Roll With It

Burnham is back in Parliament. But will Starmer acquiesce?

Towering Columns

In The Times, Patrick Maguire argues that the people of Makerfield elected Burnham out of a desire for radical change.

All the clichés you have read — historic, seismic, unprecedented, make-or-break, most consequential ever — were really written in vain. The result tells us little we did not already know. Slice and dice it however you like, this was always going to be an overwhelming landslide against politics itself — a rejection of what politics has done, and failed to do, to the post-industrial England of 2026. That frustration, despondency and contempt are felt as keenly by voters of left and right alike.

Burnham understands this. He knows the places and the people of Makerfield. Victory would mean he has successfully reconstructed a winning coalition from the wreckage of Morgan McSweeney’s grand designs for the Labour Party, which collapsed under the weight of their implausible ambitions and Sir Keir Starmer’s cowboy building, like the tower of Fonthill Abbey. Scaling up Burnham’s campaign for export, particularly to sceptical customers in the south, demands an altogether deeper understanding of what voters want from a truly changed Labour.

The pollsters Stan Greenberg and Peter McLeod have spent recent weeks in conversation with progressive voters across the country: in Basingstoke, Bath, Bolton, Bracknell, Bury, Doncaster, Filton & Bradley Stoke, Rother Valley and Scunthorpe. All were considering their options between Labour, the Liberal Democrats or the Greens. These people were the bedrock of Labour’s 2024 coalition and reuniting them is the bare minimum a Burnham premiership must do to ensure the Labour Party can once again become a going concern in electoral politics.

In The Telegraph, Lord Frost examines the issue of establishment hostility towards Englishness and English Identity.

In short, it was possible to be politically British without having to be English. (It is one of the many ironies of this subject that fashionable opinion has now turned 180 degrees, and it is now near-taboo to suggest that recent migrants who acquire British citizenship are not as English as everyone else.)

Out of this uniquely British muddled mess, it was inevitable that an English identity would re-emerge. After all, it already existed. It had just been largely associated with the wider British state and its achievements. But as people started to doubt those, and as the country increasingly thought of itself as the bureaucratic, technocratic “UK”, then the cultural and emotional component had to go somewhere – and it went to Englishness. That is the process we are living through.

Two interesting questions follow from this current reality. The first is whether a resurgent English identity can remain entirely cultural and historical, or must in the end be political, as well. If the Scots and Welsh have an assembly, why can’t the English?

All the efforts to set up regional mayors and vast new administrative areas based on very little historical or geographical logic are at root an attempt to avoid this question. An English assembly governing England, leaving Westminster responsible for foreign affairs, defence, and the currency, would after all reveal the reality: that the “UK” national identity is thin and bureaucratic, not emotional, not historical, not cultural.

Writing for The Telegraph, Joshua Rozenberg highlights how activist jurors are undermining the ancient British system of jury trials.

Witness the scene at Woolwich Crown Court late last year, where Charlotte Head, an activist supporter of Palestine Action, was on trial with others for violent disorder, aggravated burglary and criminal damage after an attack on a factory near Bristol operated by Elbit Systems UK, which the activists claimed supplied weapons to the Israeli military.

More than three centuries after Penn’s appeal to his jury, Head’s defence counsel, a leading human rights barrister named Rajiv Menon, KC, appealed directly to the jurors. After reading out the inscription on the Old Bailey plaque, he told them they could decide the case according to their consciences. The trial ended with no convictions.

But Mr Justice Johnson, the trial judge, regarded this as a clear breach of his instructions to counsel.

“The effect of Mr Menon’s speech was to invite the jury to disregard my directions that they should put views of the Middle East and the war in Gaza, and emotion, to one side,” he said subsequently. It’s not known whether the judge has decided to refer Menon’s remarks to the Attorney General as an alleged contempt of court.

