The Rest Is Politics - 557. Can Burnham Really Deliver Britain’s Biggest Change in Forty Years?

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

Can Andy Burnham, in a single term or less, fix problems like social care that are generations in the making? Is his new push for vocational education a long-overdue fix for Britain's broken skills system, or a betrayal of the working-class kids who have the most to gain from a rigorous academic education? As wildfires tear through France and Spain, have we already passed the climate and nature tipping point? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. __________ Enjoy Rory and Alastair’s interview with Kristrún Frostadóttir, Prime Minister of Iceland, by searching ‘Leading’ on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube. Go deeper into the world of The Rest Is Politics by signing up for our free newsletter HERE, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis and weekend reads from Alastair and Rory. Join The Rest Is Politics Plus. Start your free trial at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, exclusive newsletters, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Stop overpaying for energy. Switch at fuseenergy.com/politics and get a free TRIP+ subscription. 🌏 Upgrade your online protection with an all-in-one security app! Get an exclusive NordVPN deal + 4 months extra here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics. It’s risk free with NordVPN’s 30-day money-back guarantee! __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [e-mail] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith, Caroline Kaye Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Exec Producer: Chris Sawyer General Manager: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Can Andy Burnham, in a single term, overcome problems that he says have been generations in the making? So we're into week two of the Burnham era and the steady flow continues, whether big policy objectives like reforming social care or the smaller policy tweaks on rates, bus fares, electricity bills and the like. This new Prime Minister is clearly not lacking in energy, activity or ambition. Also, he's opened the door to No. 10 North. He's met with President Zelensky. And he's established a very different communication strategy to Kyr-Starma with social media. central to it. And when the New York Times fashion editor is sent to analyze your outfits, I think we can say you're making your mark. So far, so good then. And with Nigel Farage locked in a by-election battle with a bin and reform UK struggling with a host of financial

scandals, Labour have moved ahead in the polls. But announcements are the easy part. Delivery is much harder. And when you're promising the biggest change in 40 years, you're setting high expectations. Today, Annie Burnham has announced a whole new vision for education. Is this the sort of reform that could defy voters cynicism and really change the country for the long term? That's the agenda for the rest of politics today. This episode is powered by Fuse Energy. Right now, Fuse Energy's tariffs are up to £200 pounds below the off-gem price cap. Plus, they've just launched a new referral offer that can bring your bill down even further. What I love is the simplicity of it. If you refer a friend,

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Switch to fuse in just three minutes and move to cheaper energy designed to help you and your friends cut bills. So don't just listen to another price cap story, switch to fuse, save up to £200 and get trip plus free with code, politics at fuseenergy.com slash politics. Welcome to the rest of politics with me, Anastair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. He has sort of, I mean, I hate that cliche hit the ground running, but he kind of has hit the ground running. Every time you turn on the TV, Andy Burnham, this, Andy Burnham, something new. What have you made of it so far? Two big things. I think one is, it's,

It's lovely to see somebody who's a much more fluent communicator. I watched the Laura Kunsberg Panorama interview and was very struck with a way that he dealt much more comfortably than Starma would have done with challenges around, you know, his conversations with Trump and stuff. I mean, it's not rocket science, but Burnham has developed a much more easy way of sitting in his chair and not sounding like he's a sort of reading from a teleprompter. So I think that's great. I think that the bigger issue, I suppose, and he can get a long way on communication.

I mean, I think a lot of the people that we've interviewed and we've liked, on leading have just been great communicators. And let's hope that he's able to get a bit of that energy that we got from Iceland or we got from Greece or we got from Spain or we get from Canada. The second thing, I guess, is dealing with the more fundamental problems than the country. And maybe we've got to the time now that we want to really think about what the big changes would be, what the governing changes would be. So maybe this is a chance to talk about devolution, chance to talk about adult social care, chance to talk. I know you wanted to talk about vocational education, but the kind of big policy changes that Burnham wants to bring, and maybe a little

bit about what he isn't talking about yet. What struck you on the policy side? Just first of all, on your point about the communication, I was struck, you mentioned some of the people we had on leading. I was struck by something that Jeremy Hunt, the former Tory Chancellor and Foreign Secretary said, do you remember he said he wanted Kirstama to succeed, he felt it was important for the country that he did, and we don't want him to be like Donald Trump in terms of lying and bullying and intimidation, but he could actually learn a lot from the way that Donald Trump communicates, being in the conversation all the time. And I think Andy Burnham's decided he is going to be in the conversation all the time. I think on the policy side of things, I spent most of yesterday

afternoon about four hours in a studio talking to Steve Rotherham for a mini-series that we're going to be doing called Becoming Burnham, the Making of Andy Burnham, as it were. Remind us a little bit about who Steve Rotherham is in this book that he wrote with Andy Steve Rotherham is the co-author of a book, Head North. He's the mayor of Liverpool City region, very, very close to Andy Burnham. They left Westminster together, they became mayors together. They worked together very, very closely, not least on some of the policy agenda, but also when Boris Johnson was trying to divide and rule them in COVID, here's more for Liverpool, less for Manchester. They were having none of it. They're very much a team.

