Could Andy Burnham be the most important PM since Thatcher? | The News Agents

Already I see the walls closing in around Burnham. There are deep structural and cultural problems about governing a society today which are going to require a deep set of economic, cultural and, you know, intellectual ideas, organisation, alliances, you name it. And that's the question for Burnham now. Has he thought about those things deeply enough or is he going to continue to think about those things deeply enough to set himself on the right course? If Burnham does fail, the backlash could be fast, furious and possibly fascist. Do you think that's the stakes? What is the cultural, technological zeitgeist? Where do people want to go? What do they aspire to be? The News Agents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK. Opening up a world of opportunity. This is a global production. I am going to do things differently. I am going to break with the more of the same approach that has got us here. I am going to give Britain the circuit breaker it needs. Four decades of the neoliberalism that began in the 1980s have not been kind to the places that built our party. It is an end to trickle down economics which did not trickle down very much at all. The change will be the biggest change in our lifetimes to the way the country is run. We will take power out of here and carry it into every postcode in the land so that they can do more and in doing more, build a new economy. Andy Burnham, the new Prime Minister, is talking a big game. He isn't just coming out with the usual bromides you'd expect from an incoming Labour Prime Minister. A stronger, fairer society, a government for the people, for the many, not the few, addressing injustice. He's talking about something bigger, something more conceptual. He isn't just talking about making society better. He's talking about remaking society, about recreating the economic and political settlement in which we live. He wants to finally turn the page on as he seizes the world that Margaret Thatcher left us. In other words, he's talking about changing not just what the state does, but how we think about the state, how we think about politics to create a new common sense. In this, if he were to succeed, he would join a far more elite club than the burgeoning ranks of former Prime Ministers. He would become known as one of the great political teachers who leaves a legacy far beyond their years in office. A Clement Attlee, a Margaret Thatcher, perhaps a Tony Blair. But what does Andy Burnham think he's reversing when he talks about 40 years of neoliberalism? What is neoliberalism anyway? And what exactly does Andy Burnham want to replace the old settlement with? If someone knows, it would be Neil Lawson. He's an academic, a thinker, writer, intellectual, long-time doyen of Labour circles. Long ago, he advised Blair in the run-up to the 1997 election, but he came to be sceptical of what New Labour was, and has long argued that Labour must become a broader, more vital movement again. He has had a long-standing relationship with Andy Burnham, and is credited with developing some of his thinking. He shares the belief that Labour cannot afford to simply govern better. It must govern anew, create a new politics. So we asked him into the Newsagent studio to ask, why does he think neoliberalism has been so bad? What are his hopes for this new government? And if Burnhamism might replace it, then what might Burnhamism actually be? Welcome to the Newsagents. Well, Neil, thanks so much for joining us. I want to have that slightly more conceptual conversation about what the intellectual forces are which might be powering Burnham. But before we get there, just on the particulars of the week, how do you think he's done the first three or four days? I think it's mixed, really. Already? Well, yeah. I mean, I think, look, it's been good that there's been a trail of announcements. Some of those have shown that making announcements is a tricky business. You've got to work out where your funding's come from, and you get tripped up if you've not done your homework. Look, by and large, I think the cabinet is an upgrade on what was there before. It's good to see people like Miata in there. It's good to see Angela back. But I think the big part of the week is that, which will segue us into the bigger conversation, is that if you are serious about rolling back 40 years of neoliberalism, the first person you think of as your chancellor is not John Healey. You know, John Healey is a very decent, loyal, good, you know, Labour politician, a senior one, that. He has not been spending his whole life thinking about how you roll back 40 years of neoliberalism. One person in the cabinet has been thinking about that and knows how to run the Treasury, and Burnham decided not to put that person into... To remain in the ban. Yeah, yeah, into the Treasury. Now that's a, you know, I keep on wondering whether we should use the term red flags, because they're not very red, you know, but... It doesn't have quite the same connotation to the Labour Party, does it? No, no, no, no. So look, you know, we know that we'll get into the reasons why I was a keen supporter of him, you know, but, you know, he's a good communicator, he's got on his feet. But, you know, let's have a bigger conversation about the context in which this week is happening and where we're at. But just before we do, I mean, someone... I always think of you as someone who argues a lot for pluralism and working between and across parties in British politics, particularly on the left, and just in that guise, did you find the reshuffle too factional and insufficiently... I mean, you know, what the complaint is from the Starmarites, or do you think, sort of going back to what you just said