[Tubby Isaacs]

Watson seems to suggest that there are quite a lot of people who wouldn't be completely hardline about "boats and hotels", and would probably just like to see fewer of them processed faster. But I agree that doing what he and Shabana suggest with people who, as they themselves say, arrived with reasonable expectation of leave to remain would be unreasonable. And I think there's a pretty easy political argument to be made against Badenoch and co on that.

[Abernathy]

Not before time. Turner is a total wanker.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2 ... 1774961698

Karl Turner has Labour whip suspended after criticism of Starmer and No 10

Talking to that cunt Jody fucking McIntyre ?

[Tubby Isaacs]

I think he's pissed about too much, but I wonder whether this does more harm than good. Most people don't know who he is and will lap up the "Stalin Starmer kicks out bloke for being leftwing" stuff. Still an enormous majority, with or without him.

[Boiler]

I think he's pissed about too much, but I wonder whether this does more harm than good. Most people don't know who he is and will lap up the "Stalin Starmer kicks out bloke for being leftwing" stuff. Still an enormous majority, with or without him.

Seen that already BTL in the Grauniad.

I really must stop reading that.

[davidjay]

Not before time. Turner is a total wanker.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2 ... 1774961698

Karl Turner has Labour whip suspended after criticism of Starmer and No 10

Talking to that cunt Jody fucking McIntyre ?

Call me naive, but if I were an MP being interviewed by an 'independent journalist' I'd do a bit of Googling first.

[Abernathy]

Clive Lewis has put out a statement, focusing somewhat on defence, that is, surprisingly enough, quite coherent and rational :

The full statement:
Clive Lewis MP (@labourlewis)
"Westminster may finally be about to have the argument it has spent 40 years avoiding.
If Andy Burnham returns to Parliament, the political class will know how to cover it. A leadership drama. Who is up, who is down, whether Keir Starmer can survive, whether Labour is once again turning inward. The familiar machinery of Westminster psychodrama will whirr into life.
That framing misses the larger point. Burnham’s possible return matters not because of what it says about Labour’s leadership, but because of what it reveals about the British state: what it can still do, what it has forgotten how to do, and what kind of country it must become if it is serious about resilience.
Britain is finally having a more serious conversation about national security. The Strategic Defence Review, the pivot back towards Europe, the recognition that hybrid warfare turns citizens, infrastructure and civic institutions into part of the front line: all of it marks a real shift in how the state thinks about its own survival.
But at the centre of that conversation lies a question that the defence establishment, and most of Westminster, still does not want to answer. What kind of society do you need to be before resilience is possible?
Finland is now the model everyone cites. Comprehensive security. Whole-of-society defence. Civilian preparedness woven into military planning. British strategists admire the Finnish system and ask how it might be copied. But the admiration stops short of the uncomfortable question: why does it work there?
The answer is not geography or history or some mysterious quality of Finnish national character. It is structural. Nearly 80% of Finns say they would defend their country if attacked. In Britain, the figure is closer to 33%. That gap is not an accident. It exists because Finland has spent decades building a society in which people have a genuine stake in what they are being asked to defend. Energy is affordable. Housing is available. Public services function. Institutions command trust. The Nordic welfare state is not a sentimental add-on to Finnish security policy. It is the foundation of it. You cannot ask people to defend a country that does not work for them.
Britain has spent 40 years building the opposite. The privatisation of essentials – energy, water, transport, housing – transferred wealth upwards from households to shareholders while making the basics of everyday life more expensive. The state, stripped of the tools to control costs at source, has been reduced to compensating after the fact.
Out of every pound the Government spends on housing, 88p goes to subsidising private rents. Just 12p goes to building homes. When energy prices spiked in 2022, the Government spent £40bn in a single winter cushioning the blow, not because it had a resilient energy system but because it lacked one. Debt interest now consumes more than £100bn a year. Britain has the highest debt servicing costs in the G7: the compounding price of financing failure rather than eliminating it at source.
This is what bond market dependency actually looks like. It is not an abstract fiscal condition. It is the consequence of a state that has been stripped of the supply-side tools that would let it cure the problems it now pays, indefinitely, to manage. And here is the paradox the Treasury refuses to confront. The countries that borrow most cheaply are often those that have retained the public investment model Britain abandoned. The spread between UK and Dutch borrowing costs has widened sharply not because markets fear public investment, but because they have lost confidence in a model that borrows to subsidise private failure while never addressing its causes.
This is the connection Britain’s defence debate is missing. The familiar framing, that social spending is what must be sacrificed to meet the NATO target, is not merely politically toxic. It is strategically illiterate. Cutting the foundations of social cohesion to fund the hardware of national defence is self-defeating. You end up with planes and no pilots, submarines and no crew, an army that cannot recruit because the society it is meant to protect has stopped believing in itself.
I think Burnham understands this. That is why his programme is more interesting than the leadership gossip suggests. What he has been building in Greater Manchester – public control of transport, expanded social housing, investment in the productive foundations of the city economy – is not a nostalgic rerun of postwar nationalisation. It is a proof of concept for a different kind of state.
The Bee Network is the most visible example, but the argument behind it travels. A state that can shape markets is not condemned to subsidise their failures. A state that produces affordable energy through public generation does not need to spend tens of billions cushioning every price shock. A state with a serious public housebuilding programme does not need housing benefit to rise endlessly in line with private rents. A state that builds institutions people can see, use and trust begins to restore the civic confidence on which resilience depends.
The real constraint on Britain is not money. It is capacity: the workers, institutions, supply chains and public purpose needed to turn national will into national renewal. Britain’s tragedy is not that it has run out of money. It is that after 40 years of hollowing out the state, it has made itself less able to act.
Burnham’s critics will reach for the familiar warning. Borrow more, spend more, spook the gilt markets, repeat the Truss disaster. But this misunderstands both the problem and the opportunity.
Bond markets do not have ideological preferences. They have functional ones. They prefer clarity, credible revenue streams, productive investment, and a state with a plan. What they punish is not public ambition but incoherence. A properly designed productive state programme would not be a leap into fiscal fantasy. It would be an attempt to end the much costlier fantasy that Britain can keep borrowing to compensate for broken markets while refusing to repair them.
The defence conversation and the economic conversation need to become the same conversation. Finland did not build national resilience by choosing between welfare and security. It built resilience by understanding that they are inseparable: that a country in which the basics work, where people trust one another and the institutions around them, is one that can face danger with something more than anxiety.
That is the deeper argument Burnham represents. Westminster will be tempted to treat him as a leadership story. It should resist the temptation. The question is not whether Burnham can return to parliament. It is whether Britain can return to the idea that the state should make life work. Because a country that cannot command the confidence of its people cannot truly defend itself."

