Stephen Bush has a great article out on the FT that compares Burnham’s policy making on welfare to the problems for musicians, what’s top of the pops these days is beyond the tastes and listening of most people. There are people who have bought the record but most people don’t even know the number one.

Most people think they know about pop music but they don’t know what’s going on and live on a hope that music is to their taste. Stephen Bush concludes that for Andy Burnham the problem is not that he’s got a few people buying the record but that most people don’t even know what he’s so passionate about.

Yes, he must persuade people that his preferred solution to the social care crisis is the right one, but, before that, he must reach the large number of people who aren’t even aware that there is a crisis to begin with.

Burnham made sense on  Laura Kuenssberg’s show when he spoke of the recent bereavement and of the experience we have all had of someone close – a friend or a family member, who has suffered the consequences of a slow and horrible financial squeezing that occurs when people needs long-term care. But it’s not something that will happen to us, it’s something that’s another person’s problem

Stephen concludes

Convincing the British public to pay higher taxes for something they wrongly assume the state provides will not be easy

It is much the same for most people who have houses that they own or nearly own because they’ve been paying the mortgage like a tax. The house will settle everything until they find what losing the family’s house is.

These are the choices that we really have. To lose the house or remortgage using equity release, or to rely on the NHS and find that someone really close or even you, are unable to leave hospital because there’s nowhere left to go and no one prepared to look after you,

These are the tough realities that lie in wait, they are not the songs we thought we’d find at the top of the chart, they’re songs that we’ve never heard and find unsettling. We turn away and retreat into misconceptions of what the days ahead will be like.

I worry that we believe that we think pension saving will get us out of this problem. It won’t, it will need increased taxation of some kind that will restrict our capacity to save  (even with tax relief). We are hoping to see pension saving mandatorily increase to 12% (Pensions UK’s number) and that may be more comforting, a song of yesterday.

But tomorrow’s song has yet to be recorded and when Andy Burnham explains what it’s about at the Conference this week, I worry that we’ll go back to the old comfort that the NHS will take care, Government cannot pay for that from its dwindling coffers.