On Wednesday 9 December, Arguably will host its winter drinks reception in Westminster. To receive an invite, become a founding member today.

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It’s a near iron law that the beneficiaries of any system are usually the last to be persuaded that it needs to be reformed. So when Andy Burnham promises that we’ll get some version of proportional representation (PR), shaped by a new National Commission on Electoral Reform, after the next election, he still faces an uphill struggle convincing his fellow MPs that it’s a wise move.

It’s not hard to see why PR has strategic appeal for him. In a new seven-party era it could consolidate a progressive majority and minimise the risk of Reform or the Conservatives winning with the support of barely a quarter of electors. But a fair proportion of Labour MPs are bound to feel like turkeys who wouldn’t vote for Christmas. This is the Catch-22 of any kind of democratic reform: that it has to be agreed by the very people who’ve benefited from the old system.

And some may argue that a shift to PR is hardly an adequate response to the problems of democracy. In the many countries that use it, pretty much all of the pathologies that afflict the UK also show up.

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When I first entered the Foreign Office as a Labour special adviser after the 2024 general election, I remember a particular moment with retrospective embarrassment. I had seen the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) scheduled for that autumn and imagined it would be a wonderful moment for Labour on the world stage.

In fact, I was suffering from one of the commonest ailments in British foreign policy circles. I was projecting onto the Commonwealth a vision of world affairs rather than looking at the actual summit and organisation itself. And this is common across the political spectrum.

If the pro-Brexit right project a dream of Britain working beyond the EU, regaining something like post-imperial influence through the Commonwealth, I was dreaming of a forum without the United States, where the UK could pursue climate and investment goals unhindered.

The reality I found at the CHOGM 2024 summit in Samoa dashed any remaining illusions I may have had about the Commonwealth as an institution. It is time to admit that the association actively undermines post-imperial comity – its founding purpose.

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Today on Arguably, Glen O’Hara, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Oxford Brookes University, returns to write on solutions to the universities crisis – a story that has been remarkably undercovered by the media.

To read it, become a paid subscriber to Arguably or sign up for a free seven-day trial.

George Eaton, Editor-in-Chief, Arguably

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Britain’s universities are in distress and their painful decline is only getting worse. Several nearly ran out of funding last year and almost half are running a budget deficit. Tens of thousands of jobs have gone, most recently at institutions as different and as far apart as Dundee, Exeter and Hertfordshire. More are on the line. Indeed, the way the system is set up, this debacle can only get worse – until all the gains we have made since the 1990s in widening participation, urban renewal, cultural capital and spin-off growth are imperilled.

Caught in such a maddening bind, it’s tempting to conclude that the situation is beyond repair. But no government can afford to take such a view. Nor are ministers helpless. Given the mix of harm that Whitehall and Westminster have already inflicted, and the lazy neglect that’s caused even more damage, a little diligence and effort should at least make some difference. So what can be done?

First, the problems. The most obvious one is money. Real-terms funding per student has fallen by 35% since 2015-16 as fee levels have stagnated and taxpayer funding has been almost entirely withdrawn (the situation is even worse in fee-free Scotland). If you lose a third of funding, and then squeeze the international numbers that came to make up the difference, you must lose a third or more of quality. Sometimes, policy is simple. But the rot goes far deeper.

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Welcome to all the new subscribers who’ve joined Arguably over the past day. From our archive, you might enjoy our founding essay on how progressives can reclaim the future, our feature on 10 ideas for a radical Budget and Ben Judah on why a good Rejoin deal is possible.

Today, Scottish Secretary Douglas Alexander writes exclusively for us on the Burnham government’s devolution plans for England and Scotland.

George Eaton, Editor-in-Chief, Arguably

A few weeks ago, I stood alongside the Prime Minister in Motherwell for his first major speech in Scotland since entering Downing Street. It was a fitting location, as Motherwell knows better than most what it means when decisions about a community’s future are taken elsewhere, with Ravenscraig’s furnaces going cold more than 30 years ago. This closure set a community back by a generation, and work is still ongoing to fill that site.

The question devolution must answer is who gets to decide what comes next. Andy’s answer was clear. Devolution is the means to an end, not an end in itself.

As someone who campaigned for a Scottish Parliament in my twenties and voted for the Scotland Act as a young MP, I passionately believe he’s right. And it’s also the most valuable lesson Scotland can offer England as it accelerates its own devolution journey.

Next year marks 30 years since Scotland voted decisively for a parliament of its own. John Smith called it Labour’s “unfinished business”, while opening Holyrood in 1999, Donald Dewar called it “not an end: a means to greater ends”. Three decades on, the parliament is a settled part of our national life, as the Senedd is in Wales, and the question is no longer whether power should be devolved, but how far it should travel. This is a question England faces too.

Why does it matter? Because England and Scotland share three stubborn, interlocking problems.

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Ian Dunt is the author of books including How Westminster Works … and Why It Doesn’t and Centrism: The Story of an Idea.

Brexit was the future once. Not so long ago, in a way that feels fanciful now, it stood for a dashing vision of possibilities.

“It’s 24 June, 2025,” the Conservative peer Daniel Hannan wrote in 2016, two days before the EU referendum, lost in a dream-like reverie about his appointment with destiny. He proceeded to make a series of questionable predictions. “Britain is marking its annual Independence Day celebration. As the fireworks stream through the summer sky, still not quite dark, we wonder why it took us so long to leave. The years that followed the 2016 referendum didn’t just reinvigorate our economy, our democracy and our liberty. They improved relations with our neighbours.”

