Seventeen years ago, before the financial crash and Brexit, before Britain jumped on the dizzying merry-go-round of prime ministers, an earnest young Labour minister argued that too many people were trapped on benefits, and that the majority should attend job interviews. In his 2008 white paper, this work and pensions secretary offered welfare recipients “a fair deal: more support, in return for higher expectations”. This quid pro quo had always underpinned the welfare state, he said, quoting Herbert Morrison: over the howls of the left. 

That man, James Purnell, is now set to become chief of staff to Andy Burnham. His appointment is one of several encouraging signs that Labour’s heir apparent will staff his government with experienced grown-ups who are also realists. Welfare reform of the kind Purnell proposed is even less popular with the Labour Party now than it was then. Nevertheless, it offers the faint hope that Burnham may lean into the old communitarian idea that citizens have responsibilities as well as rights. 

This matters, because society is becoming corroded by a sense that some people are getting away with it. Politicians accepting freebies, GPs signing people off work, taxes rising but services floundering, public money wasted on grandstanding public inquiries and flawed procurement.

Labour ministers often talk as if public disillusionment is all about the cost of living. But it’s also about a growing belief that government is not on our side. A whopping 44 per cent of Britons think that “the government does not respect people like me at all”, according to polling last month by More in Common. More people now say that both Reform UK and Greens are more likely than Labour to “respect people who work hard” and “respect people who do the right thing”. 

The next prime minister has to turn this around, not just for their own survival but to repair the unity of the country. Empathy would be a good start and Burnham certainly has that. But as Sir Keir Starmer prepares to leave office, it’s hard not to see his legacy as one long vendetta against strivers: farmers, employers, landlords, army veterans.

Tone alone will not put things right. The UK is sagging under thickets of compliance. One of Starmer’s best lines was his pledge for politics to “tread a little lighter on people’s lives”. Two years on, the country is reeling from a tidal wave of new taxes, employment rights, judicial reviews and restrictions on landlords so fiddly that those who haven’t yet sold up are paying managing agents. There are more ways than ever in which honest folk can fall foul of the state. 

Take my window cleaner, who recently bought a computer because he was so spooked by the government’s monstrous new scheme, “Making Tax Difficult” (sorry, “Digital”). He and his elderly father have been faithfully dragging their ladder and buckets down my street for 30 years — they’re so trustworthy that you can give them your door key. But HMRC is making sole traders like them buy third-party accounting software, file digital receipts and submit quarterly tax returns instead of one. He was so terrified of getting it wrong that he shelled out for a laptop that he didn’t actually need. 

MTD is a classic example of over-reach by professionals who are divorced from the real world. Again and again, such people help politicians to impose ever more complexity. The UK tax code has reached 22,000 pages. Wanting to serve your community as a volunteer can mean you have to pay at least £21.50 for a criminal records check, often £49.50. The Equality Act is being used to fine retailers like Next for paying warehouse workers more than those in shops, despite staff preferring to work in the shops. Meanwhile public sector regulations leave good staff torn between actually helping people and staring at screens. As one prison officer said to me recently, “if we ticked all the boxes, we’d never do the real job”. 

When government spends our money to make our lives harder, the social contract starts to fray. A kind of zero-sum resentment can set in. The More in Common respondents tended to think that government was favouring the rich, or asylum seekers, or welfare recipients — depending on their politics. This is ripe ground for populism. 

Boosted by his by-election victory in Makerfield last week, Burnham will seek to unite the left against Reform UK. But instead of just railing against Nigel Farage, he must listen to what those who support it are saying. Parts of the political class, and the media, have patronised and dismissed those voters for decades, in the run-up to Brexit and ever since. It’s easier to portray people as casual racists than to acknowledge that globalisation hasn’t worked for everybody, that neighbours resent those they suspect of benefit fraud, that the arrival of small boats has been a monumental state failure, that antisocial behaviour and mass immigration have genuinely affected communities far from metropolitan London. Hardest of all for Labour MPs is to admit that the state is often an enemy, not a friend, with very different values to many of their constituents. 

There’s a hole in our politics where trust used to be. We desperately need economic growth, on which Burnham is worryingly vague. But we also need governments which treat taxpayers with respect. The Christian socialist R H Tawney warned of “the breakdown of society on the basis of rights divorced from obligations”, something which Tony Blair used to quote. Government has failed when honest taxpayers feel that working hard and doing the right thing makes them mugs.