But what was interesting talking to him and indeed reading Head North, which I know you've done recently as well, was how a lot of what Andy Burnham is saying now, social care is a good example, vocational education is another good example, he's been saying it for a long, long time. He first proposed major reform of social care when he was health secretary in 2009. It didn't happen. We've had 22 reviews of social care. None of that seems to have deterred from saying, I can be the guy to do this. So there's a thread. And then I think it's the same on education. I have to say that my principal advisor on education policy, Fiona Miller, was really, really happy this morning because this review that he's doing social care today and he's basically done a piece. I think it's in the Times today about

education. But he's signaling a change that Fiona and others, and with my support, have been arguing for for a long, long, long, long time. He did it in Manchester with this thing called M-BAC and Manchester Baccolore. And it's all about trying to raise the status of technical and vocational education and get greater links between education and the real world of employment and business. So it fits very much with the Alan Milburn agenda on a million young people, not in education, employment or training. So I think, and here's one, for you, Rory. As you know, I don't like criticising my old boss, but I think one of the first things that Lucy Powell, the new education secretary, could do, is just dust off a report written 22 years ago,

by Mike Tomlinson, who's the former chief inspector of schools, when David Miliband was school's minister and a brilliant school's minister at that, he commissioned Mike Tomlinson to do a review of the issues that Andy Burnham is talking about now. And maybe David and Mike were just ahead of their time. I'd left at this point. It was 2004. I left in 2003. I think if I'd stayed, I'd have maybe fought quite hard,

because it basically got shelved. I think Tony was obviously weakened by Iraq. He was weakened by the Tories were starting to make the running a little bit. Cameron was making the running on education. And the right wing press were into this. Any change is dumbing down, smashing the gold standard, etc. And obviously the world's moved on in 22 years, but a lot of what Mike Tomlinson talked about is so, so relevant to what Andy Burnham's trying to do now.

Maybe it's a way of structuring the conversation. Why don't we dive a little bit more deeply into this big question of vocational education and what kind of education system we want in Britain. And then maybe after the break, we can return to the other two really big subjects, I feel, which is devolution and adult social care. Digging into this question of vocational training, I guess the backstory to this is that Britain has become aware that it's not very good at vocational training. I mean, there are a few pockets of difference.

But basically we look with envy traditionally at places like Germany or in a very different way, Switzerland, which seems to be much, much better at doing vocational training. And Ken Baker, who you famously love for his great test on local council elections, is always encouraging me to, he's now, I guess, about 90, to talk about his university technical colleges. There was a big drive even under the Cameron government, people like Nick Bowles, very involved in. trying to drive ahead with these new apprenticeship levies and ways that you could get companies more involved in helping people to work. There's a much, much older conversation about when we had a tripartite system of grammar schools, secretary moderns, and whether that was supposed to be a vocational route. But broadly speaking, in Britain, I think the problem is that we have very, very good, very traditional, almost sort of 19th century education, and actually Gove ratcheted that

up. We do do quite well on numeracy, literacy. We have a lot of people going to university. Our universities are very well respected around the world, and we've built a whole series of sectors around elite university education. So that is pharmaceuticals, deep drug discovery, AI, high-end law, finance, all of which are generally graduate routes. But we haven't built what exists very strongly in places like Germany and Switzerland, which is well-respected, well-paid, skilled work for people not going down an academic route. Okay, over to you there, because you've thought about this much more than me, and Fiona thinks about this a lot. You mentioned Ken Baker there, and you say that I think love overstates it, but I certainly respected his political acumen when he managed to

manipulate the median to thinking that one good council election win was, met that the Tories had done really well. I was on a podcast recently for, something called the Careers and Enterprise Company. And I was on with a young woman called Riley, who came from a very working class background in the Northeast. And she said that going to a technical college as set up by Ken Baker had completely transformed her life. And she also said a lot of what the careers enterprise company tries to do is to develop, is to get more kids, particularly from underprivileged backgrounds, into proper work experience programs. And interestingly, in what Andy Burnham's talking about today, work experience is a big part of that.

So I think there's a, you know, Ken Baker, I think is one of those Tories who's got a proper legacy from the, from the Thatcher era. But just to go back to Mike Tomlinson in his review, and it does feel to me like, I said on social care, Andy Burner's been talking about the same things for so long. And Mike Tomlinson, I just had a quick reread of his report. And look, it would have to be updated because the, you know, AI didn't exist, all sorts of other things didn't exist. But what he's basically saying is that we have to bridge this gap between academic and vocational learning and have a single framework.

And I think that if you think at a time when something like 10% of kids are actively not participating in school, don't want to go to school, COVID obviously made this so, so, so much worse. We can't just blame the kids and the parents for that. There's something about the way we're teaching kids that is deterring them as well. And, you know, what's the thing you hear from kids when you do go into school? So, well, I don't see what this has got to do with what I'm going to do in the future. I think he and Lucy Powell are going to have a hell of a fight with the Department of Education.

The Home Office used to be the one that was seen by ministers as, you know, they try and stop you from doing anything kind of radical. I think the Department of Education is slightly taking over that mantle. So there's got to be a big change in mindset and probably change in personnel there as well. because this is a huge cultural change. And I think what Michael Gove did, Michael Gove, whatever we think of him, was a very, very powerful minister.

And he packed the place full of people who share his agenda. And his agenda is basically, you know, kids from poor backgrounds like he was from, you know, fairly tough backgrounds like he was, you know, their future has to be an academic education. And lots of kids don't want that. Gove's case would be that most of the,

very most prestigious, best-paid jobs that exist in our economy. The most productive jobs, the jobs at the frontier require a university education. And he would also point out that wealthy parents, when they're choosing what to do with their kids, put them through a pretty traditional academic education. So if you're a wealthy person with all the money in the world and you're trying to work out what to do best for your kid, you're generally not putting them through a vocational route, trying to get them into university, because I guess the parents believe that teaching them pretty traditional stuff, getting their maths good, getting their literacy good, getting them good GCSEs, good A levels, getting them into a good university is the path to,

you know, work in tech or work in private equity, or work in a law firm, or in general, maybe the parent would say just open up choices for them. They might choose to become a teacher. They might choose to become a carpenter, but they want to give them those options. So Gove's argument would be partly a class argument. He would say, as you say, he came from quite a poor, tough background. He was adopted in Aberdeen. And he would say he was very, very lucky that he was not in an environment where teachers said, well, you know, that's not really for you. But he was allowed to go to Oxford.

