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

Andy Burnham stood up at the Labour conference in Liverpool and talked for an hour without the usual Westminster anaesthetic. He talked about his dad dying, about being the seventh Prime Minister in ten years, and about what that says about a country that can no longer hold a government together for 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 have spent the last decade listening to British politicians deliver focus-group slurry, you could be forgiven for being swept away.

Konstantin Kisin, in this solo episode of TRIGGERnometry, argues that Burnham is not hoodwinking the public. He is succeeding because he is giving people what they want. The British public, Kisin claims, is against tax and spend in general and in favour of it in every particular — which is the single most useful fact in British politics if you happen to be Andy Burnham. Burnham is simply the first politician with the emotional range to leverage this without sounding like he is reading a spreadsheet. He will get his way, Kisin predicts, and it will not work.

The production problem, not a distribution problem