A Design for Life

Hear me out: It's not just the economy, stupid.

Keir Starmer resigned on the morning of 22 June 2026, the seventh PM in 10 years to wander up to the lectern and announce that it was always about putting the country first. One day later it was exactly ten years since the referendum that took Britain out of the European Union. Nobody arranged the synchronicity of those two dates, or apparently found the timing of it newsworthy, and yet it was difficult to ignore it. A decade that began with the largest act of macro-economic self-harm in modern British history ended with yet another Prime Minister walking back through the famous door to wait for a successor because, bluntly, people don’t feel their lives are getting better. The last time a PM was elected by the public at an election and then sacked by the public at a subsequent election was over 50 years ago.

Brexit is worth pausing for a moment on, because it is one of the cleanest example of the thing I actually want to talk about. It was sold as a big, life-defining moment of the expression of individuality and sovereignty that can be made by every proud Englishman - and yes, I have chosen that word deliberately as the packaging of it was very much about a specific identity group. Yet at the most practical level, Brexit arrived in our towns and cities as self-inflicted economic stupidity rarely seen in any western democracy. It made the average citizen measurably poorer, stripped away rights they already held, and added cost and friction to ordinary life, while opening handsome new opportunities for any multinational that could afford a customs department and a tax lawyer. It belongs to a way of governing that has had the run of the country since at least 1979, organised entirely around the investor, the shareholder, the quarterly figure, and the lines on a chart which lobbyists manipulate so they miraculously always point upwards all the time. Within that type of politics, the one that has dominated the country my entire adult lifetime, the market is sovereign and there’s no such thing as society. It is built on the trickle down economics assumption that if you get the big numbers right the small ones look after themselves.

Here is what half a century of that assumption has produced: The market did not bring down the waiting list. It did not fill the pothole on your road. It declined, repeatedly and at considerable length, to put clean water in the river or in your tap. Rents climbed past what wages could carry, the weekly shop became a source of real anxiety, the bus stopped coming, the library closed, the dentist stopped taking NHS patients, and the daily experience of ordinary life in Britain curdled into a quiet suspicion that the whole arrangement had been built for somebody else. None of that is fixed with a number on the BBC News that says that GDP grew by whatever microscopic percentage was meant to fix those things, because actual people, you, me, and just about everyone I’ve ever met, and certainly everyone I would ever choose to spend any time with, do not live inside statistics. We all live on a street with a hole in it, where the music venue on the corner closed down in a year where the billionaire owned media would have you believe that things just keep getting better and better.

Which brings me, with a stringently measured and heavily restricted optimism, to Andy Burnham.

The case for Burnham, such as it is, is built almost entirely from the small stuff, which is exactly why in that world of macro-economics it is potentially interesting. He spent the better part of a decade as Mayor of Greater Manchester doing the unglamorous, relentlessly micro work that no national media headline rewards with positivity. He took the buses back into public control through the Bee Network, the first English region to do it since deregulation in 1986, and the fares came down and the routes came back. He made rough sleeping a believable personal cause rather than a flash-in-the-pan press release. On grassroots music he has been remarkably consistent; as recently as April 2026 he was calling it “a huge part of our identity” and putting the fans who sustain it “at the heart of the conversation.” A Conservative MP recently dismissed him as Keir Starmer with a Northern accent. I would gently suggest the accent is not the relevant difference. How he will behave as PM is yet to be seen, but how he behaved as Mayor is instructive and at least raises the prospect of a government that might, finally, think about people rather than the profits.

So here is my challenge to the man about to inherit a country that mostly, let’s be honest, simply does not work for the people who live in it: Govern in the micro. Set aside, for one parliament, the seductive abstraction that has failed ordinary people for fifty years, and turn the full weight of government onto the small, specific things that actually constitute a life. Try try trickle up economics. Get the little things right and let the macro, which has never once delivered for the people it was meant to serve, look after itself for a change.

I am not about to launch a career in politics, I wouldn’t last past the first Mail journalist asking what I think about the monarchy, but hopefully if you are reading this you believe that I can, at least, speak with some earned and real authority about one tiny, tiny, corner of this, the grassroots music sector, where I have spent twelve years watching policy made and, more often, not made. A lot of people, not you obviously, you’re reading this, might think that such a policy area is inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. But it is at least an incredibly instructive corner, because the work of those twelve years has produced a set of fixes that share three features: None one of them are expensive, none of them are hard, and yet bizarrely not one of them actually gets done because we are too busy hoping that just another few billion of tax reliefs for offshore tech companies might finally get productivity moving.