And he was able to do these things. And I guess you might make the argument, not not in your generation, but maybe for you over two generations. I mean, you've got to Cambridge and you've had an amazing life. So the question I guess that Gove would pose is how do you know when a, let's say, a 12, 13 year old says, look, this isn't for me, I don't want to keep doing maths, this literacy is boring, I want to just go and get a normal job. are they underestimating themselves? Are they just responding to poor teaching? Could they be pushed harder and actually be grateful for it when they're older? Are people sort of giving up on them and putting them through a vocational route?

And that what it's doing is creating a sort of deeper class division between the elite who are pushing ahead to universities and kind of worker bees who are just at 12, 13, everybody gives up on them and says, well, why didn't you go and do something else? You see, I think it's the opposite of that. I think we already have a sense of two-tier, and that this might be a way to address it, because Tomlinson, and I'm sure that if Andy Burnham goes down a similar modern route for this, it will be the same.

Maths, English, and ICT were part of the baseline for all students. It was a mandatory baseline for all students. So you try to keep standards high on that. You wouldn't say that people could opt out of mass. You'd push them to keep improving their math skills, even if they didn't want to. Correct. And I think a lot of the change in this has come, by the way, from the fact that, you know, kids used to be able to leave school at 16

and now they're going on to 80. And it's, I think, a lot of them in those two years where maybe they would have gone off to be, you know, you were saying electrician, carpenters, whatever. So that's the first thing. But then what you also do is you recognize and build into the system of marking of the diploma that you get at the end of this, work experience, what you do within the family.

So many, a lot of the problem with the, the kids that Alan Milburn talks about, so many kids these days are carers, and also the, you know, volunteering and then specific projects that you do. So what you don't have is such a focus on a single exam or a single set of exams that is going to set your future for the rest of your life. And by the way, I still think that it is important to try to develop and grow the people and the sorts of backgrounds those people come from that can go to university. But I think where I think Andy's absolutely speaking to something is the feeling that if you don't go to university, you are somehow a bit of a second-class citizen. And I just think that's where you create

the sense of two-tier. So I think something that brings these two together, academic and vocational, that both are respected, that both are seen as valuable. And a lot of the universities weren't necessarily like this. Some of them will. And I think the other thing, or are you a big thing AI. I mean, this is the other thing that's just, I think, forcing people to, to recognize the need for change in so many levels of education. I think we've got to change the way they're inspected. I don't know if I told you, I went to a school recently. I was talking to a, you know, a head teacher I know quite well who had just been through the Ofsted process. And he said it came very close to breaking him. And he also said that in the run-up to it, he's conscious

to the fact, you're not really focused on educating the kids. You're focused on meeting this unbelievably rigorous, and it should be rigorous, but quite narrowly focused assessment of what this school does and how it does it. So I think all of these things should be up for grabs. And that's why I think, and related to Milburn's thing. And, you know, what did Alan Milburn show with his neat review? He showed that if you've got a good political mind and a big brain and you dig in and you do the research, you can start a debate going in the country. Tell us a little bit more about neat review. I think many listeners won't really have focused on the outcome of that neat review and what it concluded and why it was interesting for you.

Well, it hasn't yet concluded. It's in two parts. What Alan Bill Burn has written is an analysis of how we have got to a place where a million kids, a million young people are not in education, employment or training. I must give a shout out to the young woman I mentioned Riley on the podcast. She said, I don't like the phrase neat. We should call it. We should call it leit. We're looking for employment, education and training. And then we've rocked it around us. And what about Diet? Desperate. We're desperate for employment, education and training. So Alan Milburn has done the analysis. He's got a big debate going on about how big the problem is. And then he's coming down, I think, in September, in the autumn, with policy solutions. And I think what he's done

really effectively, and this plays into it, is set expectations for big change in a policy approach as well. Next question from me. One of the things I noticed in Cumbria where vocational training was very important. We were not a big graduate economy. But when people talked about vocational training, they were obsessed particularly with very specialized engineering vocational training suitable for the jobs on the Cumbria and West Coast, working, for example, in BAA systems, the defense contractor, building submarines at Barrow or working on the West Coast in the nuclear industry. The vast majority of people in Cumbria do not work in those sectors. And in fact, those sectors often produce quite high paid but relatively low employment around places like Barrow with many people without jobs. Most people in East Cumbria, where I was based, were working in tourism, hospitality, care, retail. And there wasn't much focus on how you did good vocational training for the vast. majority of the jobs. It's like 85% of the jobs, particularly for people who are non-graduates.

Then I spent a few months living in Switzerland. And in Switzerland, that is what vocational training is a great deal about. It isn't about a weird sort of 1950s obsession that everybody needs to work in a high-tech factory. In Switzerland, you have a three-year company-linked proper program on hospitality or on... care. So let's say, I mean, it's the links in child care conversation. You would spend three years learning how to be a really good carer. And every company would have proper trainers, curriculum, follow up, something like 60% of Swiss students go into vocational tasks. So, you know, I've got a friend who's a mountain guide, his daughter is going to become a, she, her ambition since she was

11 is to become an assistant in a dentist. She wants to become a work at the front desk of a dentist, and she's now getting the backing to do that. And the result is in Switzerland, partly through collective bargaining, you have people who are earning decent wages, who have pretty secure jobs, who have a pretty high level of training, and these jobs, which in Britain maybe don't have that kind of income, social capital, in places like Switzerland, in some extent, Germany, you get it with, I mean, often you get a taxi in Germany, you get a sense this is kind of guy earning a decent income, he's driving his Mercedes. So that's what I'm not seeing enough of in Britain. I'm seeing a lot of sort of nostalgia about, you know, maybe we could train people to work on building submarines. I'm not seeing much conversation about the jobs that most people are actually going to do and how we provide proper training for that.

