Andy Burnham Will Save Britain — He Just Has to Destroy It First - Konstantin Kisin

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Andy Burnham will save Britain. He just has to destroy it first.

Last Tuesday, Andy Burnham stood up at the Labour Conference in Liverpool and talked for an hour without the usual Westminster anesthetic. He talked about his dad dying. He talked about being the seventh prime minister in 10 years, and what that says about a country that can no longer hold a government together longer than a mortgage fix. He announced a national care service. He told everyone watching that VAT would vanish from their bills by last Thursday, and it did. If you've spent the last decade listening to British politicians deliver focused group slurry, you could be forgiven for being swept away with the enthusiasm. The man can communicate. It would be easy and satisfying to dismiss the excitement his speech has generated by reducing it to R. Andy being good at PR. But let's be honest, Burnham is not succeeding because the public has been hoodwinked. He's succeeding because he's giving the people what they want. Many on the right like to pretend that Britain is a nation of frustrated Thatcherites straining against a socialist establishment. And sure, if you poll the British people in the abstract, support for higher taxes and spending has actually fallen and is at its lowest since 2013

But ask about anything specific and the picture inverts. 72% want higher taxes on the top 5%.

61% will pay more themselves for the NHS.

82% want water nationalized. 76% the railways, including 78% and 66% of reformed voters respectively. The same is true for wealth taxes, mansion taxes, etc. The British public is against tax and spend in general and in favor of it in every particular, which is the single most useful fact in British politics if you happen to be Andy Burnham. He's simply the first politician with the emotional range to leverage this without sounding like he's reading a spreadsheet. So he will get his way and it will not work. It will not work because Britain does not have a distribution problem. It has a production problem. We already have the highest tax burden in post-war history at 36% of GDP, which is set to rise to 38% by 2030, according to the OBR. We are not a low-tax country that has been starving the state. The top 1% of income taxpayers earn around 13% of all income and pay 29% of all income tax.

The top 10% pay roughly 60% of it. Those figures have risen sharply. In 99 2000, the top 1% paid 21% and the top 10 paid 50%.

The British tax system has become steadily more progressive over 25 years. Not less. Whatever has gone wrong, the rich not paying the fair share is not it. Our GDP per capita is lower today than it was in 2007

We're poorer than Germany, Australia, America, Singapore and Switzerland. And we're being caught by Poland. You cannot redistribute your way out of this any more than you can drink your way out of a hangover. Meanwhile, the arithmetic is getting worse on its own. We have an ageing population and a birthrate of around 1.4 children per woman, well below replacement. Every year, more people draw on the state and fewer people fund it. To his credit, Burnham has grasped at least half of this. Ending the triple lock from 2030 is the first honest thing a prime minister has said about pensions in 15 years. And he deserves credit for saying it to a labour conference rather than a think tank. But Burnham plans to use that money to fund consumption, not production.