just now, if you are serious about a big intellectual project which is reversing so many of the trends we've seen over the last 40 years, that you need people who are all signed up to it? Look, I think, you know... I think one of the questions about Andy is he said an end to factionalism. Factionalism is not a bad thing. Factionalism is a good thing. There are different groups in the party who have different ideas and different thoughts, and they should contest those ideas, and out of contesting those ideas, you get better ideas, right? But what you want is a kind of plural factionalism, you know, and hear all the voices. And what we had under Keir and Morgan McSweeney was a hyper factionalism, which was about destroying every other voice in the Labour Party. Now, if Andy thinks that you can just have a unified party and we all agree and we're all the same, I think that's a mistake. You know, A, it's not the reality, and B, it's not the basis of generating new ideas and new thoughts. But they've got to be respectful and kind to each other and thoughtful. Hasn't been very respectful so far, has he? I mean, he's basically dispatched most of the people who back the former Prime Minister. Yes, you know, and I think there's always a balance. Let's be, you know, pragmatic about this. There's a balance between having a team that are going to support you and work with you, you know, and having, you know, a very broad base. Look, look, let's be honest, the left hasn't done very well out of this at all. No. You know, if you look at, you know, people on the... even on the soft left, you know, they've not been given many places. I mean, you know, Ed, you know, not getting the chance lip. Miat is a good one, being promoted. But, you know, and Angela back. But across the piece, you know, who would you say were the real Bernamites? You know, Lucy Powell, Lou Haig, Miata, Miliband. And some of those people have backed Andy for a long time. Some of those people are very recent converts to Andy Burnham. True. And I think he's going to find that, you know, when it gets tough in government, and it will get tough very quickly, that you always need people around you that are incredibly solid and supportive of what you're doing, understand what you're doing. And I think that the reshuffle didn't bring enough of those people into positions that can support him and help him. You talk about the idea of backing Burnham for a long time. I mean, you have. I mean, you wrote in your piece in your statement, which people should go and read out this week, that you write about how attractive you think he is as a political figure and personality. You make comparisons between him and Blair in some ways, not necessarily in terms of their politics, but in terms of how they are as political creatures. What has appealed to you for such a long time about Burnham? Because obviously this is something that, as you say, parts of the Labour Party are now catching up with and affecting. Fawning all over him. Absolutely, indeed. He was unopposed, pretty unusual. What was it about him that has attracted you for such a long time? Well, people that were creating pictures of him morphing into Liz Truss at party conference over his bond market comments are now lining up and going, you know, isn't he wonderful? Isn't he wonderful? And they are fair weather friends, you know, and they will turn against him, you know, when they see the opportunity. I'm sure he knows that. I hope he knows it. So there's two things. Firstly, you had to see that Starmer was never going to work, you know, and people hoped and they invested in him for all sorts of reasons, which were shallow, I think. And from the word go, from the moment, you know, frankly, I met him before, you know, properly before he became leader. This person was never capable of being the leader of the Labour Party. Why do you say that? Because he was not interested in ideas. He was not interested in building organisation, alliances. He just thought, I think, that, you know, he was morally and managerially good enough and that's all you needed. Just since you mentioned that, Neil, I think it's worth just exploring it slightly because this is something that I've argued for quite a long time on this show and elsewhere. I wouldn't just say Labour people, but people who kind of really had so pissed off with the Tories and they'd had enough of them and they really wanted Starmer to succeed. You get a lot of opprobrium for saying that and a lot of those people will say that people like me, maybe people like you, people in the media, they never wanted him to succeed and that's why Starmer didn't succeed. It's because he was let down by the people around him, by the media who were out to get him from day one. What would your repost to that be? It was nothing to do with the commentary. To become prime minister, you have to have a project, you have to have a plan, you have to have people, you have to have vision, you have to be able to communicate and I don't think he could virtually do any of those things. I mean, people talk about wanting a grown-up back in and for someone to make good managerial technical decisions. To do that, you've got to have a vision, you've got to know where you're going, you've got to be able to judge your individual management decisions against some sort of future benchmark. He was not interested in any of this stuff. The only person who's responsible for Starmer's downfall is Starmer. He wasn't interested in politics and then we get Morgan McSweeney coming out and saying, we never prepared for government. Well, what did you think was going to happen if you never prepared for government? I was lucky enough to be around Labour in the run-up to 97 and Blair and Brown, whatever criticisms you might have of them