This was just the most evocative of the predictions made by Leave’s figureheads. David Davis wrote that “within minutes of a vote for Brexit, the CEOs of Mercedes, BMW, VW and Audi will be knocking down Chancellor Merkel’s door demanding that there be no barriers to German access to the British market”. Boris Johnson insisted that “British people will still be able to go and work in the EU; to live; to travel; to study; to buy homes and to settle down”. Michael Gove said that “the day after we vote to leave, we hold all the cards”. Liam Fox assured us that a trade deal with Europe would be “one of the easiest in human history”.

The crucial quality of this genre of Brexiter fantasy was excitement. The words associated with this period all had a sense of swagger to them, an invocation of combat and the ocean, with that tell-tale hint of Rule Britannia imperialism. The no-retreat-no-surrender Brexit hardliners in parliament called themselves the ‘Spartans’. Free-market Brexiteers dreamed of establishing ‘Singapore-on-Thames’. Even the term Brexiteer, rather than Brexiter, suggested pirate-like adventurism, sails pulled tight against the wind, driving forward through the waves towards our national destiny. And then, of course, reality set in, as it was always going to.

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Hannah Camilleri writes about culture and performance in Westminster at Soft Power.

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The Chancellor recently announced that he was inviting all Treasury staff to pitch ideas for next week’s Budget. Admittedly, I’m not a civil servant or special adviser, but if I may be so bold: Chancellor, I have an idea – I’d like you to sell me a bridge.

As a reluctant teenager on an open-top bus tour around Manhattan, I remember an endearingly proud tour guide telling us that, because he had bought one whole share in the Empire State Building, it meant he owned a brick in it. The story has stuck with me over a decade later, and although the factual claim of ownership is ridiculous, the emotional ownership that the tour guide felt was entirely real.

There is a lesson to be learned here. The development of British infrastructure is plagued by the fact that we have no shortage of opponents to building but remarkably few organised, vocal – let alone enthusiastic – participants. There are two main opportunities for the public to engage with infrastructure projects: when they are being told how they will pay for them via taxes and when they can speak, or forever hold their peace, via statutory consultations.

Our infrastructure system is structurally excellent at producing objectors (Nimbys), consultees, ‘stakeholders’ and concerned taxpayers but very bad at producing backers. The opportunity to be a participant in public infrastructure is almost nonexistent in the UK – the distinction between a ‘backer’ and a consulted ‘stakeholder’ matters. Just compare the statements ‘my taxes paid for this’ to ‘I helped build this.’ Financially and conceptually these statements are not worlds apart – but they are emotionally diametrically opposed. One signifies extraction and the other agency.

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Today on Arguably, as Andy Burnham approves new North Sea drilling, I assess the state of net zero. To read this piece, become a paid subscriber or sign up for a free seven-day trial.

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For decades, British climate policy was a matter of consensus. This wasn’t just the Ed Miliband show – David Cameron declared “vote blue, go green”, Theresa May enshrined the 2050 net zero target in law and Boris Johnson vowed that the UK would become the “Saudi Arabia of wind power”. Debate between the main parties focused on means, not ends.

But this common ground has now disintegrated. Kemi Badenoch, mirroring Reform’s stance, has abandoned Conservative support for net zero, describing it as “impossible” to meet “without a serious drop in our living standards or by bankrupting us”. In 2025, for the first time in history, the number of newspaper editorials opposing climate action exceeded the number supporting it.

Within Labour, too, debate has become far more fraught. Miliband was routinely briefed against, while trade unions such as Unite and the GMB have long campaigned for new North Sea oil and gas licences in opposition to the party’s manifesto. Working-class families, one cabinet minister has warned, are “falling out of love with net zero”.

Perhaps no policy area is as complex as energy, which is why this debate has become so intractable. If renewables now generate more than 55% of our electricity, why are energy bills still among the world’s highest? Is net zero compatible with the AI revolution and the growth of data centres? Are working-class voters revolting against greenery? Progressives can’t afford to hide from these questions, so in this post I’ll answer them and explain why, amid the fallout from the Iran war, there are some encouraging signs.

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Today on Arguably, James O’Malley, the author of the Odds and Ends of History and the co-host of YIMBY Pod, returns to explain why the left should learn to love driverless cars.

Within the next year, the roads of the United Kingdom could start to look very different. The autonomous vehicle (AV) revolution is very nearly here.

Today, three companies – Waymo, Wayve and Baidu – are testing robotaxis on the streets of London, and there are already thousands of privately owned Teslas across the country that contain the technology required for autonomy, which merely require the regulatory green light to operate in ‘full self-driving’ (FSD) mode. However, even before services have really begun, the technology is already facing a backlash from progressives.

Last month, on the same day that Wayve began taking robotaxi passengers, albeit in vehicles staffed by a safety driver, the GMB union called for the AV rollout to be slowed to better plan for the impact on taxi and private hire drivers. This follows reports from early July that the team around Andy Burnham are more sceptical of autonomous vehicles than the Starmer team were, for similar reasons.

Now I’m happy to acknowledge that in any technological transition there will always be disruption, and that this is something policymakers should mitigate. If autonomous vehicles are as transformative as they are promised to be, there will of course be a significant impact on jobs. But I don’t think this is a good reason to slow down Britain’s autonomous vehicle rollout.

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Last week, Andy Burnham announced that he was working with Google to display petrol prices on the maps application and allow consumers to find the cheapest option before they fill up. This was far from a bad idea – consumer transparency is crucial for a market economy to function. But it was widely ridiculed online and Burnham’s continued reliance on small cost-of-living interventions will eventually be viewed as inadequate by the public.

This disappointment will flow from two facts. First, the limited size of the measures the government is capable of taking (owing to our immensely constrained public finances). Second, the government’s inability, in the short term, to protect Britain from global economic shocks.

And on a more fundamental level, are these small-scale, demand-side tweaks really what a Labour government should be aspiring to? Must we settle for piecemeal interventions which leave the public frustrated and also fail to address the structural weaknesses of the British economy?