[Tubby Isaacs]

He can write and be perceptive but I don't really get this Burnham stuff. How is his view of the state different to Starmer's, or Reeves' or most of the other people in the Cabinet? Reeves has increased the capital budget ("envelope", as it's called) by a lot. She and Starmer aren't sat there thinking "it's all the same innit, money!" The problem is that capital investment is slow burning. Burnham wants and campaigns for fast trains to Birmingham, that's "vision". Reeves and Starmer agree, and try and deliver this at a reasonable price, and they just get it in the neck for killing newts.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Lou Haigh has published something on a new fiscal framework.

https://renewal.org.uk/articles/a-new-f ... w-britain/

Lots is borrowing to invest, as you'd expect, but interesting that she's also strong on deregulation in some areas, and cites the Fingleton Review on nuclear planning. Fingleton was very unpopular on the left, where Haigh is reckoned to be.

What I'd say though, is this much different to what Starmer-Reeves are trying to do already?

[mattomac]

They seemed to say Starmer and put out this which sadly I don’t think does much.

[Abernathy]

Tom Watson gets it, as usual .

am desperately worried by today’s announcements. But after last week’s results, I understand why events have taken this course. It now looks as though Labour may be heading into a leadership election. Ministers, MPs and the National Executive Committee carry a heavy responsibility, not only to the Labour Party but to the country

A leadership election while in government cannot become a factional scramble. It must be swift, orderly and fair. That means fairness to Keir Starmer if he chooses to defend his leadership. It means fairness to Wes Streeting and any other candidate if they secure the support required to stand. And it means fairness to Andy Burnham if a route back to Parliament can be found in time.

No one should have the rules rewritten for them. But nor should the timetable be used to shut out a serious candidate before MPs and members have had the chance to judge the field properly. The NEC’s responsibility is not to favour one contender over another. It is to create a process that commands confidence.

If Makerfield is the route, then the members there must be treated with respect. They decide who their candidate is going to be. The voters of Makerfield decide who represents them in Parliament. No constituency should be treated as just a mechanism in a national leadership contest.

That is why I believe the NEC should make every reasonable effort to set a timetable that accommodates a leadership election in which Andy Burnham can stand if he finds a route back to Parliament in time. This is not about the party engineering a seat for one candidate. It is about ensuring that the process is not designed, deliberately or otherwise, to exclude him before MPs and members have had the chance to judge the field.

That goes against some of my instincts. Voters do not like unnecessary by-elections and nor should they. Parliament is not a private members’ club. Seats belong to the electorate, not to parties or personalities. But these are unusual circumstances.

Mayors are now a significant part of our democracy. They hold substantial mandates and exercise real political authority. Andy Burnham is also a major figure in the Labour movement. If anyone outside the Commons has earned the right to be tested in this way, he has the strongest case.

But this cannot drift. If a by-election route is to be opened, it must be opened immediately. If a leadership election is triggered, the NEC should proceed without delay, with a timetable that is fair to the sitting Prime Minister, declared challengers and any credible candidate seeking a route back into Parliament.

That is the only way to produce a result that commands confidence inside the party and beyond it.

The process also needs clear standards of conduct. Members of the Parliamentary Labour Party should not attack candidates through newspapers, broadcast studios or anonymous briefings. They should argue openly, honestly and directly inside the party’s democratic process. A contest for the leadership of the governing party is not a media entertainment. It is a decision about who should serve as Prime Minister.

I know this party well enough to know that if any serious candidate is seen to have been blocked, that grievance will follow the outcome from day one. Labour cannot afford that. Whoever leads the party and the Government after this process must have authority, legitimacy and room to act.

They will need the political latitude to change the factors that have held the Government back and contributed to last week’s defeat. I tried to set out some of those issues in a recent newsletter, though I do so as someone who has retired from frontline politics.

This is a serious moment for the United Kingdom and a critical moment in Labour’s history. It is not the time for MPs to posture on broadcast media or brief against one another. It is the time for discipline, judgement and speed.

The right course is clear: run a process that gives every serious candidate a fair chance, respects local members and voters and produces a Prime Minister with the authority to lead.

My thoughts are with Labour MPs as they make very difficult decisions in the days ahead. Members should also make clear to the NEC that the party needs a process that is quick, fair and worthy of the responsibility Labour now carries.

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[mattomac]

Would be fine if it wasn’t going take several months, guarantees nothing and could lose us a seat (not a massive loss considering), the mayor position and our reputation.

Well done to every Labour MP who rebelled you've basically signed your own P45s and we get that fascist lot.