It was okay, I thought, Andy Burnham's speech to the Labour Party conference in Liverpool earlier this week. It was fine.

The giddy excitement with which Labour members, and it must be said several sections of the national press, have greeted Mr Burnham’s effort is probably an indication of how low the bar set by Sir Keir Starmer really was.

Mr Burnham’s supporters are attempting to portray the speech as one of history’s greatest orations by one of history’s great orators. It wasn’t and he isn’t. It was okay. But it was not Gettysburg. And he’s not Lincoln.

It was a braver speech, though, than anyone else in British politics today would have given. It indicated that he would follow through on his long-held belief that the first-past-the-post electoral system should be scrapped and replaced with something more proportional. This is the system which returned Labour MPs to two-thirds of Westminster’s seats based on only one-third of the votes, and without it hundreds of the parliamentarians in the hall would be working as press officers for a trade union. Asking turkeys to vote for Christmas and having them cheer you out of the building is quite a feat, and an indication of his undeniable strength.

It also indicated an ultimate desire not just to creep closer to the European Union, but even perhaps to rejoin it. Again, there were dozens of cheering backbenchers who could lose their seats as a result of this policy.

In Liverpool, Andy Burnham set out his vision for Britain — but can he deliver?

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There is nobody more adept at shooting himself in the foot than a British unionist

If SNP want........

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