Healey needs to cut welfare. But he's learnt from Starmer's failures

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

55% : If you have any doubts that Labour under Mr Burnham is looking at reversing Brexit, listen to the point made by his chancellor.
46% : In his speech to conference, Mr Healey notably pointed to "Boris Johnson's Brexit" as a reason why this government does not have the same amount of money that New Labour did when he was a minister in Gordon Brown's Treasury.
45% : One minister told The Independent: "I never understood why Keir did not present it as a £20bn increase in welfare because the £5bn was only a slow down of the rise." That certainly may have helped him avoid the catastrophic defeat that he suffered at the hands of rebelling Labour MPs who forced him into a U-turn which eventually saw his government unravel as he lost authority.
45% : But he pointedly talked of a smaller welfare bill.
44% : For Mr Healey and others, it is the confidence of talking about the failure of Brexit.
43% : That seemed apparent today as chancellor John Healey gave a masterclass in Burnhamist leadership style when he retabled welfare cuts in front of the Labour conference.
41% : Ministers in Mr Burnham's government are talking privately about how they know they need to get the welfare budget down without publicly talking about cuts.
41% : He also attacked the Liz Truss mini Budget, but there is a growing confidence among Labour ministers to talk down and attack Brexit.
30% : What Mr Healey and Mr Burnham are keen to do is avoid the mistakes made by Sir Keir's government which was forced into a humiliating retreat on welfare reform because it was packaged as a £5bn saving at the behest of Ms Reeves.
22% : That will allow him and his boss to tackle thorny issues like welfare reform and Brexit in a period where they have no money to play with.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.