now, were responsible for a deep political project of ideas, organisation, project management, etc. They knew what they were doing and this lot didn't do any of their homework at all. I think, just on Starmer for a second, I actually think some of the reaction from people like that, and you see pieces about it and so on. I think very often the reaction from that certain type of liberal progressive is because from a side of person who basically wanted politics to stop and thought that Starmer would. I think they were so almost radicalised by the Tory years and the 14 years and Brexit and all of those sorts of things and they were so appalled by it that when Starmer came in, a man who almost omitted anti-politics, as you say, it almost seemed apolitical, that the very fact of his being there would make the chaos stop and make the politics stop and they could just get back to their reasonably normal lives, back to when they thought that politics didn't really affect them. But the truth is actually what it seems to me the Starmer period tested to destruction is the idea that actually having someone who's apolitical at the top of politics won't make politics stop, it'll make all of the kind of instability around him and around British politics even worse. Yeah, look, I agree entirely. There's a class of the liberal intelligentsia who are quite comfortable, who were appalled by Brexit, who were appalled by the kind of Tory chaos, I mean, quite rightly, but wanted to return back to that stuff. And as you said, it's just a captain of the ship who could sail it through calm waters as if Brexit wasn't going to throw us, as if the crash in 2008 hadn't happened. As if Starmer could just take us back to 1998 somehow. Yeah, and that's all this was about. And I think what it tells us is there are deep structural and cultural problems about governing a society today which are going to require a deep set of economic, cultural and intellectual ideas, organisation, alliances, you name it, in order to put right. And you need a prime minister who thinks about all of that stuff. And I think Blair thought about some of that stuff. I think Thatcher definitely thought about some of that stuff. And in the long march, the hundred year conversation to what Labour did in 1945, a whole load of people thought about those kinds of things. And that's the question for Burnham now. Has he thought about those things deeply enough? Or is he going to continue to think about those things deeply enough to set himself on the right course? He's certainly talking a big game. He is echoing the language that you're using in your piece, talking about rolling back neoliberalism. You know, 40 years, that's what he's talked about. 40 years, as he sees it, failed political economic settlement. Now, this term neoliberalism, it gets banded around all the time. It's a bit of a, sometimes a bit of a canard on the left, it seems to me, sometimes. But what do you mean by it? What do you mean by neoliberalism? Because I think a lot of people listening and watching to this will have heard it. They'll hear political theorists talk about it. They'll hear Andy Burnham talk about it. It's not self-evidently obvious what it means. What do you mean by it? I think it's good to unpack it. I mean, I think it was a body of ideas that wants to replace the state, replace democracy to a large extent, and impose the market and the nostrums of the market, competition, choice, profit, advantage, you know, for some, not just to push the market into areas of the state, but in terms of the state, to kind of commercialise that, to bring in choice and competition. But more deeply, and I think this is one of the worries about Andy's view about how you roll this thing back, because he just sees it, I think, in terms of the privatised industries. He changed the privatised industries. Margaret Thatcher privatised water and rail and the rest of it. And that equals rolling back. But it was much more than just a kind of, you know, economic ownership issue. It was a cultural issue. It was the way that we, you know, turned from knowing ourselves as producers to understanding ourselves as consumers, to being parts of, you know, working-class communities, to being, you know, to being individuals. You know, so there was a whole panoply of cultural, deep cultural changes which happened, you know, around that time. And unless you get us back to, you know, we're citizens first before we're consumers, that we're not, you know, that we're, you know, we need each other, we're not just individuals, and everything about that, then you're not going to roll back the frontiers of, you know, of 40 years of neoliberalism. And I guess that's the question, doesn't it? And how, and then the question is, how do you do that? Can you just do it from the steps of Downing Street? Or do you need something much bigger and broader? I mean, I suppose the way in which to think about it maybe is that, at the very least, what feels new to me about Burnham is the way he talks about, let's, for the sake of argument, not just talk about neoliberalism, let's talk about the 1980s and Margaret Thatcher. I mean, the way he talks about that is different, it seems to me, than the Labour leaders. Let's leave Corbyn out of it for a second. Certainly all the Labour prime ministers that have come since then, because, although I would argue that new Labour in lots of ways, I think you'd probably agree with this, you know, it had lots of the fundamentals of social democratic projects, and it certainly had lots of social democratic outcomes in the sense there was redistribution, there was reinvigoration of the public realm, blah, blah, blah. What is absolutely true to say is that Blair did not cast himself as like an aberration with Thatcher. In fact, he