Burnham is making the problems worse by his adherence to self-imposed rules

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One of Andy Burnham’s ‘qualifications’ for the job of PM was that he was used to running a major public sector operation in the form of the mayoralty of Greater Manchester. It’s certainly a big job, and he will certainly have learned a lot from doing it, even if the degree to which he was successful is always going to be arguable, depending on one’s political perspective. There is a difference of scale, of course; but even more important is the difference in the constraints acting upon the incumbent. Manchester (like the Senedd here in Wales) has its powers and budgets circumscribed elsewhere. Westminster sets both, and the mayor (or First Minister) has no choice but to follow the statutory requirements laid down for him or her.

When it comes to running the UK from Downing Street, however, the situation is completely different. The Westminster parliament insists that it has absolute power – delegated to it by God and the Monarch – to do whatever it wants. Financially, the only real constraint is the capacity of the economy – the available resources, in short. Any other constraint is self-imposed: the so-called ‘fiscal rules’ are the invention of the government of the day which can change them at any time it wants to (and history shows that governments tinker with the rules regularly). There was no such thing before Gordon Brown invented them in 1997, and they were invented largely to ensure that the incoming Labour government followed broadly the same policies as the outgoing Tory government, in the belief that that was what ‘the markets’ wanted.

To date, Burnham has given no indication that he understands the difference – that he has moved from a situation where he has to obey rules laid down by others to one where he can make the rules. And all the neoliberal foundations and lobbyists – to say nothing of the financial ‘experts’ in the mainstream media – are only too keen to ensure that he doesn’t realise the extent to which he is imposing unnecessary constraints upon himself. There was a report today, for example, claiming that the PM “will have to raise taxes or cut spending” to meet his pledges and that “There's clearly no scope for increasing borrowing”. What they like to call ‘borrowing’, some of us prefer to call ‘accepting deposits from people looking for a safe home for their money’ – and the only limit on that is whether people have money for which they are seeking a safe home. Given the lack of worthwhile investment opportunities (which is a much bigger problem in itself), there’s no sign of any lack of deposits; and the choice posited by the first quote is solely a result of the fiscal rules.

One of the big issues which Burnham has highlighted this week is the question of social care. It’s usually presented as a shortage of money, but even if money was unlimited, there would still be a lack of qualified and willing carers, and lack of capacity is a much more important constraint than lack of money. But that lack of capacity is another self-imposed constraint – this time it’s arbitrary rules over numbers of migrants.

One point of similarity between the governments in Wales and Scotland, the mayoralty in Manchester, and the UK government is that they are all facing major issues. But only one of them is compounding the problems by using its unique position to be able to set its own rules in a way that exacerbates rather than alleviates.

Hard hats and graduate caps

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According to the PM, “From today, Britain will value the hard hat every bit as much as the graduation cap”. It’s a nice soundbite, but what does it actually mean? He’s not the first politician – or even the first UK Prime Minister – to talk about what has often been called ‘parity of esteem’: the idea that people with key technical skills should be as highly regarded as those with a degree. Few would disagree with the sentiment. And it’s certainly true that an academic degree, and the learning involved in gaining one, is not something which suits everyone, although we need to guard against the idea that making learning less academic also strips away the remaining vestiges of the notion that a well-educated populace is a good thing in itself.

But one of the other things that those who want fewer people to seek a degree are concerned about is the lack of what they call ‘graduate jobs’, which generally seems to be a euphemism for jobs which pay a higher salary, or graduate premium. There is an obvious conflict here: it is simply not rational to support the idea of there being a graduate premium whilst also demanding that other types of qualifications and learning should carry equal value. Having done a certain amount of graduate recruitment in the past myself for two different organisations, I’m not convinced that the requirement for a degree is, in many cases, much more than a filter mechanism enabling lazy employers to discard large numbers of otherwise suitable employees. There is, though, no real question that employers seeking only graduate recruits do find themselves obliged to reinforce the pretence by offering higher salaries.

