Talk about reforming the machinery of government often sounds like a wine tasting. One expert raises the glass, considers the latest initiative and says: ‘An interesting effort, but not enough depth.’ Another detects ‘promising notes of delivery, rather spoiled by departmental silos’. A third finds ‘hints of innovation and accountability, but with a disappointingly familiar […]
Spare a thought for Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, heading the US negotiating team, as they met with Qatari Emir Al Thani this week to discuss the ‘progress of the negotiations’ between the US and the Iranian regime in the Qatari capital, Doha. While the venue for the talks has shifted from Pakistan to Switzerland […]
Here it comes again. Whoever Andy Burnham chooses to be his Chancellor of the Exchequer will face the same challenge as all their predecessors since Gordon Brown: producing ‘fiscal rules’ to reassure the City they will be prudent holders of the nation’s credit card. With Britain’s national debt higher than it’s been for decades, and […]
Should Sadiq Khan decline to run for a fourth term as London mayor, his contribution to public life will largely have been stoking the culture war. From spaffing European symbols over the New Year’s fireworks to funding bemusing anti-misogyny campaigns, the public messaging has been relentless, if little else has. And yet there’s another cultural […]
Andy Burnham’s Manc-a-Lago plan to escape the Westminster bubble by shipping bits of No.10 to the North is fated to fizzle out: the wrong answer to a problem misdiagnosed. The idea seems to be that physical proximity will make people feel the heart of government better understands them, while the new office will be full […]
‘It is time for Whitehall to accept that growth cannot be ordered from the top down,’ Andy Burnham said in his first major speech since returning to Parliament. ‘Instead, it can only be nurtured from the bottom up.’ He is right. The man about to enter Downing Street has seen what much of his party […]
It received less media attention than many of his more eye-catching announcements, but yesterday Andy Burnham stated that under his premiership, British firms would be favoured for government contracts. While this is well meaning, outside a narrow set of circumstances such as issues relating to national security, this would be a costly mistake. First, it […]
For those of us old enough to remember Andy Burnham as a not-especially-effective member of Gordon Brown’s Cabinet in the late 2000s, it is sometimes difficult to see what qualities have made some sections of the Parliamentary Labour Party speak of him as if he were a Merseyside Aragorn. To them, after a self-imposed exile, […]
Andy Burnham said this morning how seriously he takes Alan Milburn’s review of youth unemployment. If that’s true, he should pay close attention to one of its most important findings: the cost of employment is standing in the way of businesses hiring young people. Since Labour came to power they have put up the cost […]
As the Sex Pistols sounded the last honk of their guitar amps in a San Francisco rock venue in 1978, Johnny Rotten leered over the crowd one final time. “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” A strange question to ask a group of punks perhaps, if one made more explicable by Rotten’s swift departure […]
In a recent speech, Andy Burnham, Makerfield’s new MP and likely our next PM, said he would end ‘trickle-down’ economics. What on earth was he talking about? The Left often accuses the Right – and particularly the last Conservative government – of practising this voodoo art form. Supposedly, right-wingers give tax breaks to the ‘rich’ […]
Since Andy Burnham became the Mayor of Manchester in 2017, the term Manchesterism has taken on a new meaning. To him, it stands for the expansion of the public sector and a managerial state. Now, with Keir Starmer on the brink of resignation and Burnham’s Makerfield by-election win clearing his path to Westminster, Britain may […]
‘I accept that over the last year, performance at South Western Railway has not been up to scratch…we will leave no stone unturned in making sure that his constituents have a better travel experience in future,’ pledged the Transport Secretary in a Commons answer earlier this month. Heidi Alexander had been asked by the Lib […]
Last Friday, the most capable AI model in the world went dark. Anthropic had released Fable 5 three days earlier; on June 12, a U.S. executive order cut off access for foreign nationals. With no clean way to wall Americans off from the rest of us inside a global system used by hundreds of millions […]
Some are saying they don’t know what Andy Burnham’s big ideas are. They don’t know what he will try to achieve when he becomes prime minister. On GB News earlier this week, Boris Johnson described Burnham as a ‘mascaraed Mancunian mystery’. It is a peculiar concern. Burnham’s ideology seems to me no harder to identify […]
Keir Starmer is now an empty-vessel Prime Minister, nominally in office but visibly out of power. His fall from grace after Labour’s emphatic win almost two years ago brings an end to stage one of a government in collapse. Starmer has gone from weak leader to lame duck in a matter of days, and Andy […]