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Sam Hogg ran the newsletter, Beijing to Britain, from 2020-2024 and was Head of Policy Engagement at Oxford China Policy Lab from 2025-2026. He is now researching AI risk and biosecurity.

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New frontiers

In November 2023, the world’s two most powerful countries – the US and China – travelled thousands of miles to meet in a centuries-old English country estate at the invitation of a British prime minister. In a room warmed by an old crackling fireplace, Beijing and Washington joined two dozen countries and leading technology companies to thrash out the Bletchley Declaration.

Alongside their fellow signatories, China and the US accepted a shared starting point: advanced artificial intelligence (AI) could create huge wealth and push our species forward. But critically, it could also cause serious, even catastrophic, harm. As delegates began their journeys home, British officials patted themselves on the back. The first-ever AI Safety Summit had been a success.

Why did these two nations – engaged in a bitter trade conflict as the world’s first and second powers – come to the UK? And what can their presence teach us about where Britain positions itself between these powers?

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On 28 October, John Healey will deliver the Burnham government’s first Budget. Advance briefing has promised a “steady-as-she-goes” approach that defers key fiscal choices. This, we believe, would be a missed opportunity for a new administration that has vowed to learn from Labour’s past mistakes.

Below, Arguably contributors and policy experts outline 10 measures the Chancellor could take to boost economic growth, living standards and fiscal stability.

1. Remove the tax cliff edges that penalise work

One of the basic principles of a just taxation system is to incentivise work. Britain, however, has contrived to develop a model unusually good at doing the reverse – at both ends of the income spectrum.

The Carer’s Allowance (worth £4,495 a year), paid to those who spend at least 35 hours a week caring for someone with a disability, is withdrawn entirely if they earn more than £10,192, meaning that a carer able to obtain extra hours, a pay rise or a promotion can be left thousands of pounds worse off.

Meanwhile, someone who earns over £100,000 not only has the personal allowance of £12,570 tapered away, creating an effective 62p marginal rate, but also loses their entitlement to 30 hours of free childcare and to tax-free childcare (worth up to £2,000 per child). The distortions that result are, as the IFS has put it, “among the most severe you will ever see within a tax and benefit system” or, more bluntly, “absolutely insane”.

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After a friend graduated with a first-class degree in Chinese, it took them several months and multiple interview stages to get a part-time job at a local supermarket. At the time I thought that this situation was atypical. Now, the above pattern is playing out across the UK. In 2022, NEET (not in education, employment or training) numbers among 16-to-24-year-olds started ticking up. By 2026, 13%, or nearly one million people, were in this category – leaving the UK with the worst rate of any European country other than Romania.

A good deal of current youth inactivity can be put down to historical macroeconomic factors. Deindustrialisation stripped the labour market of plentiful jobs that a 16 or 18-year-old could walk into out of school. Globalisation then exported many remaining entry-level manufacturing roles to cheaper labour markets. At the same time, rapidly increasing housing costs prevent young people from moving cities for opportunities, especially low-paid vacancies that don’t justify the rise in rent that comes with leaving home.

There is now an expectation that AI will quickly eliminate low-level knowledge work in sectors such as law, finance, consulting and software – resulting in a shrinking of the bottom half of the professional pipeline. Add the UK’s mediocre economic growth rates since 2008, which prevent jobs being created, and you get a perfect storm of NEETdom.

But these global headwinds shouldn’t let the Labour government off the hook. There are dozens of interventions that the Burnham government and businesses could pursue to mitigate the NEET problem.

Employers: the missing piece?

The recent Milburn report argued that we fail young people somewhere in the transition between school and work. But there’s a large omission here: it is taken for granted that employers do not want to, or cannot, carry out the same on-the-job training they provided for school leavers only a few decades ago.

Employers’ retreat from training has created a new burden – shifting costly training overheads from the private to the public sector. Some of this cost now rests on state schools, which are already overstretched by academic demands and behaviour management. Another portion has been outsourced to job centres, which can retrain the unemployed but cannot conjure the vacancies for them to fill.

Lower expectations of in-house training are a boon for big business – companies looking for cheap, disposable workers are now scraping the bottom of the barrel, investing little while claiming to be socially responsible. Nando’s has been offering a GCSE-equivalent “Level 2 Apprenticeship” in hospitality, with school leavers getting the chance to “experience life in [their] restaurants”. The benefit here is that the chain can offer an ‘apprentice wage’ which can be as low as £8.20 an hour.

Apprenticeship providers are usually expected to compensate for this lower pay by offering a chance to learn specialist technical skills, which come with a higher asking price down the line. This isn’t the case here. Few people used to “apprentice” for jobs waiting tables or working a till – until very recently, such jobs were a rite of passage, with a relatively low bar to entry.

Nando’s apprenticeships are at least paid. From October, up to 10,000 NEETs will receive the honour of limited work experience slots at Sainsbury’s stores. It’s no surprise that Labour has hailed this scheme, providing plenty of PR placements for the supermarket in the process. Indeed, the Milburn report doesn’t make much of a distinction between paid and unpaid experience.

There are already far too many stories about vulnerable young people being exploited by the same schemes that are supposed to help them. In 2025, Waitrose generated controversy for denying paid work to a young autistic man in Cheadle Hulme, near Manchester, after he’d already spent 600 hours on placement without pay. Another disabled man completed a nine-month unpaid placement as a binman with Southampton City Council before being rejected for paid versions of the same job.

So far, Labour has been too wary of confronting the big structural issues behind youth inactivity. Milburn has said we’d see a “profound… system reset” with “new approaches” laid out in a final report by the end of this autumn. While we await this, there are a number of smaller policy proposals the government and businesses could look at to improve the situation.

