Andy Burnham may have stumbled on the most effective way yet of prolonging Britain’s managed decline: make people feel that something fundamental has changed when much of the machinery underneath has not.
His first speech as Prime Minister was full of ‘common purpose and positivity’, getting Britain to ‘start to believe again’ and ‘bringing back hope’. It would be a mistake to dismiss this as mere presentation. Burnham has understood something important. People are tired of being told, from Left and Right, that their main political duty is to brace for the next disaster. They would quite like to hear that Britain can still accomplish things.
Doom culture has become the opium of our age. It comforts the adult herd, makes ever more control sound sensible and scares the young into buckling up in the back seat instead of yearning to take the wheel
That change of tone matters. In fact, it may matter a great deal. Burnham can make the old model feel more humane, more energetic and certainly more cheerful without changing very much underneath.
If you look past the warmer language, Burnham’s offer remains familiar: stronger public control, state-directed reindustrialisation, 10-year plans and a larger preventative state.
There is a Danish precedent. Mette Frederiksen has become remarkably good at what I call minimum viable reformism: concede enough to show you are listening, soften the roughest edges and present preservation as renewal.
Burnham appears to be working from the same playbook. Managed decline really is easier to sustain when it arrives with personal warmth, regional pride and an invitation to believe again.
That is why the Right would be foolish to sneer. Like Macron before him, Burnham may look like a break with the old order while remaining largely compatible with it.
There are, of course, plenty of things that need fixing. Crime must come down. Borders need controlling. The public finances need repairing. External threats need containing. Yes, yes, yes and yes.
But these are defences. They are not, by themselves, a governing purpose. A Right that defines itself mainly by the dangers it wants to contain risks confusing protection with progress.
Nor will the Right revive simply by becoming the grumpy mirror image of the Left. The Left warns of climate breakdown and democratic collapse; the Right responds by raising the alarm over social disorder, uncontrolled migration and national decline.
Much of that is serious, but for both sides a political trap is attached. If competing mainly over which catastrophe voters should fear most, neither will spend much time explaining what sort of country it wants to build. I am convinced this is a key reason – even the key reason – the Right has failed to pull decisively ahead even as voters are clearly tiring of statist stagnation.
Clacton underlines the point. Farage has retaken his seat, demonstrating once again the power of revolt. But in a contest boycotted by the main parties, it reveals rather less about a positive programme for government. Reform UK know how to give frustration a voice. The harder part is turning that frustration into a believable picture of what Britain should become.
Doom culture has become the opium of our age. It comforts the adult herd, makes ever more control sound sensible and scares the young into buckling up in the back seat instead of yearning to take the wheel. Anyone looking to the future without sounding sufficiently worried must first prove they are not a village idiot.
Yes, Britain’s productivity record is dismal. But that hardly proves we are running out of useful things to discover. To me it points to something more mundane, and embarrassing: institutions that have become poor at spreading, testing and commercialising new ideas.
Europe has found a curious response to its own even worse problem. Instead of asking only how to restore growth, parts of the political and intellectual establishment have begun asking whether growth matters quite so much after all. Tim Jackson’s ‘Prosperity Without Growth’ helped make post-growth economics respectable. The European Parliament later held a three-day Beyond Growth conference, opened by the President of the European Commission.
There is something far too convenient about a continent struggling to commercialise new things developing a language for why weak growth may not matter, because Europe has moved beyond supposedly vulgar American concerns with productivity and abundance.
Meanwhile technology is moving in almost exactly the opposite direction. Artificial intelligence is already accelerating discovery, from protein structures to medicine, mathematics, energy and materials science. The fields feed each other too: AI advances biology, biology inspires computer science and robotics gives intelligence arms and legs. Indeed, the next challenge could be coping with an avalanche of worthwhile new hypotheses – testing them fast enough, rather than struggling to generate them in the first place.
The cost of doom culture is not only economic. We tell young people that democracy is dying, machines are coming for their jobs, the climate is collapsing and Britain has no future. Then we seem puzzled that many are anxious about what lies ahead or reluctant to take risks.
The contrast is interesting. Young AI founders and engineers often seem energised by shaping what comes next; many of their contemporaries are too busy expecting the worst.
Burnham, meanwhile, understands the mood remarkably well. He knows when to drop the solemnity. He can rate crisps in a pub with John Healey without looking as though an adviser has briefed him on how ordinary people behave. Ed Miliband’s bacon sandwich this was not.
That is another reason trying to beat him through grievance looks a poor bet. The Left is comfortable talking about injustice and redress. The Right has traditionally had another advantage: agency, enterprise and the possibility of making things better. When it mainly offers its own catalogue of threats and betrayals, it punctures that advantage.
There is a better way to change the contest: challenge the assumption of decline itself. Take risks seriously without becoming mesmerised by them, while paying equal attention to counter-forces, adaptation and opportunity. Restore the belief that Britain can still build things.
Britain does not need more professional prophets of doom. It could, however, use more reality-realists: people willing to confront genuine dangers without becoming blinded by them, while remembering that the future is also something we build. Preferably before the risk managers at the top classify the whole country as a hazardous site and cordon it off.
Britain needs neither another coat of paint nor a wrecking ball. It needs a proper renovation: keep what works, rebuild what does not. That space between preservation and demolition may yet prove to be the Conservatives’ great political opportunity.
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