LATIKA M BOURKE: Nigel Farage meets his match in Andy Burnham

Andy Burnham has turned his back on an era of political incrementalism, presenting a left-wing populist agenda delivered with a hopeful and empathetic tone, constituting Labour’s strongest challenge to Nigel Farage yet.

Correctly identifying the “Britain is broken” syndrome plaguing the country, the new UK Prime Minister told Labour Conference that the working class were not invisible nor powerless, and broke through previous no-go zones, including a daring plan to raid pensions to pay for a new universal social care for the elderly.

“Today we draw a line on a decade of division. We stop doomscrolling on posts running Britain down. And we put the country on a new path,” he said in Liverpool, adding that he wanted the country to “rise again.”

He promised a change to the first-past-the-post voting system, the only electoral method through which Nigel Farage’s Reform could govern, saying it would be a failure of public duty to “open the door of No 10 to a divisive government on 30 per cent of the vote or less”. Labour won its landslide election in 2024 with a primary vote of 33.7 per cent.

The conference gave him the biggest applause when he pledged to reverse former Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s privatisation agenda, saying he was unafraid to place failing water companies back in state control. But he bound himself to current fiscal rules around the level of borrowing, to avoid a shock to the bond markets that would trigger interest rate rises.

He even left the door open to rejoining the EU, as one of several options he intends to explore, to finalise Britain’s long-term relationship with the continent, declaring that Brexit had done “more harm than good”.

Mr Burnham pledged pragmatism in relation to extracting more oil and gas from the North Sea as “we build a bridge to a clean energy future and face the climate crisis,” but said a new publicly funded GB Grid would compete with the National Grid to start breaking the link with fossil fuels and speed up connections to transmit energy from harder-to-reach renewable projects like remote wind farms.

It was daring, it was bold, and it was courageous and exactly the type of vision that voters, who feel that the economic system does not let them get ahead no matter what they do, are urgently seeking.

But it carries enormous political risk. Efforts to overhaul adult social care were consigned to the rubbish bin when Theresa May floated her “Dementia Tax” in 2017. The country has avoided examining how to pay for the care of its ageing society ever since she nearly lost that election to Jeremy Corbyn.

Similarly, the willingness to change how the pension is paid has been totemic. Every leader must commit to not breaking the current model, aptly named the “Triple Lock” as a rite of passage before each election.

He got a standing ovation when he countered the Brexit slogan by saying: “British right talk about taking back control. Never let them forget, they are the ones that gave it away in the first place.”

Alongside his commitment to end homelessness, councils would be given the power to take over privately rented homes that landlords refused to maintain to a satisfactory standard.

On AI, he very much encouraged development and said he wanted Britain to “capture its benefits” and lead as it had done during the first industrial revolution and use next year’s G20, which he will host, to set a global regulatory code.

However when it came to national security, it was a disappointment. Despite all his willingness to fix the big neglected policy areas, defence was notably absent from the list.

He made the usual pledge about supporting Ukraine, he could not do otherwise, such is the public support for the country’s heroic fightback against Russia’s illegal invasion, but he did not mention AUKUS at all.

There was no commitment to lifting defence spending to meet the reckless attacks taking place on British soil that endanger British lives, let alone the geopolitical situation that requires a greater military presence in the near and long-term future.

He very notably expressed his willingness to stand up to any country that posed a threat but only named Russia and Iran, and not China.

He showed he meant what he said when earlier this month he told Prime Minister’s Questions that national security “can’t come at the expense of social security.”

This is one of many new fault lines in British politics that Mr Mr Burnham has drawn.

He has set up a huge battlefront and will spend the next years fighting on multiple fronts: how to pay for these expensive policies; he has not ruled out tax rises; whether nationalisation is the real antidote to the excesses of private companies and reopening the Brexit wounds at the same time as electoral reform could jolt Reform back to life.

But in delivering his speech, Mr Burnham showed that Farage had very much met his match. Unlike Keir Starmer, who Mr Burnham ousted in a coup before the summer, he did not mention his competitors once. Where Mr Starmer seemed in perpetual fright of the populist right and tried to ape Reform on migration and more, Mr Burnham proudly embraced progressivism and established his political territory.

This is the checkmate move. Populism is a formidable, but not unstoppable force. But British politicians, especially Mr Starmer, for too long chose to fight in Mr Farage’s frames of British decline and anxieties over migration.

Mr Farage is far less comfortable when fighting outside that ring. The challenge has always been to force him to exit those issues and fight on issues where he is less comfortable and credible.

Just like Mr Farage, Mr Burnham is a long-term fixture in British politics, first entering the House of Commons in 2001 and serving as a minister in the Blair and Brown governments.

But cleverly, he cast himself, as Mr Farage does, as an “outsider” with a mission to fix Westminster. He said he quit a decade ago because the government could not address the Hillsborough disaster or take on the big challenges such as social care.

“When I asked the people Makerfield to support my return, it was not because I missed Westminster so much. It was to come back to change it. To make politics work for you,” he said.

The left gets a lot of criticism for its reliance on “hopey changey” vibes, and Burnham’s relative silence since wresting the job from Mr Starmer in July until now has fed criticisms that he is a “people pleaser” and “Santa Burnham”.

But his tone and breezy communication style made all the difference. Mr Burnham ditched the lectern and spoke from stage wearing a suit jacket and shirt but no tie. Filled with empathy and warmth, he paused several times and moved his grieving Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband to tears as he spoke of his late father. Mr Starmer could never have delivered such a speech and this will electrify Labour campaigners who now have ideas and a frontman to sell.

And after his debut speech, there is no doubt that he has the ability to communicate and the appetite to fight.

“I accept I may pay a political price. But someone has to go through the pain barrier and rip the plaster (band-aid) off,” he said.

“It’s the leadership I promised you when I asked to be your leader and I will do it.”

In pitching so many big-ticket items, Mr Burnham may have bitten off more than he can chew. But after years of Labour adopting its small-target approach to politics, borrowed from Australia’s Anthony Albanese, being brave will earn him an open mind and ear from the public.

Unlike Mr Starmer, he won’t leave office wondering what might have been.