Achieving real equality of value requires more than identifying which young people are more suited to a so-called ‘vocational’ route, providing the necessary places, and making airy statements about parity or equality. If I thought that Burnham was wanting to start a serious conversation about how we value and reward different occupations, his statement today would be very welcome. How do we determine the relative value of lawyers and nurses for example? Does the current difference in reward reflect that relative valuation or reverse it? I’m pretty certain, however, that that isn’t a can he proposes to open, and that what he’s talking about is more about persuading people to accept their station in life – and the level of reward which goes with that. His fine words are, in short, more spin than substance. Being better with words doesn’t change the underlying message.

When Labour's self-image clashes with reality

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Last week, the new PM instructed his cabinet to “stop assuming that decisions belong in Whitehall by default”, according to a Downing Street source quoted in the Times (paywall). The source went on to add, “Departments will now have to justify why a power should stay at the centre rather than being transferred to a local area”. Perhaps the new Secretary of State for Wales was asleep during that part of the meeting, but his statement that he is not yet "entirely convinced" of the case for giving more powers to the Welsh government, although he remains "open to the conversation" sounds an awful lot like an assumption that powers should remain where they are unless a convincing case is made otherwise – almost the exact opposite of his boss’s instruction.

It’s possible, of course, that Burnham never intended that his new policy should apply to the national governments in Wales and Scotland – for him devolution is all about the powers of local mayors; and his record to date of understanding the difference between those national parliaments on the one hand and regional mayors on the other is not good. It’s more likely, though, that we’re just seeing two different versions of the Labour Party. There is the image that they want us to believe: a party committed to localism, empowering communities and their representatives to take the best decisions for their areas, and then there’s the traditional version with which we are all too familiar in Wales: a centralised and centralising party which wants to keep all power in its own hands. Kinnock is simply presenting the well-established reality; those who fall for the Burnham rhetoric will inevitably end up disappointed.

The power has been retained at the centre all along

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The problem at the heart of devolution is, and always has been, that ‘power devolved is power retained’. It might be politically difficult for Westminster to deliberately and blatantly remove powers from the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, but it would be entirely legal under a constitution which assumes that absolute power is vested in the monarch by god and exercised by parliament through the gracious consent of the monarch. Devolved administrations are allowed to exercise such powers as the central authority decides in the manner, and for so long as, that central authority determines. The conceptual difference between that and a republican system under which power belongs to the people and is exercised by governments on their behalf and at their discretion – even if, in practice, the differences are not so great as they are in theory – is huge. The underlying difference of principle – whose power is it anyway – is fundamental.

Andy Burnham presents himself as a committed devolutionist, which might look like a big plus for Wales and Scotland compared to what has gone before. But, like all devolutionists, his starting point is that power is owned by the centre and may be shared at the centre’s discretion. It means that he can decide what is devolved and to whom, setting up a potential conflict with the administrations in Cardiff and Edinburgh as he probably seeks to devolve power to more local mayors. And it isn’t just powers currently held at Westminster that he might be seeking to devolve – it is also those currently exercised in Cardiff and Edinburgh that he is likely to want to devolve.

As a matter of pure principle, I would actually agree that devolution shouldn’t stop at the national parliaments of Wales and Scotland; it is a disappointment to me that Plaid’s long history of supporting decentralising power within Wales seems to have gone into reverse somewhat since the establishment of the Assembly/Senedd, as politicians came up against the harsh reality that seriously devolving power necessarily means that different areas will set different priorities. Leaving that issue to one side, the question is: ‘who decides?’. Many – perhaps most – in Wales, and certainly in Scotland, would argue that further devolution within those countries should be a matter for the national parliaments but, for devolutionists, the issue of which powers should reside where is a matter for central determination. Whilst we in Wales might think that we have a Senedd in recognition of nationhood, to a devolutionist, it doesn’t necessarily look that way at all.

Paradoxically, it could well be that it is a pro ‘devolution’ PM who poses the greatest challenge to what ‘devolution’ means for Wales. The power has indeed been retained from the outset.

