Andy Burnham’s speech to party conference yesterday felt truly historic.
Whether you agree with his diagnosis or not, it takes a brave leader to run headfirst into the most fraught debates in British politics.
As it happens, I do agree with his diagnosis. Over the past four decades, our national assets were given away, our economy deindustrialised, political power centralised.
How is the government meant to protect us in these turbulent times, and beyond that enable us to prosper, if it lacks control of life’s essentials?
The results from the free market experiment of the last forty years are in: housing unaffordable, trains delayed and extortionate, waterways filled with sewage, our postal system falling apart. When we should have been investing for success, we have ended up paying for failure.
Should we be surprised? Should we have been surprised when inequality rose through the Tory austerity years? When asset price inflation made the richest even richer, while everyone else bore the brunt of cuts? It was the right that gave away control, despite promising to take it back. Never forget that.
I agree with Andy Burnham’s solutions too. Decentralising power to communities. Restoring council housing. Cheap, plentiful energy. Public control of water and transport. Parity between academic and technical education. Reforming our broken political system. Pursuing a closer relationship with Europe – the only way to truly secure our long-term national security.
But most importantly for me, the creation of a National Care Service. Here is what I wrote on that for my newsletter back in July:
“With my own Father – living alone – having been diagnosed with dementia, Lewy body involvement and Parkinson’s disease within the last two years, I have had to navigate the care system in Wales myself. I firmly believe that, speaking from a position of previous ignorance, it is one of those things that many people – in not having to deal with it – are blissfully unaware of how difficult it is.”
Most assume that the state will pick up the bill for our care when we get old. Too often that isn’t true; the current system is a lottery. Just as Labour tackled the problem of private healthcare by establishing the NHS, so too we will tackle social care once and for all. Doing nothing will only become more expensive as our population continues to grow older.
Should the UK Government do so, with health and social care devolved, the Welsh Government would need to follow suit. Indeed, it was a Welsh Labour manifesto pledge to create a National Care Service for Wales.
As I wrote in that newsletter, if England succeeds in taking adult social care into public control while Wales falls behind, that would be a disaster for my constituents, only compounding our reliance on cross-border care.
At long last, then, there is real ambition at the top. A real plan. It will need support from a public that has been asked, for years, to shoulder ever greater hardship, to pay more for less. I know that is a difficult ask. But without hope, ambition, and solidarity, we – as citizens – will not be properly equipped to each play our part in making Britain the country we all want it to be.
It is achievable, if we hope again.