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Burnham is now clearly the leftwing candidate in any Labour leadership election against Starmer and New Labour Streeting. Whereas he wasn’t in 2015 with Corbyn taking that role nor in 2010 when Ed Miliband and Abbott were the leftist candidates and he was still relatively New Labour.

Burnham might take some encouragement from Ronald Reagan who was beaten by Nixon in the 1968 Republican primaries and narrowly by Ford in the 1976 Republican primaries. As we all remember though Reagan won the 1980 Republican primaries and then the 1980 and 1984 presidential elections. Biden also ran for the Democrats nomination in 1988 and 2008 losing to Dukakis and Obama before finally winning in 2020 the nomination and presidential election

In this particular context what would 'leftwing' mean? Does it mean significantly more than having a particular rhetoric about how you talk politics? How does it relate policy and practicewise to: private enterprise, debt to GDP ratios, deficit, benefits, growth, NATO, overall tax levels, interest rates, migration, student loans, and so on? Unless it means different from Starmer, Tories, LDs, etc in ways that can be articulated, how are we to evaluate?

I think it is Burnham's willingness to take strategic monopolies such as Thames Water into public ownership.
Starmer is very reluctant because it looks too left wing, even though it is very popular with electors.

If that's all I'm left wing too, especially if Thames Water's value is £0 and its debts don't fall on the tax payer. Otherwise, it can't be done because the government's bank balance is minus £3 trillion.

I am pretty pragmatic when it comes to public ownership but in my view if something has obviously failed in the private sector who can’t we just accept it and move on. It’s this weird idea that it can only be temporary that is terrible for long term planning.

There is nothing left or right about natural and essential monopolies being outside the private sector. The essence of private enterprise is free and open competition. With water this cannot happen, so you have to invent a regulator who (not very well) governs activity and profits. That is more like rentierdom.

If water were in the public sector now it would not occur to right or left to privatise it any more than they plan to privatise the M1.

Think tanks will think........

https://iea.org.uk/in-the-media/press-release/denationalising-britain’s-roads-would-raise-more-£150bn-new-research-show/

The fact there has been virtually no change in Makerfield between 2024 and now suggests that it isn’t Labour that’s the problem, it’s Keir Starmer.

The underlying problem is the country wants changes that are 1) too expensive for our budget and/or 2) implausible. So any candidate representing the status quo is going to lose to a change candidate for the next decade at least. Policies, values etc are not that important, if we had a Conservative or Reform govt they would be extremely unpopular too.

Burnham has gone too early - he should have taken over in 2027 and portrayed himself as a change candidate in 2028. It will be very difficult to portray himself as a change candidate when he has been there for a couple of years.

I think Starmer would have worked as a change candidate were it not for winter fuel. Everything that came after was downhill but that was the initial destructive act. I supported the policy but it was utterly toxic against the new Labour coalition as to be fair many Labour MPs said at the time.

Mandelson would have been easily survivable by somebody with more popularity.

From a party POV, he should have made benefit reform a confidence issue and then quit then if it hadn’t passed. Letting that go just gave the PLP the magic money tree. Burnham will have to grapple with that too but he will start with goodwill.

Surely the point of the Labour Party is to attempt to solve national problems with policies that match the culture of the Labour Party?

The WFA cut seemed like an attempt of cod-Thatcherism. No Labour MP went into politics to cheer cutting benefits.

You want to reduce the welfare bill, but are a Labour PM? What do Labour MPs like? Benefits targeted to the poorest, perhaps?

So announce all the old age extras are going in a blender. The result will be means tests/taxed, so as to target the poorest pensioners.

Then you sell that to the MPs as a reform that makes the poor better off, while being fiscally prudent.

Taking back control...

Jacinda Ardern: ‘New Zealand will become a republic in my lifetime’

https://www.thetimes.com/world/australasia/article/jacinda-ardern-new-zealand-interview-kkppf03f9

So she says but she never pushed it as PM for a reason nor are the current NZ PM or LOTO

Plenty of New Zealand polls for keeping a constitutional monarch over a politician head of state too

https://newsroom.co.nz/2024/10/22/nz-citizens-keen-to-stay-wedded-to-the-monarchy/

Why anyone would want a professional politician with all the grubbiness and politics that causes (look at burnham and his bothering of an electorate to gain personal power) over a constitutional monarch is beyond me

Yeah, absolutely nothing grubby about the Haus Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha currently degrading the country with their loathsome presence.