Poor public transport

In many areas of the country, Conservative-era austerity and privatisation policies have eroded people’s ability to get around via public transport. Labour has restored the £2 price cap on bus fares. But shortened timetables and unreliable services often make early-morning or late-night shift work difficult for those in remote or rural areas.

Those seeking to escape their reliance on public transport then encounter a Catch-22 – the prices of driving lessons and learner insurance have surged: the former by 37% since 2020 (from £28.47 to £39 an hour in 2026) and the latter by 27.8% since 2020. NEETs need a car to get to work, but need work to afford lessons and insurance. We’ve had a driving test backlog for six years now, resulting in an average learner needing to book a test five months ahead to get a slot, with no signs of a return to the pre-Covid era. Government agencies could highlight this issue and target investment effectively by devising a British Opportunity Index, tracking job and apprenticeship availability against public transport coverage by postcode.

Labour could also launch an initiative to train more driving instructors and examiners – perhaps even offering an extension of the Advanced Learner Loan to cover the costs of learning to drive in Britain’s most rural and disconnected areas.

Ghost jobs

Almost anyone who has been in the labour market as an active applicant can attest that there are not enough jobs to go around. Even employers with genuine vacancies ghost qualified candidates. No amount of CV-tailoring, work experience, or in-school support will protect NEETs from a basic lack of opportunity generated by an economy that has been in decline, or in stasis, since 2008.

Job boards have a structural problem: aggregators’ profit motives are usually at odds with the common good. The near-absence of regulation on job sites means employers can easily post jobs that don’t exist. The recruitment software company Greenhouse’s ‘2024 State of Job Hunting’ report, based on a survey of applicants across the UK, Germany and the US, estimated that between 18% and 22% of jobs posted on its own job aggregation sites were non-existent when audited.

Jobseeker’s Allowance and Universal Credit claimants are wasting time applying for non-existent vacancies when they could be retraining; government agencies are at risk of misjudging the number of vacancies and distributing investment and training to the wrong sectors that falsely appear to be growing.

We know that at least some ‘ghost jobs’ are ruses to harvest and sell data. We could try to make this impossible: there’s no real need for an employer to collect your telephone number, address and email if they haven’t committed to interviewing you. The data-collection incentive would go away if we introduced a single-point jobs board within the gov.uk ecosystem; employers could send messages to applicants through a secondary interface, with details withheld for privacy and released once a contract is signed.

What can Labour do?

It’s also worth asking whether Labour could divert some of the existing education budget into lower-responsibility, entry-level part-time roles for NEETs. As it stands, the thousands of free workers at Sainsbury’s would still need to rely on government benefits during their time on the scheme.

As a ‘two birds with one stone’ measure, a subset of this group could instead receive a slightly lower benefits entitlement in return for a few hours of paid work a week as teaching assistants, in council offices, in care homes, or in low-risk NHS roles. There are social-democratic precedents for these ideas. During the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration hired millions of unemployed workers to build up America’s infrastructure. These efforts stretched into ‘knowledge work’ and the performing arts, with out-of-work writers, actors and musicians contributing to paid public art and preservation projects.

We also need a serious re-evaluation of the economic policies that have worsened the NEETs crisis. One answer would be to reverse Labour’s employers’ NI rise (for those over 21), perhaps removing the ‘triple lock’ on the state pension to pay for it.

At the time of writing, Burnham is mulling over a youth minimum wage climbdown and PIP (Personal Independent Payment) cuts for under-25s – both of which will expend a good deal of political capital. The Conservative Party, under Kemi Badenoch, is suggesting going one step further – proposing a ban on school leavers claiming Universal Credit at all while halving National Insurance contributions for those aged between 21 and 24.

A safer option for Burnham might be to incentivise on-the-job training. We already have an apprenticeship levy system. But it could be improved. Employers should receive tax breaks for every employee hired on an apprenticeship or graduate scheme – on the condition that companies provide a regulated baseline of training and move trainees onto above-average graduate pay within a set timeframe.

If these transport, advertising and barriers to training disappear, there’s no guarantee we’ll bounce back to a pre-Covid market. We should be asking more of Britain’s employers. Instead, we’re working around demands firms wouldn’t have made a few decades ago. Businesses now feel empowered to put entry-level applicants through multiple rounds of interviews and cognitive tests, to demand experience in roles that are easily taught, and to ask for 24/7 availability, even for part-time shift work.

The Milburn report is a good start, but Labour needs to reckon with generational structural shifts in the employment market. Burnham can, and should, start with the smaller stuff: ghost jobs, poor public transport, employers’ NI – but at some point the party needs a fuller response to the forces reshaping the economy: globalisation, deindustrialisation, automation.

But it’s not all on the government – the market plays as important a part as the state in generating NEETdom. Perhaps retail and hospitality businesses should reflect. Their line of work has always involved a high turnover of inexperienced young people, who won’t have round-the-clock availability and might need to learn on the job.

Must the burden sit entirely with applicants, careers advisers and the government – or is anyone brave enough to tell these employers that they’re asking too much for too little pay?

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Andy Burnham used his recent speech at the UN General Assembly to call for “a single set of global principles and standards” to govern AI. At the same meeting, Finland corralled 22 countries into signing a joint statement demanding AI be kept safely “under human control.”

It is perhaps not so surprising that left-wing leaders, and smaller countries left behind in the AI race, want to regulate technology. But the range of voices calling for regulation is much larger. Ezra Klein, the New York Times columnist and co-author of Abundance, recently came out in favour of a ban on recursively self-improving AI. A few days later, Francis Fukuyama announced that he had “changed his mind” on AI risk, writing that “regulation and a negotiated slowdown in the development of the technology is increasingly necessary.”

