John Healey cheered the Labour faithful with his first conference speech as chancellor, offering an upbeat vision of a reindustrialised Britain with fresh opportunities for young people, but he gave little sense of how he intends to pay for Andy Burnham’s radical plans.
Healey’s budget next month is widely seen both inside and outside Labour as the moment when the prime minister’s radical rhetoric about ditching 40 years of neoliberal orthodoxy risks crashing into fiscal reality.
With the global bond sell-off driving up government borrowing costs, and eye-watering energy prices likely to push up household bills in the new year, he did deliver some home truths to Labour members and cabinet colleagues.
He deliberately and repeatedly highlighted his role in the last Labour government, as an aide to Gordon Brown, at one point recalling lending Brown a tie to deliver his conference speech, which Healey wore as he spoke in a neat nod to that era.
However, the chancellor cautioned: “The money New Labour had in the 90s is simply not there now.”
“The worldwide economic shocks – conflicts, trade tensions – are felt hard at home,” he added. “Britain has it harder now.”
Like Rachel Reeves before him, Healey sought to argue that fixing the public finances was a precondition for rebuilding the economy. “The rock of fiscal discipline. It underwrites every promise this government makes … we can’t succeed without it.”
Attacking the Conservatives for driving the UK further into the red during their 14 years in power, he claimed that current levels of UK debt were “an assault on our common sense; they’re an affront to our values” – although Reeves deliberately redefined the government’s fiscal rules to allow more borrowing to fund long-term investment, which Healey presumably doesn’t resile from.
Much of the speech hailed the benefits of an industrial renaissance, creating good jobs for young people. An apprentice called Steve, who helped build the new Mersey ferry, had been invited along.
A clearer picture is beginning to emerge of how Labour intends to go about reindustrialisation. Healey highlighted the government’s intention to use rising defence spending to create work in the UK, including through £6bn worth of contracts with British shipyards.
And in a signal of Labour’s intention to devolve more employment support measures, he announced the creation of new local apprenticeship teams, overseen by regional mayors, which will match firms to young people.
“These times demand of us a greater resolve, a greater determination and a greater hope,” he said as he promised to pursue what he called the “moral duty” of finding work for the almost 1 million young people not in education, employment or training, echoing language also used by the work and pensions secretary, Pat McFadden.
Also like McFadden, he highlighted the fact that too many young people were being written off by the benefits system – a heavy hint that welfare reform will form part of the package of changes recommended in the soon-to-be-published Milburn review.
Healey also sought to fill in some of his own personal story to those outside the hall less familiar with a man who, he said, had given his first Labour conference speech a full 40 years ago, in 1986.
He spoke of his wife, Jackie, whom he became engaged with a fortnight after their first meeting at a Labour function, and his first job as a pot washer in a pub, which taught him the joys of a hand-pulled pint.
Yet he threw little light on how he was approaching a budget now exactly a month away, other than to recommit to Reeves’s determination to balance the books, which will take more than optimism and a good story.