In any normal country this kind of shit would get the tumbrils rolling, but here it'll be 'they deserve it!', just like sending their sprog to £60k a year Eton.

It's Trump with an RP accent.

Nina
@ShakeLS
·
18 Jun
The British Royal family using a fleet of very expensive cars to move around from Ascot to Windsor. You keep paying for them and all their gifter associates hahahaha 😂 😜

https://x.com/ShakeLS/status/2067446704215867700?s=20

So what? Profits of the Crown Estate and duchies fund the royals not taxpayers beyond security. They also need secure cars to protect them wherever they travel. Ever seen the taxpayer funded motorcade of expensive cars for the US or even French presidents and heads of state? Far bigger than that for the royals

There are plenty of good arguments for a republic, merit and equality, democracy, all that good stuff. That Georgy is going to Eton isn't one of them since Charles at least has personal wealth we'd presumably not take from him if the monarchy were abolished.

I often find supporters of a position sometimes pick worse arguments than all that are available. Certainly monarchists and republicans often do.

PR is another one. I support it, but dome supporters act like PR system would magically solve all issues of political culture, which seems unlikely and over sells it.

Burnham is now clearly the leftwing candidate in any Labour leadership election against Starmer and New Labour Streeting. Whereas he wasn’t in 2015 with Corbyn taking that role nor in 2010 when Ed Miliband and Abbott were the leftist candidates and he was still relatively New Labour.

Burnham might take some encouragement from Ronald Reagan who was beaten by Nixon in the 1968 Republican primaries and narrowly by Ford in the 1976 Republican primaries. As we all remember though Reagan won the 1980 Republican primaries and then the 1980 and 1984 presidential elections. Biden also ran for the Democrats nomination in 1988 and 2008 losing to Dukakis and Obama before finally winning in 2020 the nomination and presidential election

In this particular context what would 'leftwing' mean? Does it mean significantly more than having a particular rhetoric about how you talk politics? How does it relate policy and practicewise to: private enterprise, debt to GDP ratios, deficit, benefits, growth, NATO, overall tax levels, interest rates, migration, student loans, and so on? Unless it means different from Starmer, Tories, LDs, etc in ways that can be articulated, how are we to evaluate?

I think it is Burnham's willingness to take strategic monopolies such as Thames Water into public ownership.
Starmer is very reluctant because it looks too left wing, even though it is very popular with electors.

If that's all I'm left wing too, especially if Thames Water's value is £0 and its debts don't fall on the tax payer. Otherwise, it can't be done because the government's bank balance is minus £3 trillion.

I am pretty pragmatic when it comes to public ownership but in my view if something has obviously failed in the private sector who can’t we just accept it and move on. It’s this weird idea that it can only be temporary that is terrible for long term planning.

There is nothing left or right about natural and essential monopolies being outside the private sector. The essence of private enterprise is free and open competition. With water this cannot happen, so you have to invent a regulator who (not very well) governs activity and profits. That is more like rentierdom.

If water were in the public sector now it would not occur to right or left to privatise it any more than they plan to privatise the M1.

Well my point. We tried it and it has failed. Just accept some things are better nor in private ownership and call it a day. Why does the UK always decide to operate outside of every other country in Europe?

Taking back control...

Jacinda Ardern: ‘New Zealand will become a republic in my lifetime’

https://www.thetimes.com/world/australasia/article/jacinda-ardern-new-zealand-interview-kkppf03f9

So she says but she never pushed it as PM for a reason nor are the current NZ PM or LOTO

Plenty of New Zealand polls for keeping a constitutional monarch over a politician head of state too

https://newsroom.co.nz/2024/10/22/nz-citizens-keen-to-stay-wedded-to-the-monarchy/

Why anyone would want a professional politician with all the grubbiness and politics that causes (look at burnham and his bothering of an electorate to gain personal power) over a constitutional monarch is beyond me

Yeah, absolutely nothing grubby about the Haus Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha currently degrading the country with their loathsome presence.