In the debate between AI ‘accelerationists’ and AI ‘doomers’, both Fukuyama and Klein appear to have sided with the doomers. But what’s interesting is that neither is a typical doomer: Klein is known for opposing burdensome regulations and accelerating technological development to support economic growth. Fukuyama has also been critical of regulatory constraints on the economy, and admits that he was sceptical of AI doomer scenarios until recently.

What changed? Recent events have rightly spurred calls for regulation at the frontier of AI. But for the UK, the calculation is different. Since we do not have firms at the frontier of AI, unilateral regulation makes little sense. We should instead prioritise model access for the AI Security Institute (AISI), and do everything we can to increase our AI leverage. This means that the optimal UK AI policy, from the perspective of global AI safety, may even look ‘accelerationist’.

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Imagine the scenario. A new prime minister takes over midterm. The ideological shackles are fearlessly cast off, delighting the party faithful. But there’s trouble immediately ahead. War means energy prices are set to rise. The global economy is on tenterhooks. Whatever light there was in the fiscal tunnel now appears to be dimming. A Budget approaches.

Now, snap back to the present. For the above describes not 2026, but 2022. The differences are as important as the parallels. Andy Burnham is not Liz Truss. Not on comms ability, not on understanding Britain, not on fiscal literacy.

As importantly, the Iran war is not Ukraine. The fiscal outlook for the Budget is tough, but in terms of the likely consolidation required it falls short of 2024 – when taxes rose by £40bn – or the gloomy 2022 forecasts that so panicked the Conservative Party.

Yet the question Labour strategists dare not ask is this: might Kemi Badenoch be Keir Starmer? Is she, after two years of patient preparation, finally ready to make her move?

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A new consensus is emerging. Low or even negative net migration is good and what voters want. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood remarked last November, when UK net migration stood at 170,000, that “when I first came into parliament, back in the days of 2010 and onwards, we were talking about migration in the tens of thousands, so I would say it is still pretty high”. The few politicians who do acknowledge the negative implications for national income and tax revenue – a potential £7bn hit to headroom in this month’s Budget – argue that Whitehall can offset them. Foreign workers are now an “addiction,” as Keir Starmer put it, that must be replaced with homegrown employment.

But this consensus has now been complicated by Andy Burnham’s Labour conference speech. In Liverpool, the Prime Minister declared that he would reopen the debate on the UK-EU relationship. Burnham says he will consider all options, from a customs union to the single market to Rejoin. Free movement of people will be the EU’s price for any deal that substantially reduces the cost of Brexit.

This is because the EU remains committed to the policy that all four freedoms of the single market must go together: goods, services, capital and people. Without the latter, British businesses will not gain substantially greater access to the other freedoms. The helpful but minimal UK-EU ‘reset’, which would trade small reductions in trade barriers for a youth mobility scheme, represents the limits of either side’s ambition to date. As a result, the UK is saying ‘no thanks’ to a large amount of potential national income gained through higher trade, migration and investment with the EU.

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Back in 1987, a young Labour MP warned in the London Review of Books of the “tremendous danger” in believing that Thatcherism “is somehow now invincible, that it has established a new consensus and that all the rest of us can do is debate alternatives within its framework”.

That Labour MP was Tony Blair. In the 39 years since he wrote those words, every UK prime minister has dwelt in the shadow of Thatcher’s revolution: her privatisations, deregulation, tax cuts and trade union reforms. “I always thought my job was to build on some of the things she had done rather than reverse them,” Blair later remarked. What made Andy Burnham’s Labour conference speech unashamedly radical was his insistence that he would.

His address was at once anti-Thatcherite and Thatcher-esque, its ideological self-confidence mirroring that of the woman who once declared: “The Old Testament prophets didn’t go out into the highways saying, ‘Brothers, I want consensus.’ They said, ‘This is my faith and my vision! This is what I passionately believe!’”

While Thatcher rolled back the frontiers of the state – the UK accounted for 40% of the total value of all assets privatised across the OECD between 1980 and 1996 – Burnham wants to roll them forward: to expand public control or ownership of housing, energy, water and social care. In short, his mission is to transform Britain into a fully-fledged European-style social democracy.

But in a fraught economic and geopolitical era, that ambition faces formidable obstacles. In this post I’ll explore what Burnham’s speech got right and the areas where greater radicalism is needed – most obviously on economic growth, the factor on which his success may hinge.

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This will be the first Labour Party conference in five years where I do not have a degree of agency over what the leader will say. To which I can only say: good! In fact, to paraphrase Sir Steve Redgrave, anyone who sees me skulking around a Liverpool rehearsal suite now has permission to shoot me.

Still, like any Labour member, there are things I want to see on Tuesday. And chief among them is the hope that Andy Burnham chooses the right cause. By now, he will know that the leader’s speech is quite unlike any other. Defined by its unusual length – around an hour – it is simply impossible to restrain it to one topic. It becomes more like a play, with subplots and a denouement. Or like a body of water, where tributary arguments must cascade into a central river. Crucially, this river cannot be stagnant. It must move and flow, carry people with it, and give the speech its urgency and impetus. And its destination must be the first glimpse of the Britain our prime minister wants to build, illuminated in its most politically attractive and salient light. With the stakes this high, an ordinary argument will not suffice. It must be a great cause.

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In 2022 – my first leader’s speech with Keir – that cause was climate change. The £28bn Green Prosperity Plan captured Labour’s determination to harness state intervention in pursuit of progressive ambition. Meanwhile, last year’s speech was dominated by the fight for Britain’s soul and the confrontation with ethno-nationalist racism. This year, Burnham arrives in Liverpool with no shortage of options, many of them personal. There is his vow to end rough sleeping, his first promise in his first speech as prime minister. There is devolution, the policy ballast which undergirds his narrative of economic rebalancing. Then, perhaps most enduringly of all, there is his long-standing commitment to transform the shameful state of social care in this country.