One sector's boost is another sector's loss

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The slimmed-down Commonwealth Games opens in Glasgow today, featuring around half the usual number of sports, because Glasgow stepped in late in the day as host after Victoria, in Australia, pulled out. Slimmed down = less cost – a good thing, surely? Well that depends. Because slimmed down also = fewer athletes, fewer spectators, fewer hotel nights and meals, less of a boost to the local economy.

During the recent world cup, many pubs in England were allowed to open late, and enjoyed something of a bonanza as a result. Hard-pressed hospitality sector gets boost – a good thing, surely? Well, again, that depends. Where did the money spent come from? If it was money which would otherwise have been spent in the same pubs, but over a longer period, then it’s just a change in cash flow. If it’s money that would otherwise have been spent on other things, then a large short term boost for one sector probably equates to a smaller longer term reduction in spending in a host of other sectors. Maybe not even noticeable in the grand scheme of things, but there nevertheless.

The point is, as the wondrous invention called double-entry book-keeping tells us, that what looks like a positive entry to one party will always look like a negative entry to someone else. Unless there is an overall increase in the supply of money, it cannot be otherwise. And, as Richard Murphy pointed out a couple of weeks ago, there are only two ways in which the total money supply can be increased: deficit budgets by the government and commercial bank lending. In accounting terms, both end up looking like ‘borrowing’ to someone, although that’s an oversimplified view when it comes to the government. The questions to be asked are ‘which is better?’ and ‘for whom?’. Neoliberals (and that includes Andy Burnham, for all his rhetoric) will always favour commercial bank lending, which in turn always favours those who already own most of the wealth. It is not the option which is most favourable to the majority of us, but unless and until we break free of the assumption that it is always and inevitably ‘better’, we will never rebalance the economy in favour of the many.

Out with the old, in with the old

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So far, the Burnham rhetoric has been better than the Starmer rhetoric, but that isn’t exactly a high bar. The substance – to the extent that there is anything other than a superficial paint job – will emerge in the coming days and weeks. Later this year, there will be (we are told) a 10-year plan. In the light of the recent rate of turnover in leaders of the UK government, the degree of confidence that Burnham will still be around to see the plan published (it will, inevitably, be later than proposed), let alone to see it through to implementation, cannot be high.

Some of the signs are not good, already. Putting a man who resigned from government because the Treasury wouldn’t divert enough funding away from protecting people against poverty and ill-health into deterring imaginary Russian threats in charge of the Treasury doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence that the ‘change’ being demanded by Burnham will be quite the change that we need. Rhetoric about moving away from the neoliberal approach of the past few decades is utterly undermined by the statement that the arbitrary fiscal rules – only ever invented in order to entrench neoliberalism into the UK government’s economic philosophy – will be adhered to.

Scrapping the mad scheme for digital ID is a welcome step, but the mathematics behind diverting the uncommitted funding from that into a reduction in VAT on electricity costs are a little dodgy to say the least. Those paying the fuel bills – and especially those living in fuel poverty – will welcome any reduction, but when reduced to the level of ordinary household bills, the saving doesn’t look that large. £45 a year off the energy price cap equates to around 86p a week, strangely reminiscent of Gordon Brown's derisory 75p per week pension increase in 1999 - and worth rather less when inflation is accounted for.

We need more than a sharper rhetoric, a more developed sense of humour, and a bit of tinkering at the edges, but there are no signs as yet that Burnham is any more capable of envisioning a different approach than his predecessor. Being better at selling the same basic approach might buy him some time, but it will do little more than that.

