The King of the North has spoken

A few days ago, Joseph Dinnage had an interesting CAPX piece on reasons behind the likely failure of Andrew Burnham's National Care Service. 

Burnham’s National Care Service is doomed to failure

• Burnham announced plans to create a National Care Service modelled on the NHS
• We should reintroduce tax relief for private insurance, making independent healthcare more affordable
• Public satisfaction in our healthcare system has collapsed, despite the NHS receiving record funding

The King of the North has spoken. In an emotive speech, Andy Burnham yesterday set out his vision for Britain.

The Prime Minister pledged to put Britain ‘on a new path’, and cursed Margaret Thatcher and the 1980s for killing ‘working-class aspiration’. What lies down this new path? A route back to the decade that preceded Thatcherism – the 1970s.

The whole piece is well worth reading as another reminder that Burnham is an antediluvian political throwback. He does not have an adequate grasp of the problems he faces nor the slightest clue as to how they might be tackled.

What he may have grasped is that voters don't have a clue either so he may as well play on that. Yet as the next general election approaches, he needs a large dollop of undeserved luck or his party could demand something more than a political return to the 1970s.   

 

Nationalisation is also on the agenda. Environment Secretary and veteran Leftie Angela Eagle will bring forward a bill to bring water into public ownership, and a new publicly owned Great British Grid will be established to compete against private companies to drive down energy costs. Most misguided of all his nationalisation drives is the new National Care Service (NCS).

This ad was popular and nobody is surprised

 

Just another hollow man

An interesting Guardian hatchet job on Zack Polanski. Interesting, not only because of what it says about Polanski, but as an illustration of the Guardian's typically malevolent mix of celebrity culture, theatre, virtue-signalling and power politics.     

At Brighton, Polanski raised his arms in triumph. It felt more like a wave goodbye

The Chronicle of a Death Foretold. It must be weird to realise that you have in effect made yourself obsolete inside a year. Worse, that you have actively accelerated your demise. Even AI doesn’t work at that speed. But that’s precisely what it looks as if Zack Polanski has done. Maybe he should just look on the bright side. He’s managed eight Liz Trusses. Not to be sneezed at.

Polanski is partly a victim of his own success. A cautionary tale of being careful what you wish for. Like Nigel Farage, the leader of the Green party was one of Keir Starmer’s fiercest critics. Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting excepted. Keir wasn’t radical enough. Did not care enough about Gaza. Was too dull. And under Zack’s leadership, voters swarmed from Labour to the Greens. The party climbed to a record high of 18% in the polls and won the Gorton and Denton byelection against the staggeringly dim Matt Goodwin.

But then Keir was airbrushed out of history and Labour chose a prime minister that a lot of people in the country actually liked. Someone who could communicate. Even if they weren’t in love with Andy, voters were willing to give him a chance. Ever since, the Greens have tanked. Now they are down to 11%. Zack’s net approval rating’s almost as bad as Nige’s. Not content with this, Zack has almost certainly fatally holed his credibility by standing in the Holborn and St Pancras byelection, which he is very likely to lose. Shares in brand Polanski have never been lower.

Worth reading as the butterfly response to a changing world comes into view - must settle on something however temporary the perch may be. 

Polanski is is described as just another hollow man which he is, but behind this lies the hyper-optimistic hope that Burnham isn't just another hollow man too, even though he so obviously is.   

There was something rather sad about it all. The Greens had wanted so much more than this. They had believed they had elected a man of substance – someone less polite and deferential than previous leaders such as Caroline Lucas and Carla Denyer – who would go toe to toe with the other mainstream parties. But he had turned out to be a chimera. Just another hollow man. Long on slogans, short on ideas. A leader who had briefly burned brightly but had fizzled out. A victim of his own success. A one-year wonder destined to become a man of absence. Losing the byelection would only hasten the end.

The Benefits Party

The TaxPayers' Alliance has a useful piece on the political pressures behind benefit spending. 


Benefits of Labour

Benefit spending has seen enormous growth since the Labour government came to power in July 2024, with spending on just six benefits reaching over £133 billion in England and Wales by March 2026. [1] Despite widespread recognition that the current system is not working, meaningful reform has proven politically difficult. One of the reasons for this is that benefit spending is concentrated among particular groups, while the costs are spread widely across taxpayers. Those who stand to lose from reform thus have a much stronger incentive to resist change.