Such is the time to fill on Tuesday, all three could feature. But if I were him, I would not elevate any of those beyond mere River Gowy status. Because as with so many aspects of being prime minister, the blank page of a conference draft can encourage delusions of untrammelled agency. The truth is this: your causes chose you, far more than you chose your causes. And this year, the cause that has chosen Burnham is the crisis of opportunity for our young people.

The moral imperative is clear. It is utterly intolerable to allow nearly a million young people to languish out of work, education or training when we know how scarring that is for their long-term life chances. But allowing dementia patients to languish in inadequate care homes is also intolerable. Homelessness is intolerable. Britain’s regional inequalities are intolerable. The difference is the politics.

After all, Kemi Badenoch, perhaps now Labour’s main opponent, has made her strategic intentions crystal clear. She will seize on the moral urgency of Chancellor John Healey’s previous calls for higher defence spending. And she will ask again and again why the Labour Party cannot cut welfare spending even when our national security is at stake. I am more than ready to believe there is a compassionate Labour approach that cuts worklessness, not welfare. But we are long past the time when it should have been clearly spelt out. And this is a task only a prime minister can now perform.

Then there is the fiscal arithmetic. We all know the funding settlement is tight in the later years of this parliament. And we all know that yet more tax rises will be an extremely difficult sell to the British people. A significant change in the labour market for young people is, therefore, one of the few ways the government might improve the OBR’s fiscal forecasts. It is vital, not just on its own terms, but for maintaining national renewal rather than decline.

The electoral strategy also stacks up. As many have noted, Labour’s voter coalition is sociologically strained, an uneasy cultural mix of middle-class progressives and more conservative working-class voters. What brings them together is a sentimental connection to advancing working-class opportunity. They either need it in their town now. Or their family history is bound up with its benefits. It is the emotional glue of the party. Nothing moves the conference hall quite like it.

Finally, and most importantly for Tuesday, there is the storytelling. Opportunity issues may score low in salience polling. But as a canvas for talking about the nation’s future, nothing else comes close. Not only that, our young people have been at the sharp end of Britain’s biggest challenges for almost two decades.

The years of Tory austerity redistributed the public realm away from their material interests. Brexit narrowed their horizons. They carried the social contract on their shoulders throughout the Covid-19 lockdowns. They are patient zero for having their childhood contorted by social media. Artificial intelligence and climate change are their problems, far more than ours. And their reward for all this is to become a generation that sees the basic security of a good life – fair pay, a secure job and a good home – move further and further from their grasp.

After all that, can Labour’s offer to the most disadvantaged of these young people really just be welfare? Of course not. And on Tuesday, Andy Burnham should make opportunity his cause.

The announcement this week by Andy Burnham of a new National Centre for Information Defence (NCID) marks an important change in how we think about security and a potentially radical shift towards what I call ‘cognitive rearmament’.

The background to this shift is a dawning realisation that cognitive security can’t be taken for granted. Most would agree that happy and healthy societies depend on people who can think for themselves. Workers who can solve problems. Citizens who can use their votes wisely and can spot lies and deception. Parents who know how to look after their children.

During the last century, there were good reasons to believe that exactly these types of cognitive capacity were improving. IQ was rising, education had become universal, university participation expanded vastly. The world’s science systems were becoming ever more sophisticated and at the end of the century, the Internet opened up all of human knowledge.

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Now, however, while vast sums of money are being spent on AI, which is achieving dramatic improvements in machine analysis and reasoning, there are glaring signs of cognitive regression among people, an unhappy combination of ever-smarter machines and possibly dumber humans who are easier to manipulate.

IQ levels began to reverse at the beginning of this century in some of the richest countries, including the UK, Germany and Denmark. The PISA scores measuring school children’s levels of attainment peaked in 2012 and then started to decline, with sharp falls in reading, maths and science.

The annual Monitoring the Future study in the US found a significant rise in the proportion of 18-year-olds who struggle to concentrate or learn new things, while 25% of adults in high-income countries (and 35% in the US) are now unable to use “mathematical reasoning when reviewing and evaluating the validity of statements”.

These patterns have coincided with declines in everyday civility, including a willingness to listen and learn. In the US, a majority now believe their fellow citizens to be morally bad, which may explain why people move so fast towards angry intolerance.

With this regression come new threats. The spread of misinformation on social media platforms has been well-documented. Large proportions of the population now believe claims – on crime or migration in particular – which are the opposite of the truth.

Meanwhile, cognitive warfare has become a higher priority for states. Russia’s budget for cognitive warfare has been estimated at $2bn, while China’s is near $10bn. The 20th National Congress in 2022 announced an expansion of the “study and mastery of the characteristics and laws of information based and intelligent warfare” with the brain described as a priority for People’s Liberation Army investment and as the “main battlefield” of future warfare. In 2024, after floods killed over 200 people in Valencia, a Chinese operation posing as a Spanish human rights NGO circulated calls for the government to be overthrown.

These moves have prompted responses: Sweden established a psychological defence agency, France created VIGINUM in the office of the prime minister and Moldova set up a Centre for Strategic Communication and Combating Disinformation. The UK has at last caught up with the announcement of NCID.

Yet most countries have been slow to realise just how threatened they are by the weaponisation of collective stupidity, and even slower to understand the parallel effects of the big technology platforms which have incentives to lock populations into addictive, compulsive behaviours, and to undermine their ability to agree on effective laws, regulations or taxes.

In response, our societies urgently need to commit themselves to cognitive rearmament. That will require new institutions and capabilities for defence. But the task goes much wider. It requires nations to put a far higher premium on skills to spot lies, deceptions and manipulations, and to understand multiple points of view, rather than jumping to simplistic but wrong interpretations of events. It means rethinking defence to include both technological capabilities and in-depth strength in the population.

