UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham, addressing the Labour Party conference in his native Liverpool, promised to restore hope and end "politics as usual" but also called for an "honest conversation" about difficult dilemmas. Burnham, only months into the role after replacing Keir Starmer, sought a delicate balance between optimism and realism.

Burnham repeated his most common mantra since coming to power, namely that "more of the same" will not solve the various issues facing the UK. "We can't carry on as we are. Politics as usual has taken Britain backwards," Burnham said. "More of the same isn't good enough and isn't going to get us where we need to be." The conference's banner headline "hope again" was not incompatible with a more honest conversation, Burnham said.

In his speech, the prime minister cited Labour's post-war government under Clement Attlee, famed for achievements like setting up Britain's National Health Service, as an example of his party's past credentials. He said that since the 1980s and the Margaret Thatcher era, this direction was lost. "I will say it straight, Britain has been on the wrong path for a long time. Deindustrialization, deregulation, privatization, austerity, Brexit, and what has it given us? A country run for vested interests, not in the public interest — with power held in too few hands, and too many places left to drift," Burnham said.

Burnham told the audience he would take on "the difficult issues that have been ignored for too long," including social care, high levels of youth unemployment, and greater public control of once-nationalized core interests like energy, water and housing. "The British right talk about 'taking back control'," Burnham said, evoking the slogan of the 2016 Brexit campaign. "Never forget that they are the ones who gave it away in the first place!"

Burnham said on coming to power that he wanted his premiership to be a "circuit-breaker for Britain" after years of rising prices and anemic growth. He hit the ground with a handful of new policies like a cap on bus fares, temporarily removing value added tax from electricity bills amid the Iran war, and announcing a bid to stamp out rough sleeping. But critics say his more grand stated strategy lacks detail and could prove economically unfeasible.

Burnham is constrained by a series of factors, including Labour's 2024 election campaign pledges under Starmer's leadership, Britain's strained public finances, and the suddenly risk-averse debt markets that have started heaping pressure on most developed economies of late. Borrowing costs for his UK government, as it eyes a series of new banner spending plans, hit a 10-year-high on the morning of Burnham's speech. In a sign of this lacking spending wiggle room, Burnham has already pushed back his stated aim to formulate reform plans for Britain's social care system.

He said on Tuesday that a "National Care System" would be put forward in time for the next election, currently scheduled for 2029. He said it would be a change "as significant" to the UK as the foundation of the state-funded National Health Service, and also essential to ensure the wider NHS' survival. He said the plan would be "fully funded, and not by borrowing." Burnham said that he did not expect such reforms to be easy, and acknowledged "I may pay a political price," but he said they were necessary steps and the kind of leadership he'd promised the party when seeking to replace Starmer this summer.

These challenging economic realities coincide with Labour facing multi-pronged political threats. They hail from right-wing populist parties like the anti-immigration Reform UK, from left-wing populists claiming to hold an economic magic wand like the Green Party, and from nationalist parties in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland advocating independence from the UK. Burnham also issued an appeal to rival political parties late in his speech, saying he would seek as much cross-party consensus as possible for his plans.

He also announced that he would set up a "new national commission on electoral reform," inviting all other parties to contribute to its work. He said Labour would stand in 2029's election on a platform of reforming the UK voting system so that "every person's vote counts," as party members had advocated in repeated conference votes in past years. For decades, successive Labour and Conservative governments would not touch Britain's winner-takes-all first-past-the-post voting system, because they were major beneficiaries of it.

Source: www.dw.com