No surprises but well worth reading. Here are two of the key findings -

• Labour MP Diane Abbott’s Hackney North and Stoke Newington constituency saw the largest increase in benefit spending, £76.6 million, more than three times the constituency average.
• There were 15 constituencies where benefit spending rose by more than £50 million from August 2024 to March 2026; all were represented by Labour MPs except Birmingham Perry Barr, represented by independent MP Ayoub Khan.

Labour Euphoria

Andy Burnham gives Labour post-landslide euphoria absent under Sir Keir Starmer, says peer

Andy Burnham has given Labour the "post-electoral euphoria" that they did not have after Sir Keir Starmer's landslide 2024 general election victory, Harriet Harman has said...

The Labour peer went on to say that she was "hoping" that the Starmer project would succeed, but "a lot of [Labour MPs] were saying, 'look, it's not going to. Face up to the reality. The reality is that it's not going to'...

"Because although on paper he had a majority of over 100, he couldn't actually deliver anything with that majority.

"And I think now it's absolutely evident that we've got what we thought we got at the general election, which is a stable government with a huge majority which will get on and deliver a programme."

This is the euphoric programme Andrew Burnham laid out when he wangled the role of Prime Minister.

• Building one united Labour team
• A ‘less toxic’ problem solving approach
• Setting a ‘distinctively Labour’ direction
• Governing equally for every UK region and nation
• Taking back control from Westminster

It must have caused a level of euphoria comparable to drinking half a dozen pints of dandelion and burdock. 

More Laws, Less Rule of Law

Augusto Zimmermann & Gabriël Moens have a very interesting Quadrant piece on a pernicious Australian problem which is also a British problem - too many laws and regulations are destroying respect for the law. In some areas of UK law, that should read have destroyed respect for the law.

Hence the Two Tier Keir jibe which was far more than a mere jibe. It is exceedingly unlikely that Three Tier Burnham will even acknowledge the problem. 

More Laws, Less Rule of Law

On February 3, 1949, Winston Churchill, the UK’s wartime prime minister warned in a House of Commons speech that “If you make 10,000 regulations you destroy all respect for the law.”[1] He argued that the proliferation of laws, which defined the post-war Labour governments, undermines free markets and erodes the public’s trust in the nation’s institutions.

Churchill’s warning is timely, considering the explosion of legislative activity in Australia which has made compliance with the law difficult at best and impossible at worst. For example, it is estimated that the Australian tax law is contained in over 14,000 pages – clearly an impossible task for even the most disciplined tax lawyer to know or understand.

The whole piece is well worth reading. Here in the UK, uninformed voters effectively vote for even more laws with no prospect whatever of understanding even the gist of those we have already.


One former Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, even boasted on one occasion that no other Government in this nation had passed as many laws as her government had,[5] as though this were something to celebrate rather than viewed as a potentially serious problem for the realisation of the rule of law in Australia.

Of course, matters have become considerably worse since Gillard made that notorious statement. If it were not bad enough that Australians have since enacted an enormous number of additional legislative measures, many of such measures also have undermined an important element of our Western legal tradition: the legal protection of inalienable rights – that is, our fundamental human rights to life, liberty and property.

Taking Us for Fools

A Climate Depot piece by Roger Pielke on a familiar problem, the success of climate propaganda. Familiar but worth reading because of Pielke's stress on what he calls the use of symbols, authority, and institutions of expertise to build the propaganda.


Taking Us for Fools: How a turnkey method attributes any trend to climate change

By ROGER PIELKE JR.

Excerpt: One of the most brazen — and successful — propaganda campaigns sits out in plain sight. I am referring to the concerted effort by climate advocates to create a belief that “climate change” causes bad weather and disasters, and that we can prevent those bad things from happening with climate policies.

At the center of the propaganda campaign are scientists who perform political alchemy by turning the symbols, authority, and institutions of expertise into public and policy maker (mis)understandings of climate science. These scientists all well know that “climate policy” — however construed — cannot reduce the number or intensity of extreme weather events in any meaningful or detectable way in my lifetime, or even my future grandkids’ lifetimes.

I am using the term propaganda here as a technical term, which Harold Lasswell defined almost a century ago as, “the management of collective attitudes by the manipulation of significant symbols.”