That process of developing robust critical thinking skills needs to start early, in primary school. Finland is a trailblazer and has for several years ensured that young people learn about disinformation. Denmark has done the same. But education is just as important for the adult population and should become a primary duty of public broadcasters.

We also urgently need new institutions to guard against the deepfakes that can easily disrupt elections, and new laws to promote truth and discourage industrial-scale lying. There is much to build on, including courts that see it as their primary duty to ‘ascertain the truth by the best evidence available’, consumer laws which already punish misleading and false advertising claims and the beginnings of serious action to strengthen truth in politics (such as Wales’ 2026 law banning lies in political communication).

Many democracies tried in the past to resist subversion and manipulation. Ancient Athens even subsidised access to the theatre to help citizens gain the skills needed to take part in shared decision-making. Mass education became a priority across the world in the 19th century, from Kerala to Scandinavia, which pioneered extensive adult education – cognitive infrastructures that helped enable the region’s extraordinary social and economic success in the 20th century.

Comparable ambition will be needed everywhere in the 21st century to ensure populations have the skills needed to navigate a world of ubiquitous smart technologies trained on every detail of human psychology, and to spot verbal and visual lies and manipulations.

Taking cognitive rearmament seriously matters for social and political reasons. But it also has obvious economic consequences. Improving cognitive capacity among older people is essential for economic growth, in the many countries with rapidly ageing populations that need to keep a growing army of the over-50s productive. Reversing cognitive decay among young people is equally essential for prospects of future growth.

Meanwhile, new industries will likely emerge around cognitive defence, with plenty of export potential – as every nation comes to realise that cognitive resilience is essential to future security and prosperity. For a precedent, just look at how rising cyberattacks and cybercrime spawned the vast cyber security industry. As defence spending increasingly covers not just drones and missiles but also these less tangible forms of defence and attack, new sectors are bound to grow.

For now, it remains unclear which nations have the foresight and courage to understand the new world we are in – a world which is being rapidly transformed by AI, in which new landscapes of cognitive vulnerability are becoming decisive.

Those that watch these developments passively will look as foolish as nations in past eras that failed to grasp that their old castles and walls, cavalry and cannons, had been rendered obsolete.

Geoff Mulgan is the author of Collective Stupidity, forthcoming from Princeton University Press

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Only the most churlish Starmerite would deny that Andy Burnham’s No 10 operation has got off to a flying start. With deft, swift and optimistic comms, Labour has overtaken Reform in the polls and is well on its way to reuniting the left. Despite this, I feel anxious that a Labour Prime Minister, with the potential to break the curse of fleeting tenures, is going to repeat one of Keir Starmer’s biggest mistakes: not moving far or fast enough on Europe.

During my time as a Foreign Office special adviser, I saw Rachel Reeves eventually conclude that breaking Labour’s red lines on Europe was necessary to achieve higher economic growth. But the window of opportunity had already closed. By the May elections, Starmer and Reeves had missed the political benefits of a more pro-European stance: rallying the Labour base and eroding support for the Greens and the Lib Dems. They had also missed the fiscal benefits of bond markets pricing in a higher growth trajectory. It was only in the dying days of his premiership that Starmer vowed to put Britain “at the heart of Europe” – without anything resembling a plan to do so.

What I fear now is this recent history repeating itself. The risk is that Burnham and John Healey endure a painful Budget, start to lose the party’s enthusiasm and the nation’s support, and only then realise they need to go further on Europe, having laid none of the diplomatic and political groundwork. In this post I’ll set out how they can do that – and why an election with Europe on the ballot is now Burnham’s best hope.

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Announcing his 1988 Budget, Chancellor Nigel Lawson said that “while tax reform is a simple matter for the armchair critic, it is very much more difficult in practice. It is difficult technically and difficult politically — since any tax system, however it arose, creates powerful vested interests in favour of the status quo.” He wasn’t wrong.

In 2026, Andy Burnham is riding a wave of support as voters return to Labour. But the policies fuelling this popularity won’t come cheap and they sit atop the highest interest rates on government debt in nearly three decades. The new Prime Minister will need to find some revenue and, taken alone, his ambition for economic transformation won’t save him.

The fate of Burnham’s predecessors serves as a warning: the bond-market backlash that blew up the Liz Truss government over unfunded tax cuts, and the pre-Budget briefings and U-turns that eroded Rachel Reeves’s credibility for the sake of technocratic tweaks, not transformative change. The new Prime Minister will need to do fiscal policy differently.

Yet proposed Budget measures are already prompting dissent. We see business advisers concerned about capital gains tax (CGT) reform, billionaires reportedly moving abroad to avoid an ‘exit tax’ and landlords opposed to a proportional property tax, while Londoners are warned that such a change could leave the capital paying £7.5bn more. Such groups, with economic and political sway, risk creating a post-Budget storm. The memory of tractors on Whitehall after farmers faced inheritance tax, and the government’s subsequent partial U-turn, compounds the trepidation.

In the Budget, Burnham should push through the noise to deliver meaningful tax reforms. But in the years ahead, Britain needs a more fundamental national conversation about the tax system. How should we get more money into the Exchequer without crushing growth? Who should the tax system help, and who should have to pay more? And how can the government manage the “powerful vested interests in favour of the status quo”?

That national conversation will not happen in the standard Budget process. It will not be driven by the Treasury alone. Instead, disruptive institutional change is needed. Learning from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — both its successes and failures — Burnham needs a ‘DOGE on tax’.

The Burnham bill

Burnham’s bills are not small, and there are no easy options for paying them.