What every single policy area which would genuinely resolve challenges in the GMV sector has lacked is not money or evidence; it is a government willing to do it. And here is the part that should hopefully give you some hope and the new Prime Minister an opportunity. On this specific subject, Andy Burnham has already agreed, in writing, in speeches, on video, in venues, in public, to almost everything I am about to suggest. In June 2024 he said he fully supported the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee’s recommendations, “including the introduction of a levy and a targeted VAT cut to halt the rising tide of closures.” Agreeing from the mayoralty is the easy half, all you have to do now, Andy, is tell your government departments to get these things done.

Assuming that someone can get this to his desk, and in a position on it where the mile high stack of papers detailing the urgent need to build another data farm hasn’t completely obscured his chance to see it, here are the ten things that could actually be done right now, almost cost free in terms of government expense, and might actually mean something to some actual people who really live in our towns and cities.

1. Agent of Change. Three words into planning law, and simple words at that. The developer who builds flats next to an existing venue pays for the soundproofing, rather than the room being shut by the noise complaints of the new arrivals.

2. The Grassroots Levy. A pound from every arena and stadium ticket, raising between £22 and £30 million a year for the grassroots sector where every headline act in the country learned its trade. It is not government money; it is the industry’s own.

3. The levy’s VAT anomaly. Charging VAT on the Grassroots Levy is a mad piece of tax structure. Either stop taxing the contribution, or hand the tax back to the LIVE Trust.

4. Business rates. In June 2026 Burnham promised family-owned businesses “a fairer tax system” and said he wanted to stand up “for the people who run them.” A grassroots music venue is exactly that business, taxed simply for existing, often on space that earns nothing and makes no profit.

5. Alcohol duty. Shift 20p of duty off a pint sold in a pub and onto a slab sold in a supermarket, and you tilt the whole system back towards the brick and away from the click, towards a night out with other human beings and away from cheap vodka on the sofa.

6. PACSTR. A Performing Arts Creative Skills Tax Relief, modelled on the reliefs theatre and film already enjoy, to keep the sound engineers, lighting designers, stage technicians and producers who are leaving the industry because passion does not pay council tax. Burnham put it plainly in October 2024, when he said people “can’t live on unpaid roles or things that are short-term” and that the sector needs “funding to support people to find a sustainable future.”

7. Apprenticeships. PACSTR keeps the skilled workers; a Flexi-Job Apprenticeship Agency for the sector builds the next ones, a structured route into a workforce that currently runs on goodwill and word of mouth. Burnham, in the same breath in 2024, reached for football. Pick all the faults you like, he said, but the game’s talent development “is pretty good,” and music “needs to take a leaf out of its book.”

8. VAT on tickets. We tax live music tickets at grassroots level more heavily than any other music-producing nation on earth, double the German rate, four times the French, where Norway charges nothing at all. The CMS Select Committee recommended cutting it, and so did the incoming Prime Minister, back in 2024.

9. PRS for Music. This one costs the government nothing, because it is not asking for money; it is asking the regulator to do its job. PRS charges grassroots venues as though every song played on any given night belonged to its catalogue, when the real figure is closer to a fifth or a third. The result is millions a year collected and never reaching the songwriters it was taken in the name of.

10. Music Growth Package. Actually deliver growth all across the country by using it in the most simple way possible: Support every venue in the country to be open just one more night, creating 40,000 new shows generating over £500 million in economic activity. You can do it for about £30 million, which, amazingly, is exactly the amount of money you have already got.

Every item in that list has been costed, evidenced, drafted, taken into meetings, written into amendments, and in several cases voted on by people who already agree, the incoming Prime Minister among them. The document that lays all that out already exists. It has been sitting in a folder on a succession of desks for twelve years, and for the last two of them the man about to walk into Number Ten has been saying, in public, that he would open that folder and get those things done.

My point here, though, is much, much broader than a ten step wish-list of unbearably obvious things that apparently seven Prime Ministers could not get done and that this next one has said he already agrees with. The point I am making is that we are far from being the only ones with a list of incredibly meaningful micro things that might actually make it feel like government actually governs for the benefit of everyone.

Andy: Ignore the advice and focus on the small stuff. Because the small stuff is where we all actually live.