What you've just described, I hope, is what he has in mind. So it was interesting today. Pat McFadden. who I think he's a great guy. Just a quick reminder on Pat McFadden because that's an interesting appointment and he was in trouble with Miliband and his history because he's quite an interesting example of one side of the Burnham thing.

We often talk about it as very soft left and progressive, but Pat McFadden has a reputation of actually being quite more fiscally responsible. Sorry, overdo you on Pat McFadden. Yeah, so Pat McFadden, who stayed in his job at welfare, but he was on the radio this morning and on the television doing the media rounds

talking about this vocational education. And there's two things I'd say. I mean, Pat, who I love dearly, I think he's a great guy and he's been a friend for a very, very long time. But he can sometimes, you know, make you feel that your puppies just died. You know, he can be a little bit, he can be a little bit dad about these. What was he extraordinary about the interview I heard him do with Justin Webb on the Today program this morning? There was a power and a passion and an energy in his voice that sometimes isn't there. And I think it's, and he was speaking, your point about, he was saying, I'm speaking to you from Derby.

because I'm at the Alstam rail building place. And what I'm talking about is making sure that kids in Derby and the school's in Derby, they have the connections. You're absolutely right. So that's an obvious one. Okay. There are certain places that have got particular business connections and it's absolutely sensible that schools and colleges build into that.

But what you're saying is something this has to go national. This has to go nationwide and take account of all sectors. And interestingly, we talked about some of this last week about the Treasury and devolution. And we have, you know, Gus O'Donnell phoned me up after our conversation. And he said, you know, he agreed with a lot of what both of us said. But he made the point that, for example, you were talking about Cumbria and we'd been talking a lot about Manchester. And he said, it's just a fact that entrepreneurs are more likely to gravitate towards places of population and places of entrepreneurial activity. So therefore, your point about agriculture,

hospitality, tourism, the care sector. This is what I mean about changing the mindset about how we think about these things. So if you were thinking about, what you said, if you were thinking about vocational training, these are the sorts of jobs who thinks about, the guy who's building a railway carriage to export to wherever. But actually, building people who understand,

want to work in, want to develop, want to develop as business people as well as just carers, that's the kind of vision that I think he's trying to set out. This is one of the things that I didn't do, very successfully, but I'm struggling with all the way through that book, Middleland, because I'm trying to describe in Cumbria the fact that there's a tension between two different things. One is a very understandable obsession with frontier companies, high-end productivity, high-tech manufacturing, the big growth sectors, the economy. And then the reality, which is

the vast majority of people in Britain, 85% of people in Britain, are working in service sectors, which are not part of that. And they have many other things going on in their lives. I mean, you know, I'm talking to you from Kreef at the moment, and I was trying to think about the economy of Kreef. So I went on a park run on Saturday, which was lovely, well, like 100 people, and there were 11 people volunteering on the park run. I then went to get a bicycle for the kids,

and it's a man not taking a wage repairing. He's a retired school teacher, repairing bicycles. Now, these people are not part of the frontier cutting-end, productive economy. They're not generating the kinds of returns on capital that the Treasury is looking for. And yet they are the entire bedrock of Kreef, right? They are keeping the whole thing going. They're making it this lovely place which allows things like the park run, which have incredible benefits for people. I'm sort of trying to speak not just for Kreef or Kumbria, but I guess I'd also be speaking for coastal towns, a lot of East Anglia. And that's where a proper

Swiss system is really exciting and interesting. Because it's not doing what Germany sometimes looks like it's doing, which is making a big bet on everybody's going to work in Volkswagen and then suddenly working out. Well, that's not going very well right now. Exactly, that your energy costs are too high and the combustion engine isn't working in Chinese competition and then there isn't a job. It's really thinking, how do you across, I think in Switzerland, 230 different sectors provide proper support so that you have people saying, I'm at a lot of you. I'm at a lot of actually very proud to be an assistant on the desk in a dental place or a mountain guide or work in care. Or actually you notice this when you go into retail in Switzerland, go into a swatch shop.

People are very, very proud about their professional skills on how they work with a custom, etc. And so that may not be, you know, the point that you were making about where the most productive bits are, which may be London or Manchester Leeds conurbation. But it is very important for equality, for dignity, for self-respect, for incomes that you build up that whole sector, even if it's not the bit that excites the Treasury. Yeah. You mentioned the Park Run. I remember Pat McFadden telling me that one of his proudest achievements was the growth

of the Wolverhampton Park Run. He's a regular park runner. But I think this point about it being local. I mean, we're going to talk about devolution later, but I think this is something that can't just be left to the big businesses and the big cities. It's about, you know, when Fiona are in France, okay, and let's say you need to call that a plumber or an electrician, they nearly always come with an apprentice. It's just built into the mindset of French culture that if you're a small business person, you can hire somebody that you take on at a, you know, a reasonable wage for somebody who's entering the labour market, and they are your apprentice. Again, on apprenticeships, I think we often think of big employers.

But in a sense, what we need to think about is a mindset. It's, you know, could we all, could you and I take on an apprentice podcaster, you know, George Osborne or John Sopel, something like that? Exactly. But exactly. But I think the final thing I'd say before the break is that if you wanted to really make Britain have something more like a Swiss system, it's a lot of energy, it's a lot of time and it's a lot of money. because you're starting from where we are. And I don't know, I think it would cost you billions of pounds more a year initially. You could get it back, but it'd probably be 15, 20 years.

Small companies, including very small companies, would have to begin to think about how they think about training, supporting the way in which schools work has to change from the age of probably 11 onwards. they have to start introducing people to different businesses, giving them time to go in and do work placements, develop a sense of where they want to do. It's got to be the right thing to do. It's got to be the right thing to do. But I'd be interested maybe in, well, maybe we should get Fiona. Talk about what actually needs to happen, how much it would cost, what the priorities are to make schools and businesses go more in that direction and whether she's talking about a Swiss model or something else. I can't remember what timeline Tomlinson had in his report in 2004, but this is a long-term project. This is not something that's going to be tweaked overnight. And that's why I think it's actually quite exciting that he's thinking these big long-term.

