A Party Without A Plan

Burnham enters Westminster and is set to become PM, but rather than a vote on vision, his potential premiership is a validation of vibes.

The soldiers in the trenches used to sing about the staff officers playing leapfrog in the chateaux miles behind the lines. As they died in the mud, the staff sat safe playing games for career advancement. It wasn’t entirely fair. The determination to win was clear in every historical record.

I wish it were true in Westminster today. For the fifth time in 10 years we will have a new Prime Minister, without an election, in a party coup that people have no say in. Meanwhile, our country is being disarmed, and its people are getting poorer.

These games give a lie to the political cynic’s line that politicians know what to do but just don’t know how to get re-elected if they do it. The truth is simpler, and starker. No one has set out a real agenda for government in a decade. We’ve just had swings between managerialism and radicalism; the first without a purpose, the second without plan and we’ve ended up like a pilot on autopilot – asleep and dropping slowly into the see.

Even when there was supposed to be a battle of ideas, those ideas were meaningless. In 2017 we were offered Brexit means Brexit, a tryptic of tripe. The only real idea, social care reform, was dropped the moment it met the public. In 2019, the line was simpler still: I really mean it about Brexit. Again, once that was done, there was no agenda for change, no mandate for reform, and Covid sent everything haywire. Then in 2024 we got one line: we’re not the Tories. Ok, so what? What are you planning for the country. Again, there was nothing about the country we need to rebuild.

It’s hardly surprising that the reaction to purposeless managerialism is to crave a wrecker, but that’s just swapping a flood for a fire. The manager has no purpose: the radical has no rules. It’s like being led by a lazy general who uses sweeping gestures without understanding the implications or the details. As the army puts it: big hand, small map.

Andy Burnham’s vibe-based victory is just that. He has fought his way back into Parliament not with a programme but with a mood. He will turn the tide, seize the change moment, and scale something he calls Manchesterism to a whole nation. Ask for the route and you get silence because he’s no idea what the trade-offs are, or the real destination, and has no notion of the ground he has to cover.

Soldier don’t trust idle commanders. They cost lives. The amateur talk of moving a hundred miles before lunch without the professional understanding of the ground that will bog the vehicles, the treeline that hides the enemy, the bridge that can’t take the weight, and the basic questions of food and fuel. Wars aren’t won by the sweeping gesture but the careful plan set out in advance, the same is true of a country.

In a democracy the whole country needs to know the plan. We can’t just order the bond markets, whatever Labour MPs think. After all, they’re lending us their money and they don’t have to. We can’t order investment or growth. That happens when you set out a plan people understand and stick to it. And people will only go along with it, by turning up to work, investing in the future, training for the new economy, if they feel part of it. That’s why democracies are, or should be, a battle of ideas.

That’s not what’s happening now. Or has been happening for a while. Instead we’re seeing a coronation with the only electorate being a tearoom tribe. This isn’t a battle of ideas, it’s a popularity contest, well even school councillors have to set out a longer manifesto that the Labour leader.

Keir Starmer may have removed the last of the hereditary peers from the House of Lords but the whole of Westminster has turned into an aristocracy. Strip the ideas out of politics, reduce it to charm, and settle things among ourselves and we have become not tribunes of the people but a court, a witan electing a regent from the council of earls.

Burnham would be the seventh prime minister in barely a decade, the latest to take power promising new vibes with old votes.

There is an alternative to these purposeless princes and unplanned radicals and its emerging from the oldest democratic movement in the world. Kemi Badenoch, with less ego than the self-righteous left, and less fanfare than the welfare-right is setting out more than a direction, a plan.

Going line by line through the tax bill and the government spending, Badenoch is cutting 47 billion named and costed pounds from a bloated civil service, and a welfare system that treats a quarter of adults as disabled. She’s set the direction to a smaller state and is working through the ditches and treelines that will stop her.

For now, she’s the only one doing the work. Labour wants the state bigger; the Liberal Democrats want it wetter; the nationalists don’t care so long as it’s theirs; and Reform, beneath the insurgent costume, just wants to spend more. They’re each arguing who should wear the crown, only Kemi is asking to shrink it.

It’s essential we have this debate now. We can’t go round this buoy again hoping to get a different answer. Because the truth is, it doesn’t matter who wears the crown if they haven’t got their party onside and the country understanding the direction of travel.

The men in the trenches knew exactly what the staff officers’ games cost them, so do the voters. We all know a democracy demands a choice of ideas, put honestly to the people, not a crown passed round in private while we all get poorer. For the first time in years, one party is drawing the map, the rest are still playing games.