In any normal country this kind of shit would get the tumbrils rolling, but here it'll be 'they deserve it!', just like sending their sprog to £60k a year Eton.

It's Trump with an RP accent.

Nina
@ShakeLS
·
18 Jun
The British Royal family using a fleet of very expensive cars to move around from Ascot to Windsor. You keep paying for them and all their gifter associates hahahaha 😂 😜

https://x.com/ShakeLS/status/2067446704215867700?s=20

From an American TwiX account. Who does she think pays for her own Head of State's motorcade?

Qatar?

Reflecting on the Makerfield byelection result, I think (as I said) that Burnham was the favourite going in, and never really looked troubled.

Reform would always have struggled, but I think could have performed better if they had developed an effective counternarrative against Burnham, beyond their charge that he was using Makerfield as a stepping stone. That was clearly believed by a lot of people, but it couldn't really go anywhere. I felt where Burnham was weakest was at the point of WASPI - it was an embarrassing f U-turn in real time. But for whatever reason it didn't seem that this was capitalised on.

They also had a problem with the plumber, who I don't think was a terrible candidate, but was undoubtedly damaged, particularly by the Vorderman letter to the women of Makerfield. The letter was an utterly cynical piece of confected outrage, and I think in response I would have issued an utterly cynical confected apology, and gone the 'bad boy forgiven' route. I also might have been tempted to put Kenyon up for an interrogation with someone like Kuensberg so the public could see him sweat it out. High risk, but I think many women might have seen it and ended up with some sneaking sympathy. His line would have been - 'sorry, regret my comments, however do we want a society where the only people who are allowed to hold office are people who have never said anything regrettable on social media?'.

Even with all that, I think Reform's best result would have been to be 'robbed' by Restore. That would have fit their narrative nicely. Sadly they just missed out.

On your last point - I appreciate the short term benefit of that (consolidate the hard-right vote) - but isn’t that an extremely limited strategy?

Having a big argument with Lowe about split votes and precisely how many pogroms to conduct isn’t going to put Farage into No 10. At least this time they aren’t blaming “family voting”, which suggests they’ve learnt the lesson from last time.

Marina Hyde analyses it rather better than does Lucky.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/19/reform-candidates-nigel-farage-makerfield-prime-minister
..everything that went wrong for Reform here flowed directly from his personal character, and is going to keep happening in one way or another because people don’t change. Nigel’s gonna Nigel.

Nobody fetishises plain speaking like Farage, so we owe it to him to honour that and observe that Reform really shat the bed. Makerfield is among the party’s top 10 target seats for a general election, and Reform strategists’ decision to field yet another inadequate liability, whose past social media activity they simply couldn’t be arsed checking, seems to have proved something of a turn-off – for example for women, who strangely didn’t feel minded to vote for someone who had said: “I’m sexist, sorry but I am.” Rob Kenyon will no doubt be back on his plumbing rounds next week. So, Makerfield ladies, make sure your husband’s home to be consulted as to whether you really want your sink unblocked. It’ll honestly be cheaper to replace it.

Meanwhile it would take a heart of stone not to cackle at the fact that Reform is now losing votes to an insurgent party to its right. The thing to remember about Restore is that it is a party that genuinely only exists because Nigel couldn’t handle some light strategic criticism from Rupert Lowe. Why? Because Nigel is, and always has been, a diva who has huge fallouts with colleagues and allies...

Taking back control...

Jacinda Ardern: ‘New Zealand will become a republic in my lifetime’

https://www.thetimes.com/world/australasia/article/jacinda-ardern-new-zealand-interview-kkppf03f9

Yes, probably they will. More surprising is places like Jamaica which seem to have had political unanimity on the question for decades but still haven't gotten round to it.

It doesn't take long to do even where referendums are required so not sure what the hold up is.

Canada will be last, due to generally being unconcerned.

I don't think the monarchist bootlickers will be too arsed about Jamaica (too not white) or New Zealand (too unimportant). It's Australia and/or Canada that will sting.

I don't see why any of them should 'sting'. There are good arguments (IMHO) for a constitutional monarchy, and I can see why nation states with a historical connection to an overseas monarch would prefer to keep that. But it's clearly quite odd to have an overseas head of state, so withdrawing from the arrangement shouldn't cause any hard feelings on either side.