And so, and I think this is something that is going to go with the grain of what a lot of people in schools think, teachers and head teachers. I think it's going to go within the grain of a lot of what parents think. I think it will help kids think, oh, yeah, maybe I would enjoy. school more than I seem to do at the moment. I thought you were going to push back a lot harder from the kind of, you know, very traditional education point of view. So I think even something like you can be persuaded that this is a good way to go, but I think you're right that it's not straightforward, it's not easy and it won't be cheap. And I think the pushback that I didn't give, and it took me a bit of time to get there, is that I think vocational trainings grace his strength

is giving, if it works well, like in Switzerland, dignified, well-paid work to the majority of people, including, as you say, 10% of people who aren't in the workforce at all. And that's a different argument from the idea that this is going to necessarily guarantee GDP growth, frontier companies, much of which is inevitably going to come from the university graduates who are driving the things that are driving the British economy, which are, you know, pharma, AI, tech, banking. So I think, again, and maybe this is where Burnham's saying he's trying to challenge economic models is important. We're saying that vocational training matters because we care about people's dignity, we care about their self-respect. We're not just saying it matters

because it's going to generate more GDP growth. It may be that the American economy grows faster without having good vocational training. But the cost of that is you end up with a lot of people at the bottom of American society in a miserable situation. Okay, well, take a break, and then we'll come back and talk social care and devolution. My name is Peter Parker, but I'm also Spider-Man. This Thursday, we're faced with a threat. That can be anyone. The world may have forgotten Peter Parker.

I'm just a neighbor, friendly neighbor. But he hasn't forgotten them. Sometimes Spider-Man has to do that. the hard thing. That's my responsibility. Dr. Banner? I didn't know you could get that big. Spider-Man, brand new day. In Theaters Thursday.

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intertwine, the line between right and wrong begins to Lur. New episodes week over week. Watch the Hulu original series Furious. Now streaming only on Hulu on Disney Plus. Welcome back to The Restless Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. So, Rory, we talked about his big idea or his big plans for reform on vocational education. And then, of course, he also said, quote, if social care is not reformed, the NHS is going to collapse. Well, that says social care has to be reformed. And as I said, he's been talking about this for almost 20 years. I mean, in a very weird way, the first thing that I noticed is that this social care and devolution stuff was what I came up with when I was trying to work out what I really believed in as I was running for leadership against Boris Johnson.

And I thought was a bit odd. Why in 2019 as a Tory candidate was I saying the number one big thing we need to do? And the story is basically that the NHS was a great revolution, but it was never completed because we never worked out what to do with the poor elderly, who was seen in Cumbria 15 minutes a day by carers and who are imposing living often very, very difficult lives, but also imposing huge costs on the system. And my second thing was devolution, you know,

give power down to local levels. So how did a Tory and a labour person end up in the same place? And I thought there were two things that struck me. One was maybe it's his Manchester side. So I think in terms of my story, it would be my experience working on the ground in Afghanistan and seeing the nonsense being produced from the capital cities or working on the ground in Cumbria and seeing the nonsense being produced from Whitehall. But the second thing is my strongest memory on thinking about prisons and adult social care is your friend Tessa Jal.

And I remember Tessa Jal saying that the big question in politics is, would you put your mother in this hospital? Would you put your mother in this prison? would you put your mother in this situation in care? And I think that is the great question in politics. And then, of course, I remembered that Andy Burnham began as the assistant to Tessa Jelz. Maybe there's a great Tessor Jell story here. So that was the first thing.

And then I thought, okay, here's two questions for you coming out of that. One is, if I was being self-critical, maybe the reason we come up with this is that they are obvious problems in the country. but there are things that are particularly appealing to somebody who's an insurgent outside trying to run against the establishment and that when you get inside, it may turn out to be very different. And the second criticism you might make of us is we're spending a lot of time talking about the vulnerable. So it could be adult social care, could be the homeless.

You know, you've just done this great piece on homelessness in the newsletter. In my case, could be prisoners. But what are Andy Burnham and I not talking about? you might say we're not talking that much about how we're generating the economic growth and the money to fund this whole thing. Okay, back over to you. That's interesting that you sort of see it in that light. And so in a way, you as a conservative coming to the same policy attitude, mindset as Andy, who's clearly not a conservative and is, you know, pretty leftist center. Very interesting as well how he made an appeal that approached to the opposition parties. And Kemi Badnock,

the Troy leader, her response was that she was happy to sit down and discuss this and happy with their approvals, as long as they don't involve changes to tax or extra borrowing, which is a way of saying, which is heartbreaking, because you can't achieve it. And remember that this attempt to solve adult social care was actually what Theresa May tried to make the middle of her campaign against Jeremy Corbyn. And then Corbyn branded it a death tax and basically killed her re-election attempt. The problem always comes down to the funding. And it's awful that when the Tories are trying to do, it, Labor says we're going to oppose the funding. And then when Labor tries to do it,

Tory says we're going to oppose the funding. And of course, Burnham is going to hope that he managed to do what he didn't minister, is that he'll have political skills that maybe Theresa May or others didn't have to reach and cross the aisles. But sadly, maybe the other parties are just not going to let you do that. Yeah. I mean, he said he was going to put whatever political capital I have into fixing broken social care. Well, the political capital regarding this is going huge. But it's interesting how, you know, I discussed this with Steve Rotherham for this series of doing on how Burnham's developed. And Steve Rotherham is somebody who in the book, you remember this, he refused to shake Boris Johnson's hand. He talks openly about how his mother didn't

like him saying, using the word hate, but he hated Thatcher. This is a guy who really burdens passionately against the conservatives. But he said, even he, as Liverpool mayor, like Andy in Manchester, have had to develop a different approach to politics. And it was a way. And it was, was quite interesting when the social care plan in quotes, because there's not much detail yet, was announced. Kemi Badernock said that. So she was trying to get the tone quite nice, but then whack, no more money. Reform, I think it was generic, just came out and did a sort of, you know, classic.