Those with the vested interests aren't the ones who should be deciding the rules

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Back in April, Gianni Infantino, the head of FIFA, apparently demanded that the security arrangements for a visit to Vancouver should be at a level higher than that provided for Canadian PM Mark Carney, and at a level normally reserved for the likes of the US President or the Pope. Here in the UK, it seems that Farage has refused the security arrangements he was offered – which are equivalent to those provided for members of the Cabinet and the leader of the official opposition – as being inadequate, and said that his company would continue to provide his security instead. In the case of Infantino, it appears to have more to do with validating his own sense of self-importance than with security; perhaps there is at least an element of the same thing with Farage. Two entitled men with an exaggerated sense of their own importance, seeking special treatment. There is a valid question about what level of security is needed for people in the public eye and how should it be provided and paid for, but, even more importantly – who decides?

People who feel themselves to be under threat naturally want the best security they can get, but are probably the least appropriate people to decide what that level should be. But leaving it to the ‘experts’, which is the obvious alternative, depends on an assumption that those experts really are expert, and don’t make mistakes – an assumption which is necessarily flawed when we’re dealing with human judgement. There isn’t a simple answer (which is not to say that the government will not fall back on its usual simplistic answer to all issues – set up a review). I do wonder, though, whether Farage’s motives are as straightforward as he claims. After all, when public servants are providing security, they are subject to the normal scrutiny of public servants, and it’s more than possible that Farage wouldn’t want the security services, let alone various other authorities in the UK, to know where he was and who he was with at all times. And I really don’t believe that I’m just displaying a naturally suspicious mind by saying that.

He has attempted to turn the issue into a justification for the sort of large individual donations on which he and his company seem to depend. Without such large donations, he seems to be saying, Reform Ltd would not be able to afford the level of security which he deems necessary. It’s a complete non-sequitur – spending millions on security depends solely on the total amount of donations received, not on the amount of each one. It does, though, betray how dependent he is on a small number of enormous donations, underscoring that his company is struggling to attract the larger number of smaller donations on which other parties often depend. It is also, I suppose, possible that the widow giving her mite might just possibly be less happy than one of Farage’s fellow millionaires with her contribution being spent on security rather than electioneering. Or expelling foreigners. But here’s the thing: in the same way that people feeling threatened are not the best people to decide on what security they require, politicians dependent on the largesse of millionaires are not the best people to decide on the rules surrounding political donations.

Being against one thing doesn't mean you support one particular alternative

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One of the features of parliamentary process is that votes on legislation, budgets etc eventually come down to a straight ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Prior debate, both in committee and on the floor of the chamber, offers opportunity for parliamentarians to seek to amend and improve the proposition under consideration, but at the end of the process, nuance, subtlety, and the fact that there may be varied reasons why members choose to support or oppose the proposition are all erased in a simple binary vote.

Whether Labour made the ‘right’ call in this week’s Senedd vote on the supplementary budget is a matter of opinion, and depends on first asking the question ‘right for who?’; what suits the party’s needs may or may not suit the needs of the people. Maybe they were trying to put down a marker about not being taken for granted; perhaps they’re just struggling with the move from government to opposition. Whatever their logic, I’m amongst those who think that they called it wrong on this occasion. Whether the government should have made more effort to get them onboard is another moot point – just as former governing parties need time to adjust to being in opposition, so too former opposition parties seemingly need time to adjust to being in government.

The biggest disappointment for me, however, came not in the vote, but in the aftermath. Voting against the government is not the same thing as voting for the other opposition parties, and Plaid’s repeated criticism of Labour for voting ‘with Reform Ltd’ grates with me. It’s a tactic which has been used by Labour, in particular, against Plaid for decades, especially in Westminster, but it’s a kindergarten approach, and it’s disappointing, to say the least, to see the party which has been subjected to such an approach for so long trying to use the same approach against its former tormentors, rather than demonstrating that the grown-ups are now in charge. There are going to be a lot of votes in the Senedd during the current term, and the combinations of parties voting either for or against a proposition will also vary. Voting the same way as Party B doesn’t mean that the rationale for voting that way is shared, and the suggestion that it does is a dishonest way of avoiding the substance. Resorting to the ‘yah boo’ tactics of Westminster is not a good look.