explicitly says, I saw my job is to build on what she'd done. Gordon Brown, similar-ish, I mean, he invited her in, famously, to number 10. And Keir Starmer sort of, well, it's hard to kind of tell, he was sort of all over the place on this. Sometimes he spoke of her admiringly, sometimes he didn't. Burnham is the first one, it seems to me, who actively talks about trying to reverse what she did. And that, at the very least, even if he hasn't necessarily thought about how he's going to do it, that is a change intellectually and politically. It's big and it's important, and he's reframed the debate. And that's, you know, if he does little else, which I'm sure he will do, you know, many other things, that is incredibly welcome. The fact that someone stands on the steps of Downing Street and says they're going to do that. I was talking to a kind of Corbynite earlier today who said that they can't remember Jeremy Corbyn actually making a statement as bold as that, that he was going to take that kind of big stance, rolling back 40 years of Thatcherism. So it is remarkable that he said it. He's absolutely right to say it. Now we've got to think about, you know, what is the intellectual and organisational wherewithal to do it. What we're talking about is, because it's an easy thing to say, let's roll back Thatcherism and let's roll back neoliberalism. But I mean, Thatcherism and neoliberalism was itself an intellectual response to what was considered a failed settlement, or at least a settlement that was failing, i.e. by the time you get to the late 1970s, you've already referred to it, the kind of broad economic post-war settlement in the Second World War, which itself took a long time to develop and incubate and come to pass for all sorts of reasons, not just in Britain, but across the West, was seen to be failing, especially in Britain. And Thatcherism was a response to that failure. So isn't there a danger in a way of, even if you say, let's roll back 40 years, is there a danger that that project seems very regressive? Yeah. That it's just going back to something that itself in many ways, people who remember it might think that it had failed, or is it about creating something new? Well, I think too much, again, this is another worry, is that it does look nostalgic. It does look returnism. It's like the 1970s were wonderful. And rightly, Andy talks about, his youth in 1970s on the edge of Liverpool, secure job, secure housing, good education. But millions of strike days and economy and inflation at over 20%. I mean, it wasn't all rosy, was it? No, it wasn't all rosy. But you can understand why that sort of secure floor that gave a kind of essentially sort of upper working class boy from the edges of Liverpool into Cambridge and then a job in London and, and, and, you know. But the thing about, you know, Thatcher, you know, Thatcher wasn't saying she wanted to go back to a pre, you know, post-war settlement. She wanted to kind of do something which felt new, you know, the big bang consumerism, you know, privatisation, everyone owning shares, popular capitalism and all of that. And then you get to Blairism, which was very kind of forward-looking, zeitgeist-y, we've got to serve the waves of globalisation, we've got to prepare everyone for- Well, Labour, when Labour wins, it tends to win because it has a sense of modernity, right? Yeah, like Wilson did that, Attlee did that, Blair did that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think there is, there is very little, you know, so far about the, or not enough about the Byrne project, which has that sense of what is the cultural, technological zeitgeist? Where do people want to go? What do they aspire to be? How do you use the kind of context around you of way people are acting and behaving? How do you jump on social media, not just as a platform for yourself, which is very good at, to project and narrate your own story all day, but how do you use our network society, you know, in order to bring people together in ways that are going to help roll back 40 years of neoliberalism, but take us to a new future? My critique of New Labour was always that it wasn't new enough and it wasn't Labour enough, you know, and it actually wasn't surfing the wave effectively, but it wasn't being true to its Labour roots. I think Andy is true to his Labour roots and Labour values, but he's got to append onto that a very modern, futuristic, you know, entrepreneurial, innovative kind of, you know, platform of ideas, thinking, etc. But Labour does have to, any kind of new social democracy, let's put it that way, a new centre-left settlement that replaces neoliberalism, for want of a better expression. It's got to work with the grain of what we've had for the last 40 years, hasn't it? I mean, it's very difficult to imagine, it seems to me, when you talk about individualism being at the centre of that. Nonetheless, that is how we have, generationally now, including my own generation, I'm the one that came before that, the one that's come after that, that is how we've been encouraged to think of ourselves, that is the intellectual environment in which we've literally been kind of incubated. It doesn't seem to me, particularly with technological developments as well, which have hammered home that individualism. We talk about our constantly, each of us creating content, our own sort of constantly sort of streaming ourselves, all of this sort of stuff, that has hammered that home and amplified that individualism. Surely, a new left-wing project would have to work with that and actually talk in those terms, talk about, it seems to me, how to enhance our own freedom as individuals, rather than trying to sort of hark back to a slightly more sort of stolid collectivism of the 70s. Well, I don't think