There are the recent cost-of-living measures, including the £100m cut to business rates for pubs and small venues and the £850m temporary removal of VAT on household electricity bills. Burnham also faces an £800m shortfall on council housebuilding and up to £9bn on defence (if the 3%-of-GDP target is to be met by 2030). A 10% increase in the social care budget, meanwhile, would cost £7.4bn.

That is before we account for the rise in government borrowing costs since the last official forecast in the spring — which has more than halved the Chancellor’s fiscal headroom from £23.6bn to £11.6bn — or the hard-to-measure long-term ambitions such as place-based regeneration and reindustrialisation.

Higher public investment could be funded through borrowing, but that risks raising debt interest costs as lenders demand higher interest rates. Spending cuts should play a role, but the political turmoil after the Starmer government’s cuts to winter fuel payments and disability benefits shows the risks. Tax rises will have to lift some of the weight.

Why we need a DOGE on tax

To drive through transformative tax reform, Burnham’s government needs to build legitimacy, embrace disruption, own trade-offs and give reforms the time and expertise to be assessed properly.

David Cameron’s coalition government tried something similar with the Office for Tax Simplification (OTS). The OTS was designed by Chancellor George Osborne as dry, legalistic and politically toothless. Consequently, ministers happily took the administrative tidying-up offered by the OTS, while shelving structural or politically sensitive reforms.

For a lesson on disruptive institutional change, we should look across the Atlantic. Musk’s DOGE lacked depth, running on chainsaws rather than expertise. It alienated staff and claims about its savings collapsed under scrutiny. But as Demos has identified, the federal initiative had real upsides: it challenged orthodoxies, owned disruption and drew on private-sector nous. DOGE posed good questions, but answered them badly.

Calls for a British DOGE have largely focused on spending cuts, but it is tax where the political and institutional barriers are highest — as decades of inertia show.

Tax reforms that make chancellors nervous

Burnham has two promising ways to raise revenue while keeping the bond markets calm. Both, however, have scared off his predecessors.

The first is reforms that improve fairness and efficiency in the tax system — but are undermined by uncertainty about how much revenue they would raise. Successive chancellors have shied away from pro-growth CGT reform, i.e. matching the rates with income tax, introducing new tax-free allowances to encourage investment and removing opportunities for investors to bypass the tax by moving abroad or passing on assets in inheritance.

Despite calls for change from across the political spectrum, uncertainty about the market response stands in the way. Closing the tax break for partnership businesses — which mainly benefits partners in legal, financial or accounting firms — is another missed opportunity. That reform was reportedly set for the Budget last year, but big-business lobbying and forecasting jitters threw it off course.

These are not isolated problems. They reflect a policymaking process in which Budget tax reforms are designed at speed, drowned in lobbying and starved of external expertise, before being cut down to fit an ever-changing fiscal black hole. Rushed forecasts often change as corporate opponents get louder. Too often, the chancellor of the day gets spooked.

The second clutch of reforms is economically obvious but politically daunting. Swapping council tax and stamp duty for a proportional property tax is a clear example. We would end a system in which North East households typically pay council tax at a rate, relative to the value of their house, more than three times that in London, while unlocking 79,000 homes each year by stopping stamp duty from discouraging property sales.

Merge National Insurance with income tax and you level the playing field between employees and other income earners (investors and landlords, for example), while tackling anti-growth tax incentives that favour one kind of income over another. Even a two-percentage-point shift raises £6bn. Fix the way we tax pensions, where the biggest reliefs often go to the very wealthy, and you achieve a fairer intergenerational settlement.

But once again, the barriers are deep-rooted. All these big but necessary reforms have winners and losers, and the latter shout louder. Landlords, pensioners, business owners, investors, high-value homeowners — these groups can make life extremely hard for a government, and IPPR has highlighted pathologies among the public and the press whereby concerns are amplified at the expense of praise. As Demos has argued, the chronic legitimacy deficit for the tax system means every chancellor feels unable to break with the status quo.

Public misunderstanding compounds this problem. As I’ve heard in focus groups, many people assume that pension contributions are fully taxed, so later charges feel like double taxation. It isn’t true, but try explaining that on the doorstep.

The standard Budget process, held tightly within the Treasury, is not fit to tackle these barriers.

The three pillars of a successful DOGE on tax

To effect progressive change in the tax system, and avoid the fate of the OTS, a successful ‘DOGE on tax’ needs to do three things.

First, build legitimacy through public participation, so the government can own the trade-offs. That does not mean discussing the minutiae of tax reforms (which risks triggering a harmful market reaction), but the values and principles underlying the tax system and how they weigh against each other. Labour should be discussing how to balance tax on work vs wealth, young vs old, sector vs sector. Embedding these values into tax policy — and using Burnham’s successful communications operation to raise their salience — would increase the legitimacy of ambitious tax reforms.

Second, be disruptive by design. That means escaping the restraints of Treasury orthodoxy and the Budget policymaking process. It means producing a mandate for tax reform based on first principles, not day-to-day constraints.

The name of the body also needs to be disruptive. Burnham could call the organisation the RESET Unit (Reforms for Equitable, Simple and Efficient Tax) or the FAIR Tax Unit (Fix, Axe, Improve, Reform). Whatever the choice, he must signal that real change is coming.

Third, assemble the expertise that serious forecasting requires. Do the background research needed and get a range of perspectives. With that, create a stable assessment of the expected revenue and the risks, rather than a rushed spreadsheet that changes weekly in the Budget lead-up and prevents chancellors from making a balanced choice.

Burnham should grasp the opportunity of his first Budget to drive meaningful change, but the radical overhaul we need is unlikely. A DOGE on tax may come too late to shape this Budget, but national renewal was never going to arrive in one fiscal cycle. The tax system is the engine that funds everything else Burnham has promised in the years to come. He needs to be brave enough to rebuild how it’s made.