Burnham lifts Labour spirits, but detail lags

Businesses are hungry for answers, pinning hopes on the Oct. 28 budget to show where the PM would spend and cut

• By Elizabeth Piper, Andrew MacAskill and Alistair Smout / Reuters, LIVERPOOL, England

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British Prime Minister Andy Burnham has restored some hope to his governing Labour Party with his vision for Britain, but how the new prime minister makes it a reality remains something of a mystery for businesses, lawmakers and even his most vocal supporters.

At the Labour Party’s annual conference in the northwestern English city of Liverpool, the mood was much more upbeat than the past two years of Keir Starmer’s administration, but there were nagging questions. It remains unclear when Burnham will plot a detailed route and allocate the funds to become the “circuit-breaker” for Britain’s recently unstable politics.

After promising to ease cost-of-living pressures and to spur economic growth through reindustrialization and devolving power to the regions, there is little detail on how Burnham will fund and implement his feel-good agenda in the near term, companies and lawmakers say. They say he is more focused on the future, specifically after the next national election, due in mid-2029.

Even his first conference speech as prime minister, in which he offered an “honest conversation” on the deepest problems afflicting Britain and the trade-offs involved in tackling them, posed more questions than answers on immediate policy decisions.

‘IN A HAZE OF DOPE’

Burnham himself concedes he is boxed in by Starmer’s earlier election promises, limiting not only his room to raise funds for his more ambitious aims before the next national election, but also preventing him from bringing in his own agenda.

“The whole conference feels like it is c,” said one business executive, speaking on condition of anonymity. “It is nice to be here. But it feels like everything is moving slowly.”

“The frustrating thing is some big ideas are being thrown about, but we don’t know enough about how they are going to work.”

Companies, which paid about ￡6,000 (US$7,924) to attend Labour’s business day and the wider conference, and lawmakers, nervously eyeing opinion polls, want answers — how will the government cut energy costs, borrowing and welfare, and is there money to spend on defense, health and education before the next election?

Burnham has promised to set out a 10-year plan later in the year, and has pushed back one major commitment — the reform of social care — saying he would only present proposals at the next election, due by mid-2029.

However, after offering some short-term “breathing space” to Britons struggling with cost-of-living pressures, Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade has failed so far to offer, particularly to businesses, a blueprint of the government’s investment strategy and its plans to deliver lower costs.

The scale of the problems facing Britain has created some sympathy for Burnham, the former mayor who had been in parliament just a month when he became prime minister in July, after Starmer resigned earlier than expected.

Labour lawmaker Alex Sobel told Reuters Burnham had been dealt some of the trickiest challenges of any prime minister in modern history, including the rise of AI and wars in Iran and Ukraine pushing up Britain’s energy prices.

“You can’t say you have had three months, and everything should be sorted by now,” he said.

However, that understanding has its limits and the bounce in the opinion polls since Burnham took power could soon disappear.

John Curtice, Britain’s best-known pollster, said Burnham’s five-point bounce was very similar to that enjoyed by former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown and former Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson when they took on their roles mid-term.

Both lost their jobs about three years later.

“Things are better, but the party needs to do much more to win the next election,” Curtice said.

CLEAR SIGNALS

That means supporting businesses still angered by the tax and wage increases brought in by Starmer, and offering a clear signal about which sectors will benefit from government spending so they can increase investment.

One attendee of Labour’s business day on Monday said while the access to ministers was the best they had ever had, the real test would be the budget and the 10-year plan. They remain desperate for policy details.

However, Burnham must also convince voters he can ease cost-of-living pressures such as energy bills over the long term, start a mass house-building program and deliver higher defense spending and jobs, all without diverting spending on Britain’s struggling public services, such as health.

Businesses and lawmakers hope for more clarity in British Chancellor of the Exchequer John Healey’s Oct. 28 budget, although his conference speech suggesting it would be business as usual made some worried that he was not yet ready to grasp the nettle.

“The grit is going to come,” said Claire Ainsley, director of the Project on Center-Left Renewal at the Progressive Policy Institute and a former Starmer adviser.

“The things that it’s going to take to reboot the economy are not necessarily the things that Labour members want to do,” Ainsley said.

At least eight Labour lawmakers canvassed by Reuters said that if the government fails to deliver, that could hand power to the populist Reform UK party, led by Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage.

The removal of Starmer for the more popular Burnham would have been all for nothing, one said.

“We have to deliver. We have no choice,” Labour lawmaker Chris Curtis said. “That is why we have to be bold and come up with solutions to those challenges.”