I can't even remember what he said, but it was sort of, you know, up with this we will not put. But the Lib Dems were very interesting. They were basically quite warm, quite positive, let's see the detail, but, you know. So he's definitely trying to get a different sort of political debate. going. And I mentioned in the first half, you know, 22 reviews we've had. The most famous was the Dillnott Review. I mean, which, you know, the Dillnott Review, virtually everybody thought this is a really good piece of work. We should do this. But it fell apart. And that was basically Theresa May's a proposal. Just remind people, one of the central ideas there is that, look,

it's going to cost a lot to fund, at least in the short term. The hope is that if you look after the elderly properly at home, they don't have to go to hospital and that will save a huge amount of money, but in the short-term cost of money. So the idea was you were going to fund it by saying after somebody dies, you can recoup some of the money from the value of their home, not while they're alive. Not while they're alive. They retain their home. But after they die, the government recoups some of the value of their home. And actually, so in some ways, it's a sort of wealth tax. It's got some of the elements of wealth tax. It's combining the fact that a loss of money is tied up in property and the government's facing huge costs. And I suppose the idea is if you're putting a lot of money into

looking after an elderly person, it's costing you a lot of money, to recoup that money after they die, yes, the sad thing is that's at the expense of their children, but it's going to help finance the system. Now, here's another challenge. Theresa May was killed by Corbyn saying death tax and returned without a majority in Parliament. Andy Burnin has an enormous majority. And if he adds the Lib Dems to it, another 70 seats, he can do almost whatever he wants. He doesn't need the cross-party stuff and the way that Theresa May did, who had a minority government. So maybe this is the litmus test for his government. If he's saying he's going to fix it, this is probably the one chance to fix it.

Nobody's going to have a majority like this again in British politics. So you think he could do this even before the next election? He'd have to. It's his only chance to do it, I'm afraid. If he doesn't start doing it in the next few weeks, it's never going to happen. And then, sadly, we're going to say Andy Byrne, it was a nice guy who said the right things, and we all agree, but he didn't manage to do anything. On the BBC news last night, they put up clips of every prime minister in his camera and saying they're going to do this. But he's got the majority to do it.

I mean, this is the one chance to do something like this. Well, he has said he's going to speed forward the Louise Casey report. Louis Casey's got this commission that's looking at these issues again. Well, look, it shows his thing. I was going through, before doing this thing with Steve Rotherham, I was going through all my diaries of all the references to Andy Berlim. And it was quite funny, actually, to see, though. There was quite a lot of me saying, Andy, you've got to get some decent suits. But there's also one point when Ed Miliband lost the election and was stepping down, and it was the second time that Andy Burnham stood for the leadership.

And I was talking to Ed, and he said, he thought Andy was a good shot. This, of course, is when Jeremy Corbyn won. but he said he thought Andy was a good shout because at least he thinks in big ideas. Now then he was probably thinking of devolution, social care, education, and what have you. So he is thinking these big ideas. So you say he's got a big majority to do it. But at the same time, even with a big majority is Kyrs-Tharmaphoned, you have to be able to take the public with you at the same time.

And, you know, so how he develops the arguments in a way that doesn't kill him in the way that it killed Theresa May, as you say. that's the tricky bit, but at least he's starting. So Theresa May managed to do it as a manifesto commitment in an election which he then effectively lost. He's got, I guess, nearly three years in which he can try to get stuff through. The Labour Party, the members of Parliament, the Labour Party, combined with the Lib Dems, there's not going to be enough rebels against a massive change to adult social care to stop him getting the legislation through. Okay.

So there is literally nothing stopping him in parliamentary terms from doing. it. Maybe this is where he implements his removing the whip, removing the whip system. Yes, it's going to be unpopular with the public, but you just have to believe that in three years time, people are beginning to see the benefits of this. Yeah. Well, they're seeing the direction. I think they have to see the direction. Yeah. Well, remember that, I mean, famously thatcher did things that were very, very unpopular with the public, but then were not undone. An example that we had was gay marriage. So when I voted for gay marriage, it was, incredibly unpopular with my local association. People were very angry with me. Fast forward,

nobody's undoing that. And I think the same would be true about social care. If he pushed through, it's going to be very expensive and it's going to get him into trouble in his fiscal rules, but he can do it. He can absolutely do it. He must do it. It would be awful if he says, I'm waiting for, you know, Dame Louise Casey to produce a review and then I'll put it in the manifest over the next election. There's never going to be in a majority like this again. The one thing we know from all our look at these opinion polls is the days of big majorities are over in British politics. So this is the last chance to fix it. Very interesting, yeah.

Well, look, I think this is why people are feeling a sense of greater optimism that there was and greater hope that there was, because we're talking about big things. He doesn't feel defensive about it. I didn't see the panorama, but, you know, you said you watched it and he sounds to me like he wasn't defensive. No. The other point, maybe this is the useful way to flip to devolution. The other point that Gus made when he phoned me up, he said he thought we're a bit harsh on the Green Book.

