I know, I know. It’s mostly political theatre. But I can’t help warming to Andy Burnham’s style of government. I almost cheered out loud when he said he was going to make “the hard hat as valued as the graduation cap”.
Far too many young people are being propelled into indifferent universities where they take on life-changing debt in exchange for degrees in whatever-ology that are of little value in the jobs market of today. Meanwhile plumbers and builders earn as much or more.
The humiliation of the graduate precariat explains a lot about the vacuous activism they often engage in. A degree doesn’t confer money or status but if you can talk fluently about intersectional gender theory and spell “simulacrum” you can still feel a bit special.
Super-Northman seems to be making the right noises about the North Sea, social care, welfare, Ukraine and “growth in every postcode”. I realise of course that he’s really just telling us what we want to hear. He has looked at the polls and knows that people like the idea of nationalising public utilities, taxing wealth, ending benefit entitlements and being rational about net zero. That’s why Ed Miliband is no longer Energy Secretary. In due course, though, nearly all of Burnham’s initiatives will run into the sand.
This is because the UK is not only becoming poorer faster than any country in the OECD, it is essentially insolvent. We are £3 trillion in debt and spending twice as much on debt repayments as we spend on defence. That will eventually deflate the Burnham Bounce.
But hey: we’re allowed a bit of naive optimism now and again, aren’t we?
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