collectivism has to be stolid. You know, if you look, I reference in the newspaper, a book called Hyperpolitics. You know, and what the author of that book talks about is the way that kind of social swarms happen now. We are still incredibly collective. We like to come together and do things together. It's why, you know, bands make their money now out of, you know, shows not selling, you know, albums. It's why you see these big kind of groups of people and we've seen it recently from Black Lives Matter to, you know, Hashtag Me Too to, you know, all sorts of, you know, the big marches around Palestine, you know, etc. And you get it on the right as well. You know, people on the right like to come together. We are collective beings. We can't help ourselves. Why do we go onto social media to narrate our own individual lives? Because we want to be seen with other people. We want to be compared. We want to join in with other people. We can't help ourselves. So how do you do that in the 21st century? How do you look at kind of, you know, the way in which the growth of, you know, social enterprises, co-ops, mutuals, B corporations, there's loads of inspiration out there for a kind of new form of social democracy if you've got a government that wants to tap into them and support them. Mrs Thatcher said, the economy is the means, the goal is to change the soul. Right, how does Andy Burnham and this new government use its economic levers and legislative power to boost those practices, those sectors, those groups, which are in tune with that kind of new social democracy? Well, how does he? Well, looking around and understanding the kind of groups I've just mentioned and promoting them. Look at kind of things like media. There's all sorts of interesting, new, independent media happening across our country from newspapers to, you know, to podcasts, to websites, you know, people want to, you know, express, you know, their views, they want places to talk. Why not turbocharge all of that stuff? Why not give that sector big tax breaks? Why not invest in that kind of, in those kind of organisations? Because that would, that would be the terrain in which the rich soil in which something new could emerge. Maybe you can answer me this, Neil, and because it does seem to me a potential tension or even impediment to achieve what Burnham wants, which is, he's talking about, as you say, profound economic, political, transformational change in Britain. He wants to be, it seems to me, at least if we're to judge him on the basis of what he said this week and in the last weeks, potentially the most transformational prime minister we've had since Margaret Thatcher. And yet at the same time, he has talked about his signature political idea, devolution and the devolution of power. Now, if you and I were sat here in the 1970s, your average labour, your median labour politician would have been very sceptical of that idea. They would have said the way that you achieve transformational economic change within Britain is a strong central state. That's why the Labour Party historically was pretty sceptical about devolution and devolution of power, Scottish devolution, and so on. Is there a tension between Andy Burnham basically wanting the most interventionist and activist state that we've had for decades and at the same time saying, we'll give power away to our political enemies, to cities, to towns, to regions, to nations? No, look, I think, you know, there's two, well, at least three very good bits of Burnham. You know, firstly, you know, he knows that the current democratic and state system is not working, not functioning, and it doesn't allow our economy and society to function properly. So you've got to take, you've got to change the democratic and state structures. One aspect of that is his belief in cross-party long-term consensus, you know, and he's already mentioned on issues like social care that he would like to, you know, develop a response which had that kind of deep cross-party support. We know that he's, you know, rock solid behind proportional representation, you know, and that would underpin that kind of, you know, new consensus. But the devolution thing is absolutely central, that, you know, power and money has got to go to people locally. There's, you know, and that, you know, there's no doubt about that, that we'll get buy-in, you'll get better decisions, you'll get deeper, more meaningful answers to how the state operates and what it does. Why? Because people will be involved in the process then. Not necessarily. Well, you have to design it in a way that they are. But Neil, if we were sat here in 1948 and we'd applied that principle, we wouldn't have the National Health Service, we would have kept all the friendly societies and would have kept all the local little hospitals and would have let people make their own decisions. And some of that wouldn't have been a bad thing, you know, and my worry about things like, you know, when he talks about a new social care settlement that he's modelled, because he's already said he wants it to be like the NHS. Well, you know, that was in a very foolish, very centralised, very top-down mechanical era. We don't live in that era anymore. We live in a very dispersed era. We live in an era where everyone has voices, we've been discussing, and I say through social media. And so therefore, you should be doing things locally with people. There's a great scheme up in Sheffield who have been running social care through kind of, you know, neighbourhood systems. And it works, right? You know, because it's close to people, there's proximity, they've got a voice, but right now, our local democratic structures are often monopolised by tiny cabals of people, often older people, because we basically live increasingly in a