This is the thing that assesses. He says, actually, it's been rewritten twice in recent years. And he said, the problem is, the Green Book's thought he used. He said, if the Green Book process had been applied to HS2, it would never have happened. So, but he also said, this is, Gus is a treasury man, right? So he's maybe, but he's also, Gus is a great guy and he actually thinks in very, innovative modern ways. He says he doesn't accept that the Treasury is going to automatically be against devolution. What they'll be against, he said, is the risk of local authorities being

able to run what he calls spectacular missions, which go broke. And he also said, another really interesting point you made when you and I were both saying, you know, you want more in Cumbary and we need more local, this, that, the other. He said, you know, the more local you can get, the better, but very rare will be the place that we'll put the hands up and say, yeah, we'd love to have a prison bill here. Or, you know, yeah, we totally accept health secretary that, you know, we need to close down some of these small hospitals. Can we close down ours, please? You know, you have to have a national overlay. So anyway, it's interesting that he, I thought he made some really, really important points. On government and getting stuff done, I wondered whether

the key thing now for Andy Burnham isn't working out what the two questions that every civil servant and minister asks themselves when looking at a policy to think what would the Prime Minister want. So let's say it was Margaret Thatcher, maybe the question would have been, can the market do this? And I wonder whether for him the questions aren't, firstly, the Tessar Jow question, you know, would I put my mother in this institution? The second question on devolution might be, is this something that could be done at a lower level? is there something that needs to be done at the centre? But really getting those two questions up and light so that everybody through the whole system knows what those questions are going to be central.

Maybe I haven't quite got the questions right. No, I know you mean. I know you mean. Just on Tessa, by the way, I talked to Steve Rotherman about Tessa. I made the point, and I think this is right. And Steve agreed with this, that Andy, as it were, doing his political apprenticeship with Tessa meant that his first real experience of Westminster

was alongside a politician. for whom empathy and kindness and liking people were fundamental. There was no faking how much she was interested in people, how much she was genuinely empathetic about other people. And Andy's definitely witnessed that. Just as then he goes on him as PPS to David Blunker, he witnesses extraordinary work ethic and an extraordinary drive, extraordinary determination.

So I think he's somebody who's learned from these things as he's gone. And then the test that you're describing is what the Europeans love to call subsidiarity, which is, you know, do it at the most local level that is humanly possible. So you don't need Andy Burnham to decide when your bins get collated. You couldn't have Camden Council having its own Navy. It's like that has to be national. And then, of course, it's international when you get to the level of NATO. So, and I think that is the best way to think of this.

If you go through all of the jobs that you did in government, if we're being honest with ourselves, did we really operate subsidiarity? No, we didn't. with one of the most centralized countries in the world? Then the question is, can the minister resist the temptation when a crisis happens to pull all the power back into the centre and say, I'm going to fix it from the centre? So maybe Andy Burnham needs to almost say from the get-go, by the way, things are going to go wrong, and I'm not going to bring it back to the centre. When these kinds of things go wrong, I'm going to allow the local councils to fix it. maybe also, this is a horrible word capacity building, but maybe also there needs to be a recognition

that some local authorities are stronger than others. Maybe Manchester is not a model all through the country. So maybe I'm going to choose five or ten authorities, which I'm going to really invest in building up their capacity, along with giving them the power, the tax raising power, etc. That's similar to what's happened with schools, where, you know, weaker schools, learning from better schools, not least by, you know, giving heads who are, in charge of several. So maybe you build up kind of, you know, different relationships between councils as well. Look, I think this, I think this stuff's really, really exciting.

And the point you made there about relationships as well, sorry to sort of, well, no, I'm not sorry, actually, because I think it's going to be really interesting this Steve Rotherham giving his analysis of how Andy Burnham's become the prime minister. But Steve was making the point, when he was the mayor of Liverpool City region and Liverpool got city of culture, Andy Burnham was the Secretary of State for Culture and he said what he you could imagine let's say when Boris Johnson was mayor of London Boris Johnson saw it as part of his

him self-obsessed bit of a narcissist his job in the Olympics particularly once it was up and running was to make it as much about him as he could okay I'm not saying he didn't have a role and his people didn't have a role in making the whole thing come together he did but there were so many people involved in that that had they wanted to could have gone out and say oh I did that I did that

Steve said that what all that Andy Burnham cared about as Secretary of State for Culture, who was going to Liverpool virtually every week, was actually, is this thing running properly? Is this thing happening well? And was perfectly happy that Liverpool and the key figures in Liverpool were, as it were getting all the credit. So I think that sort of sense of the relationship between centre and local, centre and regional, I think that's what we have to kind of rethink. And I do think there are Europe in Scotland. I do think there are lessons in all this for Scotland at the moment as well

because I think one of the downsides, I think there's been a lot of upside to devolution, but one of the downsides is actually that so much of the power has flowed to the centre in Scotland. So the power is in Holyrood. And I think a lot of Scottish local towns, cities and authorities feel weakened by it all. That's the final thing then, maybe before we close. You know France very well, and we are now looking at these completely horrifying wildfires. The reporting, I think there's been good bits reporting, but the basic news reporting just keeps reiterating 250,000 people evacuated fire getting near Bordeaux.

From the outside, it strikes me there's a couple of quite interesting things. One of them is that a loss of the stuff that's on fire is this Atlantic forest planted by Napoleon III. It's commercially managed forest that's felled every 20, 30 years that was on previously Wasteland. And the second thing, I think, I guess it's interesting, is the whole culture of France. and the way in which firefighting operates there, the kind of pride of the fire services, their professionalism, and presumably fights within France

about how much of this forest should be kept, how much revenue it generates, how much it's cleared, etc. Anyway, over to you on the world first. Well, I found the whole thing absolutely horrific this week. Both France and Spain and Scotland and England to a lesser extent, and the Kiengorms, these fires were going for a long time.

Canada truly horrific the fires. One of the most moving things I saw was an interview with a Spanish firefighter who looked charred and sweating and exhausted, and he just looked into the camera and said, anybody who doesn't think the climate crisis is real, come and do this. You come and try and do this job. I really, really do hope. And we've seen straws in the wind.

