Article #38163

Torsten Bell says Labour manifesto ‘did not set out the timeline’ for changes to living wage after scale of youth unemployment crisis revealed in Milburn report

Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor and Labour candidate in Makerfield, has also published his response to Tony Blair’s essay about Labour and its future, as an article for the Times. Like the other mainstream Labour figures who have responded to the former PM, Burnham commends Blair for opening up a debate, agrees with him on some points, and declares that his views are worth taking seriously.

But, like Starmer (see 11.10am) and Wes Streeting, Burnham argues that there is a big gap in Blair’s analysis.

As I read on, I kept waiting for the main topic of conversation on doorsteps in Makerfield to make an appearance. And it never did. The fall in the living standards of millions, and the reality that life has got harder for most year on year since the financial crash in 2008, is, I believe, the gaping omission in his analysis.

This has been the single biggest driver of the turmoil in politics he describes and the cratering of support for traditional parties of right and left, here and around the world.

The Labour government in which I was proud to serve did many great things. It did not, however, take us off the direction set by Thatcher. For instance, the failure to reform right-to-buy and fully restore the public housing stock is the root cause of today’s housing crisis. Similarly, acceptance of the deregulation and privatisation of essential services is the same for the cost of living crisis.

This has given us 40 years of neoliberalism and the simple truth is this: it has not been kind to communities in Makerfield and those like them across the UK. Trickle-down economics did not in the end trickle down very much at all.

The secret to our success is setting a unifying long-term vision for the city-region that all sectors can get behind. It’s the polar opposite of the Westminster culture. Where they do point-scoring, we do problem-solving. Where they do party-first, we do place-first. We have built a pro-business approach and a new political culture that could be part of the forward plan for the country, a more collaborative politics in Westminster creating a stable platform for some of the long-term structural changes the country needs. In other words, a new politics to build a new economy.

Ditching the manifesto commitment to an equal living wage for employees of all ages would be a betrayal of young workers.

Young people are far too often expoited as a source of cheap labour as a consequence of the lower statutory national minimum wage rates for their age group.