gerontocracy or a geriatric society. We see all over the country, you know, classic example is housing. You know, Burnham says he wants the biggest programme of council housing we've seen in a generation. Great idea. It's obviously desperately needed, but at the same time, that is supposed to be happening with a transfer of power to local areas. And we know from literally bloody history, time after time after time, that whenever we give local people the power to decide where the house is going to be built in their area, nine times out of ten, they say no. Well, I mean, firstly, Burnham has shown that local government can be used dynamically and purposefully. You know, he's done that in Manchester. So it's a good example. We need more examples of that. And secondly, this shouldn't be just about devolution of power from one set of politicians to another. It should be to, you know, to communities and to citizens. So how do you bring in that level and push power all the way down? Bring in citizens' assemblies as a way of people deciding. You say that, you know, people have a sort of nimby attitude when they're asked the question. But people usually, through formats like a citizens' assembly, when they're given all the information and time to talk about it and think about it and work it out with others, they arrive at a much more kind of progressive outcome. Look, you know, if you're a Democrat, you're taking the gamble that, you know, more democracy leads to more progressive outcomes. If it doesn't, then we've got real trouble. But my trust is with the British public if they're given the resource, time and support to make decisions. Is one of Labour's problems right now in a sense, because you're talking about an intellectual transformation and Burnham is as well. That is really hard to do in government, isn't it? I mean, you know, the two examples, well actually three examples, two and a half examples that you cite in the piece. 1945, as has been argued by many, Paul Anderson and others, you know, it's basically a sort of hundred-year march or a hundred-year, century-long kind of incubation of intellectual forces and political action leading up to that transformative government. 1979, 30-40 year project itself, Thatcherism and an international one. And Blair, a new Labour as well, you know, as you say, whether you agree with it or not, a proper intellectual project over some decades, developed in opposition, loads of intellectual thinkers, writers and so on. I mean, the Labour Party, it seems to me, I mean, one of its problems is it spent much of the 15 years in opposition tearing itself apart. If you talk to people around Starmer, some of them will say, I mean, look, he wasn't very interested in ideas, but those of them who were, will say, look, all our energy was basically taken to get rid of Corbyn and the Corbynites. It was a sort of internal project. But do you think that's fair enough or not? It doesn't really matter, but that's what they think. Burnham's now got to do this, this new set of ideas, this transformation, while he's also prime minister. Yeah. It's going to be really difficult. It is going to be difficult, um, you know, and it's tough because he hasn't had the time, you know, but in Manchesterism, you know, one of the organizations I'm associated with, Mainstream, published a huge report on called The Productive State, which was an analysis of Manchesterism and how it can be extended to other areas and other places. But I would strongly urge him, his number 10 team, the cabinet, to do the kind of things that we've just been discussing and help that big conversation flourish, you know, because he's got to do the short term and that's going to be difficult enough. But unless you put in place the medium to long-term thinking of bringing in the think tanks, bringing in the academics, bringing in the practitioners who are doing this in different places and experimenting. Do you think there's much intellectual life on the left? No, no, I don't think there is. I mean, all this intellectual energy for the last few years has appeared to be on the right, not just the right, but the radical right. And this is his job. This is his job as leader to not just pass the legislation, you know, and do the appearances. His job is to stir all of that up and use his convening power to make all of this happen. Look, this will not happen because he's good on TV, he's good on social media, or even because he's got a parliamentary team. My worry is this becomes a kind of old parliamentary labourism and doesn't see a bigger, broader movement of ideas, organisations and alliances. An old parliamentary labourism. Well, it's just the fact that, you know, you think he can, you know, legislate his way through to a better society. And of course, legislation is important, but the extent and the nature of the legislation, you know, the example I cite in this piece is that there was huge pressures on Bevan when he was creating the NHS in the run-up to 1948, and big pressures to have an insurance-based scheme. So to water it down, it's not free at the point of need, you have to pay for it through insurance. And it was the might of the South Wales miners who insisted that it was going to be free at the point of need. Now, what's the example of that today to say that, you know, when it comes to taxation, that there must be, there has to be a proper wealth tax in this country? What are the forces, the trade unions, the social movements, the academics, the public intellectuals that will make that case irresistible? And are they open to that? And do they want to support that? And do they want to work with those people? Or do they think that all of this will be done in Downing Street or in Westminster? You, I mean, you write in your piece, is the what