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

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 anaesthetic. He talked about his dad dying. He talked about being the 7th Prime Minister in 10 years and 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've spent the last decade listening to British politicians deliver focus 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&D 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% won higher taxes on the top 5%. 61% will pay more themselves for the NHS. 82% won water nationalized 76% derailways, including 78% and 66% of reform 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 and 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 age in population and a birth rate 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 labor conference rather than a think tank. But Burnham plans to use that money to fund consumption, not production. He is reshuffling the deck, not printing more cards. There is precisely one way out of the demographic trap and that is productivity. Fewer workers producing dramatically more value per hour. That requires cheap energy, aggressive adoption of technology and an economy in which work pays and the people who could be working actually are. Now look at what we're doing instead. We have the most expensive industrial electricity in the developed world because of net zero targets, nobody can afford and nobody voted for. Instead of looking to the US, which is streaming ahead to win the AI race, we followed the European model whereby we regulate AI before we have any AI worth regulating. And most damning of all, there are a million young people in this country aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment or training. 58% of them have never had a paid job. And how have we responded to this? By importing millions of people to do the work and paying our own young people to stay at home and rot. We have built a system in which a young British man is the problem and a young foreign man is the solution. The decisions that led to this were rational. The employer who needed a shift covered this month, not a trainee next year. The Treasury official who scored an immediate taxpayer against a deferred return. The minister who had a shortage to fix before the figures came out at up 30 years of reasonable short-term thinking and you arrive at a country that imports its workforce and warehouses at young. So, Burnham will spend, taxes will rise, growth will continue to stagnate, the debt will spiral out of control, and the whole thing will end in the kind of humiliation that lingers in the national memory for a generation. I don't want this to happen. It will be terrible, but I have resigned myself to the conclusion that it is the only way to save this country in the long run. Because there's no argument that will break Britain and Europe out of the ideology we're trapped in. I've made the arguments. Many better people have made them better. It changes nothing because the belief that prosperity is something you allocate rather than something you create is not a proposition. It's an article of faith and faiths are not refuted by evidence. They're refuted by failure. Someone has to run the experiment to its conclusion, and the Burnham has volunteered. He may well be the most useful prime minister of my lifetime, just not in the way that he intends. If you enjoy these videos, remember that they're available as articles at constantincution.com. Days, weeks, sometimes months ahead of time. So head on over to www.constantincution.com right now and subscribe. As you know, I've been concerned about both the economic and political direction of travel of Western countries in recent years. That being the case, I'm keen to protect my family in case things continue to get worse. That's why I'm making sure to keep a portion of my savings in gold. The reason the price of everything continues to go up is that governments keep printing money. When they do, inflation is inevitable. What does inflation mean? It's just a fancy word for the value of your money being diluted over time. This is what's happened to the value of the dollar in our lifetimes. 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