Can Burnham do this without going against Labour’s ‘modest’ manifesto? | The News Agents

I was just about to say, in the last 24 hours, you know, and slightly before that as well, you know, he's talked about relief for business and business rates and business taxation. He's talked about the importance of raising the limit on the personal tax threshold or allow income of income tax allowance that is currently frozen at about £12,500 has been frozen for some time. He's talked about more support for high streets. He's talked about more support on every kind of element I can think of in terms of, you So, you know, if he's serious about this stuff, we're talking about a bill that could easily run into the tens of billions of pounds. So that comes back to what I was going to make as a central point, which is, if you are doing that, I mean, unless you are going to slash departmental budgets and say, right, the welfare budget is going to be cut by, you know, £10 billion and you've just got to find out, you've got to find a way of doing that, Pat McFadden. You are then in a position where you're going to have to be coming up against your manifesto commitments of not raising, you know, income tax or not raising VAT to fund all of that. Or you're going to have to increase borrowing, which will send the markets spiralling. And so you do wonder, I mean, this is a question we raised yesterday of how you can do this without a fresh mandate of whether, you know, if you are really going to do all these things, can you do them all without going to the British people and saying, right, this is our plan. This is our 10 year plan. This is how we're going to alleviate the cost of living for the people that are most hard-pressed. This is our offering to you, the British people. But to do it without that, I think, becomes really problematic. I think it is very difficult and it's something I think that if he is, as we were saying yesterday, if he is serious about offering profound political and economic transformation, he will find increasingly that he chafes on the leash of the 2024 manifesto because it was a manifesto that was deliberately modest. It talked a big game in terms of wanting to offer profound change, but in terms of the prescription, as we've talked about many times before, in many ways it was modest. Now, I think Burnham thinks he can kind of get away on that because he can sort of point to particular passages which talk about, you know, the transference of sort of wealth and power to ordinary people and ordinary communities. But all Labour manifestos talk in those kind of, or many of them anyway, in those sorts of generalities. And so I think he will find it a more acute problem if he's serious. And this is, as we were saying yesterday, the kind of tension, the conundrum at the heart of this government. If he's serious about that change, it's going to be more difficult as time goes on.