Anyone nostalgic for flared trousers, shag-pile carpets and the Bay City Rollers would have found plenty to enjoy in Andy Burnham’s conference address.
Delivered to Labour supporters in Liverpool, the Prime Minister’s speech amounted to an unabashed tribute to the heavy-handed socialism associated with 1970s Britain.
For critics, it was the most alarming address by a Labour prime minister in living memory, setting out a dramatic shift to the Left that appeared to go further than anything Jeremy Corbyn attempted while leading the party.
Nationalisation, the compulsory acquisition of property, “democratic control” of housing and a retreat from Margaret Thatcher’s market reforms formed the core of a speech designed by the Left, delivered for the Left and aimed squarely at the Left.
The audience responded enthusiastically, breaking into repeated standing ovations. The message was unmistakably interventionist: greater state control of housing, water, energy, transport, social care and other parts of the economy.
The Prime Minister’s address to Labour supporters in Liverpool was an unabashed tribute to the heavy-handed socialism associated with 1970s Britain
Burnham spoke of “good growth in every postcode, hope in every heart” while promising an ever-present state influence reaching into virtually every corner of the marketplace.
He said Angela Rayner would oversee “the biggest council-house building programme since the post-war era”. Yet the proposed homes would differ sharply from council housing policies of recent decades: tenants would lose the right to buy, while the state would assume “democratic control over our housing stock”.
The announcement followed an emotional passage in which Burnham recalled his grandparents purchasing their home and the opportunities that ownership created for his family. It was a striking contrast between celebrating one generation’s access to private property and limiting that option for future council tenants.
Nor did the housing proposals end there. Councils would receive fresh powers to take control of privately owned properties judged to be empty or poorly maintained by their landlords.
The Prime Minister repeatedly stressed housing’s importance, arguing that it should not be treated “as a market” but instead recognised “as an essential that everyone needs”.
Yet housing’s status as a basic necessity is precisely why market forces have a role to play in supplying it, critics would argue.
Contrary to Burnham’s sceptical portrayal, the market is not some outside force imposed on ordinary working people.
It is shaped by those people—their choices, priorities and willingness to pay. Homeowners and prospective buyers are often better placed than distant officials to decide what they need from a home and what it is worth to them.
Trying to disconnect consumer demand from price, the argument goes, is unrealistic—and likely to prove expensive.
The loudest applause came when Burnham announced plans to repeal Margaret Thatcher’s ban on public ownership of water companies. He appeared to suggest that bringing the industry back into state hands would make bills more affordable.
But, invoking Thatcher’s famous words, critics would answer: “No. No. No.” State-run companies are not automatically more efficient or cheaper. With fewer choices available to consumers, poor performance can make it easier for prices to rise. Anyone satisfied with healthcare being managed by a vast bureaucracy may welcome the prospect of building a similar model for social care.
1970s Britain was blighted by power cuts, three-day weeks, ceaseless strikes and indifferent state industries. Rubbish piled up on the streets of London during binmen’s strikes in 1979
This was another defining feature of the address. Like much of Burnham’s analysis, it presented a confident verdict on market economics from a politician whose career has largely unfolded away from the pressures of commercial competition.
Burnham’s “theory of growth” centred on state “control” of essential services, followed by the transfer of power from Westminster to politicians and officials at local and regional levels.
It’s the sort of theory that ought to be kept far away from practice.
In reality, it will mean third-rate national politicians seizing control of sections of the economy and handing them over to fourth-rate regional politicians to regulate them into ruin.
What Burnham forgot in his nostalgia trip back to an era he never experienced outside of childhood is that, by the time Mrs Thatcher came along, the British public was well and truly sick of nationalised industries.
They were inefficient, unresponsive, one-size-fits-all, and simply allergic to innovation. When the state held a monopoly on a service or utility, it not only locked out private enterprise, but it also denied consumers the most powerful tool of all in the marketplace: choice.
Where there is choice, there is competition – and no mechanism can raise quality and lower prices like competition. State control, even where it is not monopolised, deprives the consumer of the power he enjoys in a free market.
The next generation, to whom Burnham directed his remarks, knows nothing of the days when Britain was served by nationalised industries.
Take the publicly owned British Telecom. If you wanted a phone line, you had to be prepared to wait six months. And forget about choosing a model to suit you: there was one model in whatever colour they gave you.
Younger voters might well be taken in by the Prime Minister’s tempting talk of lower prices and affordability, but this is wholly at odds with the British experience of socialism. They will come to learn what their grandparents did once the peace time idealism of the Attlee government gave way to the realities of collectivism. When state intervention fails it prompts more, not less, intervention.
Burnham cannot fathom this basic rule because, more than a socialist, he is a sentimentalist, and he came of age at a time and in a place where Thatcherism was spoken of as an almost metaphysical evil. The handbag-wielding market warrior was a cruel and wicked woman who tore society to shreds for the sheer hell of it.
In fact, the MP for Finchley was responding to the abject failure of post-war socialism. She did not secure three election victories in a row because she brainwashed the voters, but because the voters – in particular working-class Labour ones – were fed up with the endless misery of 1970s Britain, with power cuts, three-day weeks, ceaseless strikes, and indifferent state industries.
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The most deafening cheer came when Burnham told the hall of his intention to repeal Margaret Thatcher’s prohibition on public ownership of water companies
Burnham was indulging in the very rose-tinted – or, in this case, deep red-tinted – nostalgia of which progressives so often accuse conservatives. Where the Right longs for a romanticised past of unlocked doors, respectful youths, and cohesive neighbourhoods, the Prime Minister’s yearning is for a social and economic idyll that was far from idyllic for those who lived through it. He is that oddest of political creatures: a Left-wing conservative.
Curiously, the only area where Burnham wasn’t keen on the warm embrace of big government is the state pension, where he announced the scrapping of the triple lock from April 2030. From then, old-age payments will be only double locked, rising annually by whichever is higher between inflation or 2.5 per cent.
Ironically for a speech that spent so much time taking a sledgehammer to the Thatcher legacy, Burnham’s double lock will make him the first prime minister since the Iron Lady to break the link between pensions and earnings.
The true oddity of the Prime Minister’s address, however, was the eleventh-hour revelation of a commission on electoral reform. Anyone feeling glum at the prospect of a reversion to stultifying state control can console themselves that the Labour leader seems on the brink of a historic blunder.
Electoral reform is a hobby horse for middle-class liberals who have no firm policy preferences or philosophical beliefs and therefore prefer to talk endlessly about process. The technical term is ‘Liberal Democrats’.
The notion that proportional representation, for example, would aid Labour’s electoral fortunes is ludicrous. Labour is a beneficiary of first-past-the-post because of the geographic spread of its vote in the inner cities, university towns, the north of England, the Scottish central belt, and the Welsh valleys. This is how Keir Starmer was able to record such a mammoth landslide on a very weak vote share in 2024.
A more proportional system would aid several parties – Reform, the Lib Dems and the Greens – but it would make it highly difficult for Labour to form another majority government without the backing of smaller parties.
Given the sweeping schedule of state controls spelt out in Liverpool, that eventuality could only be greeted as a blessing.
