Chris Bowers talked about the lack of a “Yesss” moment at our Conference yesterday.

Well, like buses, if you wait long enough, several come along at once – the problem is that they were in the speech of the leader of another party.

Andy Burnham’s speech yesterday was quite simply one of the best I have ever heard from a UK politician. It had heart and soul and ideas and emotion and mission. I had goosebumps and it’s a long time since a speech has done that to me. I’d have to go back to Obama for that.

A speech that targeted the good emotions, ignited the things that bind us together. You have to give it credit.

I will never, ever join the Labour Party a) because I am a liberal to my core and b) because they, whatever good they do are so authoritarian and centralising and one size fits all that they need a liberal party to stop them when they go too far.

But the job of a liberal party is to help rebuild a culture of togetherness to combat the horrific targeting of marginalised communities we have seen from Reform and its evil twin Restore, the Conservatives and, yes, from the Labour Party when it’s tried to ape Reform in a cowardly quest to get its vote back.

We should broadly welcome Andy Burnham’s clear enthusiasm to get moving on closer relations with Europe, social care, electoral reform, getting utilities into more public ownership. So what has our reaction been:

“Andy Burnham spent years telling the country what he would do if he were in power. Now that he is sitting in Number 10, what we got was a lot of ‘Definitely Maybe’ and a total absence of action today.

“Families struggling with a broken social care system cannot wait until after another election and it can’t be funded from the pockets of our poorest pensioners. Communities blighted by sewage cannot wait yet another decade to finally stop profit trumping morals in our water industry.

“This Prime Minister had a historic opportunity to start to fix our broken voting system and rebuild our relationship with Europe, but everything remains a maybe.

“This looks too much like Starmerism with a veneer of panache.”

It’s all a bit po-faced.

Surely we should be saying that there are things we can work with him on?

Now, it’s not surprising that we are rushing to defend the Pension Triple Lock that was our idea. Over the past decade and a bit it’s worked to restore poorer pensioner’s incomes. And pensioners on fixed incomes have a lot to lose as, for example, energy bills get higher leading to wider inflation.

I get that it’s an important thing for us, but I do think we need to look at whether there is some wriggle room here. Has it done its job? Do we need to look at what Burnham is proposing in more detail and look at what it does to affect older people’s lives in a holistic way?

The right are going to go after Burnham on this big time. Do we really need to be part of that chorus? Using some savings from the triple lock while protecting poorer pensioners does seem like an idea that we should not immediately dismiss.  We could perhaps be more nuanced in our comments.

Yet I suspect we will be contributing to the noise with petitions and campaigns and votes against. Let’s be a bit more constructive. Let’s listen to young people as well who feel as though their generation is being forgotten.

Labour do have a problem with this. After the Winter Fuel Payment fiasco, after their last term in Government ended in 2010 with a measly 75p pension increase, this will be used to build a narrative that they hate old people. That is clearly nonsense and we shouldn’t feed that particular beast.

I feel like we should have expressed a lot more enthusiasm for working with Burnham, but saying what we could bring to the table.

We’ve always, in Scotland at least, been very sceptical about the idea of a National Care Service and its one size fits all approach that doesn’t properly take account of the challenges of delivering care across local communities. We can advocate for more local control. Nobody wants anyone at a desk in London or even Manchester dictating how care services should work in rural Devon or Cumbria, for example. There needs to be local accountability in this system and we can push for that.

On Europe, we need to be wildly enthusiastic about rejoining and constantly pushing Labour to go further, but framing the arguments in ways that people who vote for us and who should be voting for us will like.

On electoral reform, we need to go into this with a bias towards STV, a push for as much voter control as possible. Labour is likely to veer towards closed lists but ultimately are we going to vote for any actually proportional system. We do need to make sure that the thresholds favour a true multi party system and don’t make it very difficult for smaller parties to get a toe-hold in Parliament.

We’ve been needing a game-changing, new generation moment to rid ourselves of the toxicity of the past decade and the erosion of the social contract and community spirit of the past half century.

We need to lift our eyes and put ourselves to work to help make this country fairer and to make people feel that some politicians are genuinely on their side. Our democracy depends on it.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social