Because the jury could not agree on charges faced by four defendants, the prosecution sought a retrial which ended when they were all convicted of criminal damage. Last Friday, Charlotte Head, 30, and Leona Kamio, 30, received sentences of six years. Fatema Zainab Rajwani, 21, was sentenced to five years and eight months. Samuel Corner, 23, received five years for criminal damage and a further three years and eight months, to be served consecutively, for fracturing the spine of police Sgt Kate Evans with a sledgehammer.

In The Critic, Mike Jones argues that the tipping point against Keir Starmer occurred during the 2024 Southport Riots.

The Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin was fond of asking, “Who? Whom?”. It is a question that strips politics back to its essence: who holds power, and who is on the receiving end.

For many in Britain, Southport gave a stark answer: A multicultural elite indifferent to mass immigration stood above the rest — backed by the two-tier authority of the state, with Starmer at the helm. (As protests rage in Belfast over a shocking attempted murder, allegedly perpetrated by a Sudanese asylum seeker, the state faces another major test.)

That narrative did not stay on the comment pages. It quickly spilled into the wider public consciousness. Lord Ashcroft’s focus groups showed how fast the “two-tier” charge took hold among ordinary voters. It offered a simple way to package a wide set of grievances into something neat and intelligible.

Combined with Starmer’s failure to “smash the gangs”, this hardened opinion at remarkable speed. Many feel the country they grew up in is being reshaped without their consent, while a political class seems determined to shut down anyone who says so.

For many voters, the verdict is already in. The Prime Minister does not represent them; he resents them.

In Conservative Home, Georgiana Bristol makes the case that advocacy for the oil and gas sector won the Conservatives Aberdeen South.

To fix this, and keep good jobs in Aberdeen, our report called on the Government to grant new licences for North Sea oil exploration, scrap the EPL immediately, and develop a concrete transition plan that supports domestic oil and gas production for as long as it takes for renewables to be genuinely ready to replace it.

As Shadow Energy Secretary, Claire Coutinho has forcefully made this case. Wes Streeting has pledged to grant new licences in the North Sea if he becomes Prime Minister, and Andy Burnham has said that he has an “open mind” on further exploration.

It’s correct that drilling more in the North Sea won’t have a material impact on prices paid by UK consumers. But ensuring continued investment will make sure that jobs and tax revenue stay in the UK – rather than Nigeria – and will help keep the energy supply chain afloat as we continue to move towards renewables.

Whilst the impact of energy policy is felt more keenly on the ground in Aberdeen than anywhere else, there are lessons that the Conservatives can take from this. A relentless focus on good jobs. Safeguarding domestic industry. And, in the words of Al Carns, “energy security shapes economic security”.

In The Telegraph, Stephen Pound argues that unions are advocating for higher immigration - against the interests of their members.

I also found in my decades as a Member of Parliament that those who made it to my advice surgery were never the tragic mothers of Afghanistan but more often the sons of businessmen and farmers who could pay the “agent” to facilitate the journey for what was rather more an economic imperative than a desperate longing for life and freedom.

No one with an ounce of humanity could deny the suffering of those who make an illegal and dangerous journey to these shores.

No one with an ounce of sense could deny that uncontrolled, unlimited immigration may provide a temporary relief to the individual rescued from the Channel but ultimately is corrosive of society and does no favours to those who the idealists seek to support.

Many of us in Britain still squirm with guilt when we remember the then health secretary, Enoch Powell, scouring the Caribbean for volunteers to work in the NHS or those mill owners in Yorkshire and Lancashire luring as many workers as possible from Mirpur to sweat in conditions that undercut the native workforce. Again, a short-term solution led to a long-term crisis and we see the current problem through the lens of that guilt.

We simply cannot, however, allow the error of the past to dictate the policy of the present and I sincerely, and in true fraternal spirit, invite Andrea Egan to spend some time away from the echo chamber and see what is being said and experienced on the streets.

The experience may not be a pleasant one. But it is one that may help to ensure that the trade union movement remains a bastion of support for working people and not a self-satisfied and increasingly out of touch relic in a world that has changed beyond recognition.

In The Telegraph, James Frayne argues that unprecedented levels of immigration shattered the vision that Leave voters had for Britain.

