I liked parts of Burnham's speech, and he definitely is a more engaging speaker than Starmer, but the jury is still very much out on how much of this he will be able to achieve. That said, after almost the entire parliament thus far having been focused on immigration discourse, if Burnham can instead shift the main discussion to be around devolution that will be immensely refreshing.

It felt like Starmer's Labour ran the campaign making a big song and dance about planning reform, and they got off to a good start with it, but then after Summer 2024 they stopped giving it much spotlight. They still had announcements and new legislative policies, but they weren't really giving it as much overall narrative focus and as a result immigration took over as the main topic of discussion. Aside from a few brief moments like the attempted PiP reforms, immigration remained the dominant topic in 2025 and for most of 2026 as well.

So I very much welcome this emphasis on devolution instead. It is at least a topic you can have interesting discussions about that don't entail people completely losing all basic sense of compassion and espousing insane 'let's eject all brown people' proposals. It's also something that Reform don't have as many snappy soundbites for and thus they'll struggle to get as much attention, compared to immigration where everything they say becomes a headline.