To ask if you watched Andy Burnham’s bloody good speech?

[Househunt2026]

As in actually watched it and didn’t just doom scroll the commentary? It was bold and honest and pragmatic and actually made me hopeful that we have someone at the helm with a vision for a better tomorrow who has Britain’s best interests at heart.

The National Care Service is a masterstroke, paid for out of scrapping the triple lock and the very real savings of reducing NHS bills on A&E and hospital beds for elderly who should be in care but have nowhere to go.

Scrapping right to buy and increasing council control of housing, boosting the technical education track for young people, pushing renewables, nuclear and energy sovereignty, public control of key utilities for water to get bills down and reduce pollution, investing in people & getting them back to work, leasehold reform by Christmas and everyone’s energy bill will be reduced by fast tracking decoupling energy prices from global gas pricing and by having no VAT on energy bills by TOMORROW!

You can watch the whole thing here and be directly informed instead of getting your perspective filtered through all the bots and misinformation peddlers online m.youtube.com/watch?v=jyjTT_55Gi0

Agree, he carefully ducked the real issues and bangs on about 10 year plans, which is meaningless. Yes he is a better speaker than Starmer, but that was a very low bar, and it's easy to promise things for 10 years in the future, when you won't be in this job. He has no mandate to be in this position - just as Labour argued when the Tories changed PMs. This should trigger a General election.

That’s how I see it, too.

A big difference.

Careful with those clichés, now. They can make a poster seem unimaginative. Makes a change from "fangirls" I suppose.

Who uses ‘fangirls’?

So in that situation with a major speech to the nation to make, wouldn't it be wise not to mention your father, knowing that it would be likely to make you cry?

Unless you decided that crying would help you achieve your objectives? And knew that you would be able to contain it to just the right level and not mean you'd need to leave the stage to get your shit back together so you could carry on?

It was a choice he made, it wasn't done by mistake, uncontrolled or unexpected.

I'm not convinced that the reception by the public has been very positive, look at the poll at the top of this thread it could hardly have been closer. The best you could say is that it is very weakly positive.
I suspect that positive polls doing the rounds were made in the immediate aftermath of the speech, and before people realised that being put up in a nice care home wasn't what was on offer, rather a few short visits a day made by often poorly paid and trained carers.
Look at popularity in the weeks and months to come and in particular after the budget.

This isn't a thread about support for Labour in general or about post budget responses though, is it? This thread is about responses to the speech, which were extremely positive.
If you believe positivity will wane after the budget or in the longer term, or that Burnham's popularity will fail to translate to support for Labour, you can look forward to enjoying that should it come. Right now we're discussing an event that all measures show has been a positive for the PM.

Fortunately we are probably witnessing peak Burnham. Things might look very different after the budget and following a difficult winter. Let’s hope for an election next year and the public can actually decide what they want. If that’s Burnham, then so be it.

The people taking time to watch are already receptive, they are following a Labour conference and speeches. There were similar threads after Starmer’s speech.

But that simply isn’t true. Responses have not been positive by all measures. There has been a genuine mix of positive, neutral and critical commentary. For example, the triple lock issue has gone down like a shit sandwich in some quarters.

I found this when I was in the party. You have to work very hard to avoid being stuck in a bubble.

With many commentators able to seperate their personal support for policy with an objective assessment of whether the speech was 'good', and being fair enough to acknowledge that it was.
I disagree with 90% of what Badenoch has to say but I'm fair minded enough to admit she is skilled at speaking and has compelling delivery. Many people have been fair to Burnham in this way.

So very kind of you to try to correct my thinking.
I was merely pointing out that the immediate response to the speech was positive but that the speech was misleading. Now, a few days on, the response seems less positive.

Oh give over. You can disagree with me without pretending I'm trying to 'correct your thinking'. Bluntly, my interest in your thinking is limited to the words on the page and the contribution it makes to the discussion. I've no personal stake in you.

I tend to judge a speech on the policy content, or at least the direction of travel, rather than on the ‘performance/delivery’. I think that’s how the OP was also defining a ‘bloody good speech’. I can think of a famous orator who put on barn storming performances, but I’d never describe his speeches as ‘good’. Maybe I just need to separate his policies from his compelling delivery.

The problem with the care proposal is that it delivers extremely limited service at enormous cost and I suspect that’s not what people are envisaging. It will also inevitably run vastly over budget.

He also pre sold it in with some emotive story about a house being sold. The actual policy is vastly reduced, and still expensive.

Well, OP (with all the usual caveats about polls etc), the early signs are the speech has gone down pretty well with the public: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/polls-latest-labour-burnham-brexit-tories-reform-opinium-b3060839.html

It’s obviously impossible to say what will happen to the Prime Minister - and the government’s - standing over the next few months and years. I’m sure he won’t be this popular forever. But as conference speeches go, I think it’s really hard to deny this was a successful one.

The budget looks like it will be kicked into the 2030 long grass, like everything else.

The next three years is looking like an extended probation for Burnham.

He sells everything with an emotive story. It’s like watching an episode of Britain’s got Talent. Everthing comes with some emotional heartbreaking back story. It wins a lot of viewers.

Thanks for sharing the speech OP - I loved it too. It's given me some much needed confidence in the government. I've been impressed with his agenda and ideas every time I've listened to him in fact. I would definitely vote Labour in a GE now he's leader.

Would that be why you were apparently a Labour activist during the “Oh Jeremy Corbyn” years? It’s a hell of a turn around from supporting a leader so red some lifelong Labour voters spoiled their papers to the opinions you’re expressing here.

It probably does but could have a shelf life. If what people remember is the emotional line but the reality is nowhere near.

I supported and campaigned for every leader starting with Neil Kinnock. Some admittedly more enthusiastically than others.

I just don’t think we can wait that long.