isn't the question, the how is. Do you think Burnham has answered the how? And what do you mean by that? Well, you know, the what, he's made the big statements, that's right, rolled back four years of neoliberalism. We've discussed the fact that he needs to do more on what a future-looking, orientated agenda is. It is the question of how. And that move from being the sort of lone gun mayor of Greater Manchester, where you can decide things yourself and make things happen largely untouched, you know, with a budget, with people in a proximity, to shifting that to Westminster with all of the demands and all of the complexity and all of the chaos. It can't be done by one person, however charming, thoughtful, you know, and charismatic they are. It's got to be done by a big team and a big movement. And does he get that? And is he going to put that in place? What you're talking about now, what you talked about in that piece, is the importance of a Labour Prime Minister to create a new settlement, you know, a new... And you talk about Gramsci and the Marxist thinker, you know, and the idea of the true success of a new political settlement is that everyone just thinks of it as common sense. Margaret Thatcher did that, Attlee did that, Blair did that to some extent. I was just thinking when I was reading that, is that even possible anymore? I mean, when those political figures, and, you know, one can think of, say, American presidents who've done the same thing, FDR or Reagan. When they were creating those settlements, the media environment existed and the political environment was way less fragmented. It was much easier to have a kind of consistency of message. It was easier to get through to more people all the time. It was easier to just get in people's heads and try and craft that common sense. Do you think it is possible now for a political movement to actually create that sense of common sense and create that settlement? Or are we just too fragmented? I think it's a really good question. And we're going to have to work our way through the answer to that. But starting with the question is a good point. There is a theory in cybernetics that says that to govern any entity, you need a governance system which is equally as complex as it, right? So that's why, for instance, I think cross-party stuff is good because you bring more voices in. It isn't just a narrow band of people. So you want pluralism in the Labour Party to address the complexity. You need alliances across progressive parties to address the complexity. You need to go down to, you know, devolve down to other people and other places to address the complexity. You need to bring in, as I've said, kind of citizens' assemblies. You need to bring all the voices in in order to address that stuff. What you end up with then, I'm not sure if it's a kind of, you know, Burnhamism that's a moment in history like Thatcherism was or Atleism was or whatever. I don't know what that looks like, you know, in terms of being a solid, identifiable, monolithic, you know, settlement era. But it could be, you know, a more complex, nuanced, creative, enterprising way of addressing all of this policy, you know, poly-crisis stuff that's around us. And that's what I want from a leader, someone who wants to explore that stuff with other people and test out that stuff. And you write that if Burnham does fail, the backlash could be fast, furious and possibly fascist. Do you think that's the stakes? Well, I think he said that this is the last chance. I went out knocking on doors in Makefield, you know, and they were voting there for Andy, not for the Labour Party. It was the last chance saloon. And I think that's right across the country. People in this country have been voting for big change at every election since Brexit. And they haven't got it. And already I see the walls closing in around Burnham with people, with ideas, it's becoming a tighter and tighter circle. When people say that he's at his height of his powers, you know, I wince because this has got to be the start of his powers. Look, what's happened in this, getting him into the premiership, you know, it both always looked, you know, impossible, unfeasible. How could the mayor of Manchester become the prime minister? He's not in parliament, you know, but it always looked to me as inevitable because it was just like the run-up when Blair became leader. No one believed he was going to be the leader until the last minute because everyone turned in the crisis of the Labour Party then to him as the likely saviour, just as they turned to Burnham after Gorton and Denton and the local elections and Unstama's obvious failure. But in getting him into the premiership, all he's done is reach what I would call base camp. He's at the foot of the mountain and there is a steep incline to be navigated for which he's going to require the oxygen tanks, the supplies, the Sherpas and the route map to get in there. And does he recognise that? And is he going to bring all of that stuff together? You know, or because if it fails, as I say, and as you've read out from the piece, you know, there are people waiting in the wings who want to dance all over the failure of effectively kind of liberal social democracy. And that feels like a terrifying place. Are you one of his Sherpas? He's still chatting to you? Yeah, I haven't spoken to, to be honest, I haven't spoken to him for a bit. He's been a busy man with busy, busy things to do. So are you. You did the Today programme twice this week. Well, well, but it's not quite as hard as being prime minister, is it? You know, God, I wouldn't, you know, wouldn't wish that job on anyone. But look, it doesn't matter whether he talks to me or not. It does matter about whether, you know, he sees the scale and the scope and the