Andy Burnham, the likely next leader of the Labour Party made a speech on Monday 29th June, from the People’s History Museum in Salford. I have linked to the Sky News video of the speech. I have captured the transcript and posted it on my wiki. See below, overleaf for my comments.
Is that it? Moving part of No 10 to Manchester. What is he moving and how will that change things? We should note that this has already been tried once, when Sunak, then PM, moved part of the Treasury to Darlington. Devolution needs more than relocating civil servants from London. The proposal is an oblique criticism of Starmer’s failure to act on the Brown Commission report which proposed both a limited devolution in England and a legal entrenchment of local government rights. In my article, “New Britain, New Britcon”, (or on Medium), I argued that such plans would fail unless funded and funded in such a way that the axiom that poor areas need more services, and generate lower tax revenues is addressed. Devolution for a progressive government needs both money and a means of equitable sharing.
Many will ask “why Manchester?” It is the second economic centre in Britain but is it the best place to locate a flagship to devolution. Having said that, he namechecks other parts of the UK, including even London but it just leaves me asking the question, “Does location of the Civil Service really make a difference?”, surely it needs to be about money and power.
In “New Britain, New BritCon”, I also looked at civil service numbers and concluded that there was a very limited room for further dispersal. This reinforces the fact that location of civil servants is not enough since it’s the cultural & policy status quo that needs challenging.
One of the problems in today’s economy is that even if it grows, those who reap the benefit are not the bottom 70%. Profits and return on capital mean the current economy as an extraction economy where the majority are struggling to afford to live while an ultra-plutocratic minority often living in the USA are getting richer.
In order to resolve this, he doesn’t propose nationalisation, or the appropriation of private debt within public services; he proposes a form of regionalisation. I am not a fan of Morrisonian corporations and maybe a politically accountable commissioning model might work better but it doesn’t address the extraction economy nor the excessive financialisaton of the economy.
He does speak about the Treasury, and I think underestimates the cultural inertia of forty years, or longer, of economic orthodoxy and promises to keep to Reeves’s rules. The Treasury is a problem, it’s tied to neo-liberalism and seems unable to unwind the interests of 21st century capitalism with that of the people it and the government are meant to serve. So even having strong political direction, unless the financial rules are changed the problems will remain and his proposed choice of advisers doesn’t auger well.
In an article on the Guardian, they say,
Burnham is understood to be getting advice from Andy Haldane, a former Bank of England chief economist, as well as Richard Hughes, a former chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility and Jim O’Neill, a crossbench peer and former Treasury minister who worked on George Osborne’s “Northern Powerhouse”.
Haldane is an interest rate hawk, Hughes is unlikely to support more flexible attitude to borrowing. These choices emphasise to me the fact that the financial rules need to change and that Burnham does not understand that need.
On Education, there’s not enough focus on Universities, neither their parlous financial state nor their crucial role in economic growth. Apprenticeships are important, but so is further and higher education. Private consumer debt funded university finance has failed. We need another model and need to remove the de-facto 16+.
On housing the targets are ambitious and there seems little insight into the construction supply chains, possibly most importantly skilled workers most of whom come from eastern or central Europe. If the UK plans to build, it needs to welcome those who can make it happen. AI can’t build houses. It is not possible to grow the economy and continue with Mahmood & Starmer’s immigration policies.
There’s no mention of foreign policy i.e. Gaza, and decoupling from the USA nor trade i.e. the EU, nor on Energy where price controls and enhanced profit taxes are needed and would be popular.
It’s all a bit disappointing.
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