You can’t put houses and hotels on certain squares on the Monopoly board. Even that foldable bastion of capitalist endeavour recognises that some things – energy, water, transport – should be at least partly immune from market forces and the reckless pursuit of profit.

Andy Burnham that he intends to reverse almost 50 years of British political travel away from this simple truth and bring national necessities closer to national ownership. I think we can all agree that he is going to have his work cut out.

If a week is a long time in politics, then 10 weeks constitute an aeon. And yet two-and-a-half months into Burnham’s premiership – already longer than one of his recent predecessors managed, as he waspishly reminded Conference yesterday – the waves of hope and optimism on which he came to power remain improbably high.

It was an impressive, often inspirational speech, notable as much for what was much mentioned: social care, Neets, housing, electoral reform and the Burnham family history – as for what was barely: immigration.

Yet if he is to succeed in changing the national conversation in the ways that he described, it is the final issue, nodded at towards the end of the speech in an uncharacteristically mealy-mouthed fashion, that will demand the most urgent attention. In short, if he can’t break the stranglehold that usually false impressions of immigration have on our discourse and our politics, then he won’t be able to do any of the things he dreams of.

The reasons for this are both emotional and intellectual.

Emotional, because whenever he asks voters for the funds needed to redraw the social contract and rebuild our social capital, most obviously through housing and a new social care service, bad actors and populists will be queueing up to claim that any money raised will in fact be squandered on undeserving recent arrivals. They will be lying, of course, but exactly the same people were also lying (or at least hideously wrong) when they said that, in no particular order: Brexit would make us richer, Boris Johnson would be a brilliant Prime Minister, Liz Truss was an economic genius, and Donald Trump would be a loyal and doughty ally of the United Kingdom. And they won, albeit sometimes very briefly, all of those arguments.

Intellectual, because the peremptory praise lavished on Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood for reducing immigration struck, for me, the only sour note in a speech that otherwise delivered on its opening promise of honesty.

It was, for example, reported this week that the falling net migration numbers that Burnham celebrated could cost his Chancellor, John Healey, as much as £7bn in fiscal headroom. That’s up to £7bn that would otherwise have been available for spending on all the visions so powerfully detailed by the Prime Minister.

And he will be aware of how these numbers were arrived at.

First, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (a proper “think tank”, as opposed to one of the secretly funded right-wing lobby groups that rejoice in the same title, congregate around London’s Tufton Street, and still inexplicably get invited to contribute to economic discussions everywhere from the BBC down) has calculated that the “success” of migration-cutting reforms introduced by the last two governments – one Tory, one Labour – could cost Healey about £4bn.

Then, Government sources told that the real figure could be closer to £6.5bn, because the Office for Budgetary Responsibility’s net migration forecasts tend to be considerably higher than the actual figures.

It means that we have become a country where almost everybody (including Andy Burnham) celebrates falls in net migration while simultaneously ignoring the fact that it is biting big chunks out of the money available for public spending insisting that more money must be found for public spending. That, remember, is why the Prime Minister has pledged to abolish the pensions triple lock.

Shabana Mahmood, meanwhile, gives every impression of remaining committed to a programme of apparent appeasement. I am in no position to lecture her, the English daughter of Pakistani parents, on the realities of racism. But I would cautiously suggest that depriving the Treasury of desperately needed funds, in the hope of assuaging the carefully stoked and profoundly ignorant anger of “anti-immigration” voters, is a fool’s errand. Not least because one of the most potent weapons deployed by the politicians and commentators stoking that anger and ignorance is to blame the perceived paucity of public services on immigration.

In many ways, Burnham managed to have his cake and eat it, and I feel almost churlish for raining, even lightly, on a political parade that managed to be both historically ambitious and profoundly moving. But having made a magnificent fist of telling truths that the party faithful were aching to hear, he will now have to master the art of telling the country some truths that they don’t want to. And fast.