A Leader of the Opposition faces two big challenges each year, and nowadays they’re only three or four weeks apart.
On Wednesday 28 October, Kemi Badenoch has to deliver a spontaneous response to Chancellor John Healey’s first Budget. But her much trickier task – perhaps the toughest of her career so far – comes this Wednesday in Birmingham when she has, in effect, to respond to Andy Burnham extraordinary speech to the Labour gathering in Liverpool last week.
The Prime Minister’s speech has been widely acknowledged across politics as one of the most breath-taking, emotional and inspirational conference speeches of the past 50 years.
Badenoch can make highly effective and memorable speeches herself – she showed that last year – but she cannot just dismiss Burnham’s oration as a “return to the 1970s”. That might go down well with the Tories’ very elderly members who recall the industrial strife and regular strikes of that era, but most voters weren’t even alive back then.
Indeed, many of those who were around may recall the decade of Ted Heath, Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan quite nostalgically, as an era of community and well-run public services. A time when gravely sick pensioners weren’t stuck waiting on hospital trolleys in A&E for 48 hours, or when families didn’t have to pay £2,000 a week for their relatives in private, understaffed social care homes; and students didn’t leave university with tens of thousands of pounds in ever-expanding debt and degrees that no longer guarantee a job.
Badenoch may dismiss Burnham’s pledge to bring water and the railways under public control as a reversion to full-blooded state socialism, and warn of the failings of nationalisation – and there was plenty wrong with the old nationalised industries. But simple “control” is very different from hugely expensive and bureaucratic “ownership”. Most voters are fed up with delayed, cancelled and overcrowded privately-run trains, and sickened – sometimes literally – by the sewage pumped into our rivers and seas by water companies whose executives are paid millions in pay and outrageous bonuses.
Badenoch may also be tempted to taunt Burnham over his toying with rejoining the European Union. Reversing Brexit might upset Labour’s traditional working-class voters, but they’re just as likely to switch to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK over the issue as to back Badenoch. More importantly, polls have for years now shown a majority of voters think Brexit was a great mistake. More important still, many of those voters include traditional centrist Tories whom Badenoch needs to win back, especially in southern England.
Her best approach on reversing Brexit would be to focus on the practicalities. Do we really want another long slog hammering out the details of our return to Europe, a process which for five years after the 2016 referendum sucked the blood out of our politics – both in Parliament, and in interminable negotiations with our EU neighbours?
Nor, Badenoch could rightly argue, would Burnham get the financial rebate and treaty opt-outs which Conservative Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major personally negotiated with the EU.
Nor should Badenoch pay much attention to Burnham’s plans for electoral reform, and bring in proportional representation which would make the number of seats held by each party in Parliament more closely reflect their proportions of votes at the election. Electoral reform will never excite the public.
On Burnham’s highly ambitious plans for a new National Care Service, Badenoch has already rejected Burnham’s decision to fund it by scrapping the triple lock – the formula of raising pensions each year by the higher of price rises, earnings or 2.5 per cent, which most economists say is unaffordable in the long term.
The danger is Badenoch will look like she is opposed altogether to any reform of social care. Yet millions of families are intensely worried about what will happen to their elderly relatives, or indeed to themselves if their condition means they can no longer be cared for at home.
Successive Conservative leaders have been committed to reforming social care, but failed – most notably Theresa May and Boris Johnson – and Badenoch has a moral duty to accept Burnham’s invitation to take part in cross-party co-operation, rather than sit back and privately hope the Prime Minister fails in implementing such an important reform. She should announce that with enthusiasm this Wednesday.
There may be little scope in Badenoch’s speech for dramatic policy announcements, beyond traditional conference goodies on tax and welfare.
After Farage has faced repeated questions over his party’s finances and a decline in his personal polling rating, it’s a moment for Badenoch to show seriousness without abandoning her attractive and distinctive sense of humour and fun. She needs to demonstrate competence, integrity and a sense of public duty in contrast to Reform and, in contrast to Burnham, a realism about how much a leader can credibly shower a sceptical public with numerous bribes and vibes all at once.
Voters are fed up not just with politicians who recklessly over-promise, but also with those like both Sir Keir Starmer and Burnham, who put all their thought and effort into winning office and too little serious thought into what they will do with power, and how their plans will be paid for.