, as they did when we had a fully nationalised set of monopoly water companies prior to 1989. The faults of the industry today are the same as they were then. They stem from monopoly, not from private ownership.
One of the last acts of the nationalised industry was to poison some water users from the Camelford works. In the hot, dry summer of 1976 large numbers of customers lost all supply of water to their homes and had to queue to fill buckets from street standpipes. The nationalised industry could never get enough public money to expand and modernise its facilities as it needed to do. How would today be any better, when public spending pressures are acute and the state is already borrowing far too much?
Putting water onto the public accounts would greatly add to the strains. After all, the whole point is the regulated industry did not invest enough either thanks to strict controls on new capital so we need to spend a fortune on bigger pipes, more treatment works and new reservoirs.
Mr Burnham sees that the UK is way off being able to deliver the 1.5 million homes over five years Labour promised. It will be pushing it to do 200,000 a year, not 300,000. Instead of asking himself how the government has driven mortgage related interest rates so high through its own excessive borrowing, or why people struggle to pay the extortionate Stamp duties on homes, he has decided that the state can build and pay for more homes instead. He wants to provide more Council homes, though he probably means more social housing through Housing Associations. He will find that this imposes more strains on state finance and will come nowhere near the numbers required to hit the pledged 1.5 million 2024-9.
Everything Mr Burnham says is geared to polling and to his immediate political task, self defined as seeing off the voting threat from Reform. As Prime Minister he will be judged more by what he does than what he says. He will discover it will not matter how he spins it if the underlying reality of people’s lives is different to his honeyed tongue account. Labour MPs brought him in as Leader because he beat the Reform candidate in Makerfield. They misread that election. It wasn’t Labour that won the election. It was the anti Starmer candidate with the power to topple the PM if he got elected.
Mr Burnham is right about one thing. People want change. They are angry about depressed standards of living and high prices. He is wrong in thinking you need to put our taxes up to solve that, as it is the high taxes that cause much of the anger and stress in family budgets. We can afford the 45 per cent of the petrol price that goes to the oil company, but not the 55 per cent that is tax for the government. Home buyers are put off by high Stamp duties. Business people cannot afford to offer more jobs to young people because of the high costs of National Insurance. Farmers are giving up because of the Farms tax, and because the grants are now given out to stop them growing food instead of to help them farm.
In Mr Burnham’s world, more income and benefits come from the state in a crazy money-go-round where many have to pay more tax, to get some of it back as subsidy because the tax has done so much damage. The nationalised steel industry has to pay huge energy and carbon taxes, only to get a subsidy to pay the resulting losses.
It all creates work for administrators to do, taking the money off us and giving back some of it after a big handling charge.
Mr Burnham is also split over his lack of mandate and the need to stick to Labour’s Manifesto which he did not stand on. It did not contain a lot of positive change in it. He would be well advised to cancel the tax rises, the giveaways of our overseas territories and the other obvious violations of the Manifesto by the Starmer government but I doubt that will occur to him as a good idea.
(UKR)