As sure as night follows day or the Labour branch office in Scotland is unwilling to learn from its repeated electoral kickings, the Labour party at Westminster is equally unwilling to change, retreating to its comfort zone of corporate centre right politics just as soon as it had defenestrated Keir Starmer for being massively unpopular due to his corporate centre right politics.
The reality that Andy Burnham was not going to push a left wing agenda was disguised to a considerable extent due to the control freakery of his team’s interactions with the media (itself an indication that a backlash was expected) and because the House of Commons has been in its summer recess since Andy Burnham’s coronation.
There have been plenty of worrying signs that Burnham’s tenure as Prime Minister was only going to deliver much the same kind of policies as his predecessor, just delivered in less robotic tones. Burnham kept Shabana Mahmood as Home Secretary despite, or more likely because, her time under Starmer was spent in implementing performatively cruel policies aimed at placating the impossible to placate far right. He made John Healey his Chancellor, Healey resigned as Starmer’s Defence Secretary, citing his inability to support a defence spending review which Healey argued gave insufficient funding to the notoriously spendthrift and wasteful Ministry of Defence which Healey wants to receive 3% of GDP.
It was Healey’s resignation which made Starmer’s position untenable so it was to be expected that Burnham would reward him. However it’s the poor and the disabled who are going to pay the price of that reward. Healey has signalled a package of benefits cuts in his first budget announcement.
With the Commons due to reconvene next week, the U-turns are coming thick and fast. Burnham has U-turned on his previous commitment to nationalise the failing privatised Thames Water company, a decision which comes as no surprise to anyone who is aware that Burnham’s chief of staff is the right wing Blairite James Purnell, who with his former employer Flint Global advised Thames Water on regulatory and rescue strategies. But don’t you dare say conflict of interest. Plans to bring the company under public control have been shelved on the grounds of the alleged cost. This is untrue. Thames Water has been laden with debts by its board, who together with shareholders have continued to reap huge profits even as the public paid a £3 billion bail out to keep the company operating.
Since privatisation 32 years ago, Thames Water has handed £7.2 billion pounds to shareholders, while neglecting essential upgrades leaving the public with failing pipes, sewage discharges, and degraded waterways.
The Government has accepted at face value the supposed £100 billion plus cost of nationalising England’s failing water companies, a figure which would ensure that not only would shareholders and management not suffer any financial loss for the mismanagement and pollution, but would be handsomely compensated. It’s a figure which protects investors and an unsustainable cycle of debt servicing.
A report by the Common Wealth think tank argues that the true cost of nationalising England’s water companies is very far from £100 billion, it is in fact closer to zero.
You can read the report here:
https://www.common-wealth.org/publications/how-to-clean-up-our-water
Naturally, Burnham has accepted the water company bosses’ own estimation of the cost of nationalisation, not a more realistic assessment which refuses to allow those bosses to continue to profit and which takes into account their decades of environmental damage and criminally negligent under investment in infrastructure. Given who he chose as his chief of staff, that was always going to happen.
There has also been a U-turn on the plan to spend the Government’s housing fund solely on social homes. Now only 40% of the £10bn from Affordable Homes Programme will go on types of housing such as sheltered and shared ownership. Burnham had previously called for the programme to be spent entirely on social homes.
One of Burnham’s most egregious U turns has been his decision to renege on the promise he had made to put a cap on political donations. The buying of politicians and political parties by wealthy and corporate donors is one of the biggest threats to democracy we face. The flooding of politics by such donations and the dubious think tanks these donors fund has directly led to a strongly rightward shift in British politics and to the rise of the extreme far right. Without such an infusion of cash from the rich, Reform UK would be a minor political party which could safely be ignored while Restore Britain would be way out there on the la-la lunatic fringe where it rightly belongs instead of registering significant support in opinion polling and dragging Reform and the Tories towards outright fascism.
Just a few weeks ago Burnham told an electoral reform campaigner he would support a donations cap of £500,000. Burnham himself has received donations worth more than £325,000 solely in the three months before he entered No 10. Now Burnham won’t support such a cap after all, citing donations to Labour from trades unions. But donations from trades unions are not the problem and Burnham knows that. They’re just a convenient excuse.
Billionaires are increasingly treating politics and politicians as their own personal playthings, distorting politics and the media so that public policy bends to their will, fomenting actual fascism and the demonisation of minorities in order to distract from the harm that their greed does to society and to the planet. However Burnham isn’t going to do anything about any of that in case it derails the Labour party’s own gravy train. Party before people, how very on brand for the Labour party.
All this even before the House of Commons is back in session. There’s going to be many more U turns and betrayals in the weeks and months ahead. Burnham’s modest bounce in the polls isn’t going to last and in any event it hasn’t translated into an equivalent boost in support for the ailing branch office in Scotland.
Much of Burnham’s apparent polling success is due to the ongoing implosion in Reform UK, while Reform’s difficulties are to be welcomed by anyone who values decency and an appreciation of our common humanity, Burnham’s boost has been minor and will not provide him with much of a cushion when the shine comes off and the reality bites of a Labour party which is as much a creature of the rich and big business as it was under Starmer.
After wrestling for hours with PayPal, I have finally compiled a list of the emails of almost everyone who makes a regular monthly donation to the blog and will soon launch the weekly bonus premium email article for those who make a monthly contribution to the blog. I had hoped to launch this in June but unfortunately it will be delayed for a while. There are a number of people whose emails I am unable to find. Some people donate monthly by Ko-Fi, one makes a monthly donation to last year’s GoFundMe fundraiser, a few people make monthly payments directly by bank transfer. I cannot access the email addresses of any of these people and so cannot add them to the new mailing list. If you are one of these folk, please email me at weegingerbook@yahoo.com and I’ll add you to the mailing list.
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