I thought I don't normally say nice things about columns in the Daily Telegraph. Tim Stanley wrote a piece in the Daily Telegraph yesterday saying, the right needs to wake up and realise this is a real issue, stop politicising it, stop weaponising it. I think that's the first thing. You know, I've watched so much of this coverage, including on French television, and even on French television, it's about the weather, it's about the fires, it's about the stories, it's about the evacuations. The big story has to be the climate crisis. And so I think that's the first thing I would say. The second thing, I think,

in relation to both France and Spain, you know, I love the Tour de France. I was watching the end of the Tour de France on Sunday going through the streets of Paris. And it was just amazing. It's huge crowds, incredible passion, incredible atmosphere. And I had a lot of the I think in the two or three hours I watched it. I think there was one mention of, you know, meanwhile, we should have a thought for the people down in the southwest. It's sort of, I think there's not the kind of national sense of urgency and emergency about it. But the truth is, let's be frank, Rory, we're going to get this year after year after year.

And last year, when we were, when Fiona and I were at our place in France, we had forest fires there two years ago now. Now, we're in a pretty isolated place, but the sight of them rolling through a forest is absolutely terrifying. And we did. We see all these canadares, these planes coming along and dropping this stuff, and then they go off and they pick up another load and they come back and dropping it. But it's terrifying. It's absolutely terrifying to watch. Now, they've actually responded to that, where all the forests got wiped out. They're replanting them, but they're replanting them with quite large gaps between trees. I hope this is wake-up time. I hope this is wake-up time. It's the two things, isn't it? It's the rise and mean temperatures. You know, so everybody's watch. what's the temperature going to be in France today and how firm-bull that makes everything. And then there's the second question in the shorter term of land management, how you plant these things, what kind of things you're planting, how big the firebreaks are that you create,

how you balance very different objectives. I mean, is this forest there for the timber industry? Is it there for biodiversity? Is it there for carbon capture? And actually, there's a lot more disagreement there than we're really acknowledging. It's a policy area. you will find the firefighters, the environmentalists, the forestry industry, all in pretty big tension. I mean, we like to believe that in politics there's a right answer that pleases everybody.

Actually, it can be pretty tough. You could say, in some cases, we're going to create big fire breaks, or we're going to fell these forests, or we're not going to allow this kind of tree to be planted in the future. And that isn't necessarily always the most biodiverse, wild, natural. solution. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn't. But these are really difficult debates which have to happen at the same time as addressing climate change. Because the climate change question, this is a next year question. I was wondering whether your friend, His Majesty of the King, might think about doing a joint visit with his Spanish counterpart to...

Ah. What about that? I think that. Very good. Very good. That will feed that in. That's very good. I think. But I do... It is terrifying. It is terrifying to think that. They'll get it eventually under control. The places where our fires were, I mean, I was out there a few weeks ago down the bike, and you're still looking at charred landscape. And what you've seen just outside Bordeaux and just outside Madrid, I mean, it's going to take years and years to recover from this. It's all very well for people to say, well, we're just going to have to get used to this.

Yeah, fair enough. But, you know, when we talked to Daniel Ergerson, the climate commissioner, he was actually saying we might already be beyond the tipping point. We don't know. And once we are beyond that tipping point, people are going to say, we have to do everything we can to stop this. And we might all end up saying, well, maybe we were just a bit late. If anybody hasn't yet signed up to listen to Caroline Lucas series on the climate, honestly, it could not be more timely. She's done a series of absolutely brilliant interviews who are people who really, really know this stuff.

And it's interesting to watch Caroline, because she's not, you know, she's so passionate about this herself. But actually, she's very, she's just teasing out the argument. She's not sort of evangelizing herself. She's wonderful. I mean, I was thinking about when you were talking about Tessa Jal, how actually just very natural and non-tribal she was and how easy she was to work with as somebody from a different party. The same is true for Caroline. I think these are proper, thoughtful, empathetic people. For Caroline, sign up at the Restless Politics.com.

It's a mini-series on climate, but of course one of many, many miniseries we're creating, because Alice has also been. talking about the Steve Rotherin one and you can pick up on some far past ones on AI or one that I'm about to do on existential risks. So check out restless politics.com and start with Carolina. You better make sure climate's the big one, Roy. I don't know if your climate's a big one. All right. Well, thank you very much. I'll still look forward to regrouping for question time. Yeah. And we're going to talk about India. We're going to talk about this new deal on nukes and the enrichment of uranium between America and Saudi Arabia. we're going to talk about AI and data centres and much else beside.

And we should probably reflect very briefly on Donald Trump's utterly insane speech to the White House correspondence dinner. Very good. So more international question time to do. We've done a lot on Andy Burnham over the last few weeks. So next episode will be quite international. Looking forward to it very much. Thanks.

See you. Bye. Bye. Bye. Hello. This is Saul, David and Roger Morehouse from the Battleground podcast. And we're here to tell you about an exciting new strand. We're bringing out every Wednesday, the big picture.

Yeah, there's a lot going on in the world. at the moment, as we know Ukraine, which we cover every week, but also sort of wider developments as well. So we wanted to have a section where we did interviews with high-ranking individuals, people who can illustrate and inform us of that wider world. Yeah, we all get a fog of information and common, and we want to cut through that to give some real insight about the conflicts and geopolitics that are affecting our world today. And we've got a pretty stellar lineup to begin with, haven't we, Roger? Yeah, I'm just prepping now for an interview with Radek Shikorski, the Polish Foreign Minister.

Poland's very much a big strategic player now in Europe with the Ukraine war as well. So he'll be a fascinating interview. Who have you been speaking to, Saul? Yeah, well this morning I spoke to Al Khan's soldier turned politician who until recently was Minister of Armed Forces but resigned on a matter of principle because he felt the government wasn't committing enough money to keep Britain safe in the years and decades to come and he had some really fascinating things to say. So do listen out for the big picture every Wednesday and also on Friday when we'll be covering

the latest from the Ukraine War and things are really hotting up there at the moment. To find out more, search for Battleground wherever you get your podcasts.