nature of the challenge. We've had, this conversation has basically been a conceptual one. It's been one about political ideas. Keir Starmer was definitely not interested in political ideas. Not only was he not interested, he was actively hostile, I think. He thought that they were kind of a feat and something that intellectuals sort of do and Westminster games, all that. I had that conversation with him. Literally, he said that. So I'm not taking him out of context. Andy Burnham, do you think he is interested in political ideas? Because the way he talks about politics is much more, and there's no criticism for this, but it is quite sort of meat and potatoes. You know, it's quite retail politics. It's, he tries to talk, I think, in a reasonably demotic way. But do you think that he is interested in political ideas as, say, a Margaret Thatcher was or something in Ed Miliband would be? Yeah. No, I think he is. I mean, it's strange in the sense that it doesn't come from theory. You hardly ever hear him cite anyone, reference anyone. He's quite an emotive politician. Yeah, yeah, it's emotive and it's from practice. It's from his, you know, day-to-day work. You know, and I've sat him down with, you know, big thinkers from think tanks and academia or whatever. And I just thought, like, you know, at first I used to think, you know, he'll just say, oh, hello, you know, everyone. I'm really pleased to be here. I'm going to listen to what you say or whatever. He would just start for 20 minutes and start talking in really interesting imaginative ways about, you know, particularly around economy and rewiring the state. Like, really impressive. And like, you know, then I'd get people after, you know, texting me going, God, he's impressive, isn't he? And he is, you know. I think there are, you know, there are limits to his impressiveness in the sense that I think too much of it is backward-looking and not forward-looking. But on those issues, he has thought about stuff. You know, is it enough? No. Do we need more of it? Yes. Does he have to build all of those alliances and thinkers and movements or whatever? But he does. He does think. And my worry is that if he goes down that kind of parliamentary laborism route, don't worry about it. And many of those people are anti-ideas as well, anti-intellectualism, you know. They don't want to talk about hegemony, you know. If he gets surrounded by those people, then this will be a short-lived, you know, opportunity to stop, you know, the rise of the far right. Just finally, what does success look like? I mean, the easy answer to that is winning an election, sure, OK. But that's not, you know, Keir Starmer won an election less than two years out. Later, he's out. It proves that big majorities mean very little in that fragmented, you know, fragile world. And Labour's got to learn that. You know, I mean, it's so apparent that if you win 65% of the seats on 34%, you don't have any governing mandate. There is no support for you. So that's another reason why we have to have proportional representation. But look, I'm on the left of the party, you know, but I feel incredibly pragmatic. I don't expect him to change everything overnight. What I expect of our politicians and our leaders is to put in place the foundations so that steadily, gradually, over time, society and democracy become stronger than the free market. And that's going to take a long time to do. I don't believe in revolution. I believe in pragmatic, you know, step-by-step movements. You know, how do you begin to make the trade union stronger? How do you make communities stronger? How do you make alternative media stronger? You know, how do you invest in things like, you know, the B-, how do you allow the B Corp movement, that's companies that, you know, that honour the triple line of sustainability, you know, society, democracy, et cetera. How do you massively accelerate the march of those kinds of institutions, which are the places in which, you know, a new kind of society is going to grow and develop? It's not going to just grow because he's good on his feet at, you know, PMQs, or they pass this or that legislation. That stuff is really going to help. But it's out of all of that, gradually, steadily, we could build a new settlement. Does he have his eye on that kind of long-term prize and wants to build those kind of foundations? Let's see. Neil Lawson, it's been really interesting to talk to you. Thank you so much for coming in. Well, Lawson is right about one thing. The new ideas on the left have been dormant for years now. There were the Miliband years, where Labour was interested in ideas, but no one seemed much interested in it. There were the Corbyn years, where so much of the energy was spent on internecine warfare. There were the Starmer years, where ideas were considered a problem to be avoided. And now Burnham must think on his feet, on the job, creating not just a new programme, but a set of ideas which gel them together. And that is tough. But politics is the battle of ideas. And having a prime minister who is interested in fighting that battle, well, it's early days. But for the Labour Party, it ain't nothing. Well, that is it from our own little think tank here, more tanking than thinking, generally, for another week. Thanks, as ever, to our own Salon Intellectuals, our production team, Shane Fennelly, Michaela Walters, Natalie Inge, Anna Djordjevic, Jess Williamson, Mikey Baggs, Martin Kroeser, and Lizzie Ward. Our executive producer is Louis Dagenhart. Our editor is Tom Hughes. It is presented by John Saint-Simon Sopel, Emily Marxist, Maitlis, and me, Lewis Gramsci-Goodall. We'll be back on Monday. Have a lovely weekend. The News Agents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. This has been a global production.