Joining the Establishment is easy - it's staying out which is difficult

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One of Trump’s imaginary foes is what he refers to as ‘the deep state’, a vast conspiracy which he alone is capable of vanquishing. That there are shadowy forces at work in US politics pushing particular viewpoints is not a particularly remarkable claim, but the idea that it is a coherent and sinister organisation is much harder to substantiate. The biggest proof that it is not is probably Trump himself: he’s both still alive and still in office, neither of which would be likely to be true if the deep state was really all it is claimed to be. Unless, of course, rather than being its nemesis, he is actually its willing tool.

In the UK, we more usually refer to the ‘Establishment’, another shadowy creature, and Farage has chosen to paint himself as its enemy. Its membership is hard to define, but it certainly includes top civil servants, the military top brass, media proprietors, the old-boy network of certain private schools, and the aristocracy. There’s no formal membership, and no-one ever describes themselves as being part of it. It’s neither organised nor coherent, nor does it have a leadership. Traditionally, much of the interaction between its members would have taken place in the so-called ‘gentlemen’s clubs’ of London, in the way portrayed in the Yes, Minister series. Farage himself is a member of at least one such club and regularly uses others for meetings and events. Indeed, by almost any definition one would choose, he is an archetypical member of the Establishment – and the more he denies it, the more typical of its members he becomes.

There is one thing that the Establishment is very good at doing, and that is capturing and absorbing new blood, perpetually renewing itself in the process. People who start out claiming to be rebels or revolutionaries almost invariably end up becoming part of that which they set out to oppose. Titles, gongs, membership of boards and panels all help, but perhaps one of the biggest factors is that life is simply so much easier if people simply go with the flow. Membership – as Farage currently, and Tony Benn in the past have demonstrated – doesn’t require adherence to any particular political viewpoint; the Establishment can happily accommodate them all. It merely requires them to abide by a whole series of undocumented conventions and traditions, most of which serve to protect and prolong the status quo – especially for those who benefit from it. Farage doesn’t (and never really has) threaten any of that. Brexit may not have been popular amongst the Establishment, but it hasn’t threatened their entrenched position, any more than joining the EEC/EU did in the first place.

The challenge for those who seriously want to challenge the way the UK works – a group which most emphatically does not include Farage – is to recognise the ways in which they are likely to get sucked in and resist. The longevity of the Establishment shows how few have ever succeeded.

Could Farage be right about the people vs the establishment?

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Farage presumably thought that resigning and fighting a by-election in which he expected to vanquish all his foes was a wizard wheeze. But then the other parties decided not to play, leaving him to fight a campaign against Count Binface and potentially a few other fringe candidates. There’s something rather pleasing about the man who refuses to play by the rules laid down by others now complaining that the others aren’t playing by the rules he has attempted to set for them.

The pundits all seem to be expecting that he will win an easy electoral victory, albeit one that will prove nothing, and probably leave him facing the same jeopardy. I wonder, though. In the first place, turnout is likely to be low – without other parties campaigning at all, who will be working to get the vote out – and for what? Secondly, in a country where ‘the people’ chose to name a boat Boaty McBoatface rather than honouring official national treasure David Attenborough, is it really too much of a stretch to imagine a victory for Count Binny McBinface, especially if the latter opted for such a scotification of his name? Farage claimed that it would be a fight between ‘the people’ and ‘the establishment’, and maybe he’s right. It’s just that he doesn’t understand that in a fight between these two titans, he – a multimillionaire public school-educated city trader – is the establishment candidate, and McBinface the anti-establishment insurgent. Farage also said that it’s an opportunity for people to stick two fingers up to the establishment – is there anything more likely to have that effect than sending a bin-clad warrior to Westminster? If I lived in Clacton, I’d certainly be tempted – and on a low turnout…

For those of us who see Farage as a danger to community cohesion, bringing his political career to an end would surely be a cause for celebration. And could there be a better – or more humiliating – way of achieving that than seeing him turfed out by a man wearing a refuse bin on his head? Maybe the pundits will be right, but we can surely dream in the meantime.