Looking at the reasons voters decided to vote Leave, it’s not hard to see why. Among respondents who backed Brexit in 2016, the top three issues they had in mind when they cast their vote were border control (51 per cent), having control over our laws (43 per cent) and the cost of living (31 per cent).

Overall, taking account of the state of the economy and society, 63 per cent of voters think Britain is on the wrong track, compared to 23 per cent who think we’re on the right track. Among Leavers, the share of people who think Britain is on the wrong track rises to 72 per cent.

It’s important to note that most voters blame other things for our current predicament rather than Brexit, even if many believe there has been a failure to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the UK’s exit from the EU. Most people blame poor political leadership, as well as a turbulent economic and social backdrop and no border control.

Given a choice of two options about the problems facing Britain today, significantly more people agree that they’ve been caused by issues other than leaving the EU.

And, given a short list of possible solutions to deal with our problems, significantly more people say we should have a fresh general election to choose a new government (37 per cent) than advocate rejoining the EU (26 per cent).

The logic is clear – voters can see that recent prime ministers have made a whole series of unforced errors. It isn’t down to Brexit that Starmer piled additional new costs on to businesses, or chose to pay for more welfare claimants, or that his Conservative predecessors chose to house large numbers of asylum seekers in hotels in small towns. These mistakes were all their own.

Wonky Thinking

The Prosperity Institute has published a new report calling for the replacement of the Equality Act with new legislation which focuses on the negative enforcement of human rights, removing the positive rights framework that currently exists under the Equality Act. It recommends abolishing the Equality and Human Rights Commission as well.

The idea of bringing together various laws on equality to create a single piece of legislation, was first mooted in 1997—the year New Labour came to power—in the course of a project led by two politically influential figures: Bob Hepple and Lord Lester.

Hepple had been a member of the African National Congress in apartheid South Africa before moving to the UK in the early 1960s. He became a QC and a Cambridge academic, specialising in labour and equality law. He also established the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD) in 1964 and was chair of its legal subcommittee. In 1997 he was a member of the Runnymede Trust’s Commission for Multi-Ethnic Britain.

Lord Lester was a member of the Labour Party who, as a young human rights lawyer, had helped to draft the 1965 Race Relations Act. A prominent member of CARD, he co-founded the Runnymede Trust in 1968 and was its chairman between 1991-1993. By 1997 Hepple, then Master of Clare College at Cambridge University, and Lord Lester had convened a small group of people from organisations involved in law and race relations, including the Runnymede Trust and JUSTICE, a law reform charity. Their aim was

to review and evaluate proposals for the reform of UK anti-discrimination legislation, based on an assessment of the experiences of those affected by the legislation. The specific objectives were to develop a legislative framework, to propose other measures that will promote equal opportunity policies and to spur compliance with those policies, and to ensure that the UK is in full compliance with its obligations under EU law and international human rights law.[4]

The framework they arrived at in 2008, set out in the Declaration of Principles on Equality by the Equal Rights Trust (ERT) (of which Hepple and Lord Lester were Chairs), differed from previous anti-discrimination legislation in two important respects:

1. It embodied a shift from negative conceptions of law, in which law is an instrument for the prevention and punishment of that which is expressly forbidden, to a positive idea of law in which law itself is seen as the agent by which society will be reformed.

2. It reversed the order of priority in the chain of legislative accountability: instead of being ultimately answerable to the British electorate at the ballot box, equalities legislation was to be addressed primarily to trans-national officials such as the law officers of the European Union and related bodies, and the United Nations.[5]

Accordingly, of the 128 original signatories supporting the Declaration, only 26 were based in the UK; and of the 26, only one was not an academic and/or legal professional working in human rights or equalities law. This was the exclusive social stratum which gave birth to the Declaration, the document which proved to be the dominant influence on the subsequent Equality Act.

Podcast of the Week

On Quite Right!, Simon Heffer, Madeleine Grant, and Michael Gove examine the complicated legacy of Enoch Powell and how his actions and rhetoric still influence the British Centre-Right today.

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