Burnham's fantasy realm. Sharp from @alanbeattie.bsky.social www.ft.com/content/0da0...

So how many Cry God for Harry headlines should we expect?

As in geopolitics so in football …a constant struggle to reconcile past glory with more constrained reality …still a great nation but no longer a great power ….

Britain's defence plan carried uncomfortable echoes from the 1930s. My thoughts in the FT www.ft.com/content/3716...

A British-Indian friend told me how Reform activists threatened to take away her family's passports if they get into power. The rising tide of racism should worry us all. And the politicians who are stoking it must be condemned.

Shock horror..wealthy banker says Burnham should cut public services instead of putting up his taxes. www.ft.com/content/fc5a...

England have some good players …a couple of v good players …..but France!!

Andy Burnham speech was a genuine challenge to Treasury control Is this a parody? www.thetimes.com/article/a8d3...

Looks to me as if AI served up untouched large slabs of Angela Rayner's 2024 devolution white paper to Burnham's speech-writers. No harm in that, but promises to "rewire the state" are beginning to sound a bit hackneyed.

A cold shower for those over-exhuberant Red Wall MPs who think Andy Burnham can wave a magic wand to reindustrialise the North. As ever, fine journalism from FT's @jenwilliamsft.bsky.social www.ft.com/content/a108...

So there you have it. Everyone will be a winner. Andy Burnham is going to reindustrialise the North which will cut need for subsidies from the South..all so simple …amazing no one has thought about it before.

This is utterly spurious …uk output is about 15 times that of poorest US @theatlantic.com distorting meaning of per capita GDP figs …worse sort of click bait from supposedly serious magazine …

"seminars on 'Brexit at 10' in London this month, where nearly all the speakers are British - reflect an unconscious assumption that continental perspectives are marginal or irrelevant." Good short to the point article

substack.com/@politicosw1... Well worth a read …the rest of Europe has politics too!

Should I care that the Transport Salaried Staffs' Association is backing Ed Miliband's ever more vigorous campaign to become Chancellor?

One has questions.

All this talk of reorganising Whitehall reminds me of comment of head of corporate restructuring at one of big consultancies…core of his business came from new CEOs who did not know what to do ….when in doubt reorganise the corporate furniture ….

I know we keep having exchanges on this but fiscal devolution is great for accountability but not for regional rebalancing. What the latter needs is fiscal transfers. The trick is balancing the two. The problem with English devolution is that nobody has even tried to address the issue.

Yes, YES, this. Imagine the south rubbing its hands and saying "great, we can put our taxes down now".

Welcome to German politics

The big block to fiscal devolution is the massive inequality in fiscal capacity which it would exacerbate. Your starter for 10 Andy..

Andy Burnham wants to shift resources from prosperous south to more needy north…he also plans to give local communities fiscal autonomy so they can choose how to spend money they raise …what happens when, say, rich Hampshire says it does not want to transfer any of its money to, say, poorer Hull?

Ed Miliband lost the election to David Cameron in 2015 because he was utterly convinced that, like Francois Hollande in France, he could win from the left. Would be an interesting choice as Chancellor ….

Didn’t Blairite Purnell resign from cabinet in failed attempt to force out the PM Gordon Brown in favour of David Miliband? How the wheel turns …..

Tenth anniversary of Cameron announcing his resignation - possibly the worst UK PM - Johnson for all his venality and Truss for ideological idiocy don’t come close to the long term damage that resulted from Cameron’s Brexit referendum gamble for party management reasons. Truly terrible judgement…

Pour encourager les autres …the next commentator who says England need to “get the job done” should be taken out and summarily shot.

One of many, many absolute Brexit gems from Michael Gove: "For Europe, Britain voting to leave will be the beginning of something potentially even more exciting - the democratic liberation of a whole Continent.....We will have ....saved our country by our exertions and Europe by our example."

What Brexit xenophobes said then: Gisela Stuart "Instead of giving an extra 88m people (from Turkey, Balkans) – more than our entire population – access to the NHS I believe it would be safer to take back control. We should give our struggling NHS the £350 million we send to the EU every week.”

Lessons of the recent past go unlearned... Immeasurably worse than a not-very-good prime minister is a not-very-good prime minister who thinks they are very good indeed...

Interested to see Wes Streeting say he he had only “small differences’with Burnham..I had thought Steering a progressive liberal …but then I suppose prospect of top job for in Burnham gov dissolves any policy disagreements …who said they were only in it for themselves?

Quotable: 10 years later, what all not on the island could see….a UK isolated from the EU is a weaker UK…”….as the Conservative pro-European Michael Heseltine has often put it, this is the sovereignty of the man in the desert” Source: @nytimes.com @philipstephens.bsky.social

#NoBurnham #LabourZionist #EndUK

Standing back from today's tumult, my reflections on a decade of Brexit as published in the NYT www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/o...

From the FT “It’s fair to say that most of us who worked with Andy in government do not hold him in particularly high regard.”

"History’s dismal verdict on Brexit has been written: Untrammeled sovereignty can end up looking like lonely isolation." Yet Labour won't endorse rejoining the EU because resentful, xenophobic Reform supporters are STILL pro-Brexit. They don't blame Nigel Farage for lying to them a decade ago.

Many years ago I wrote a half-satirical piece in the FT on "When Britain left Europe, Scotland left Britain, and London left England" ..we are getting there.....

Standing back from today's tumult, my reflections on a decade of Brexit as published in the NYT www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/o...

This is very poor journalism …Britains output is something like 15 times higher than than Mississippi’s …the comparison made is gdp per head …a measure subject to exchange rate and population swings as well as actual output

Not sure Commissar Miliband would agree with this…

“They are in it only for themselves” …can’t think of way that stampede of Labour ministers and MPs forcing out Starmer could do more to prove the populists right. Want better government? Not bit of it…it’s about saving our jobs!

Israel’s IDF has become a lawless militia with an insatiable lust for indiscriminate killing …whether in Lebanon, Gaza or the West Bank

A note of scepticism about Andy Burnham...

How the world changes …the pilot on my aer lingus (10 time s better than BA) flight to Dublin is Captain Omar Sharif…

Of frying pans and fires - some thoughts on Burnham bid to oust Starmer. Latest Inside-Out column. philipstephens.substack.com/p/saving-bri...

In the last few months, 35,000 houses in West Oxford have had their water pressure cut by Thames Water, some by up to 50%. This isn't a service, it is a scam and it is my constituents who end up footing the bill. The Government must let Thames Water fail and start again.

From FT. I think there may be a message here. SpaceX is as big as Amazon but "Amazon’s revenue grew to $717bn last year, with net income of $78bn, while SpaceX’s sales were $19bn, with a net loss of $5bn.

Another data point for the idea that voters just hate the prime minister, whoever the holder of that post may be. Or in Burnham’s case, merely coming in line for the office enough

Rather surprised that IFG taken upon itself to say 1. Starmer is finished and 2. He should go quietly rather than contest a leadership election.

If you don't go with AB negative when writing about this we can no longer be friends

Disagree with lots of this, including the central argument, but it's very thoughtful. The best single idea in it is this: "Any platform that uses an algorithm more complex than ‘people you follow in chronological order’ to be treated as a publisher, and held to account for content."