Burnham to Promise an End to 'Politics as Usual'
The Prime Minister uses his first conference speech as leader to argue that the country cannot continue as it is. “Politics-as-usual has taken Britain backwards,” he will say. “More of the same isn’t good enough and isn’t going to get us where we need to be.” He will announce a publicly owned Great British Grid, the first state player in electricity networks since privatisation, and set a goal of matching European energy costs within a decade.
The speech is built on a claim about honesty rather than a list of gifts, which is a risk at a conference: “hope comes from honesty and from saying the things politicians usually avoid”, and he will offer “a more serious prospectus for Britain than people have been offered in a generation” while conceding that “people will not agree with every part of it”. The thing he is avoiding naming is how a free social care service gets paid for. Some estimates put it at £18bn a year, nothing changes before the election, Baroness Casey has yet to report, and ministers have pointedly refused to confirm that the pensions triple lock will be in the next manifesto. Economists have already floated scrapping it to fund care, and Reform has pre-labelled the whole project a death tax. Watch whether he mentions the triple lock at all.