Burnham ushers in new era of Lollipop Politics

Saccharine platitudes, watery content, and integrity that will melt by the end of recess

Manchesterism

What a stupid bloody phrase. A vacuous, meaningless, media-made trope to describe the largely non-existent, inconsistent, contradictory 1970s buffet of vaguely cobbled together Sixth Form Ideologies. Be Kind on steroids.

With the critical issues facing the united kingdom and litany of pressing concerns on the doorstep - unfettered immigration, illegal invaders, crippling taxation, stagnant growth, geopolitical instability, sky rocketing crime rates - none of which Andy Pandy has even remotely addressed - what is our newly anointed Prime Minister going to do?

Apparently fight the ghost of Margaret Thatcher and pledge to end homelessness.

How?

Let’s start with that - as it is the only concrete pledge we have thus far been privileged to learn. Social housing wait lists average 2.9 years across the country, with the unending inundation of infinity migration overwhelming supply even more. And what about all those new houses Rayner promised to build? Labour’s manifesto pledged 1.5 million homes over the parliamentary term, averaging around 300,000 per year. Well they have finally reached that target after two and a half. Dilapidated hotels have become migrant manors, while a great many rough sleepers are also foreign born.

Even his own record in Manchester on tackling rough sleeping has been lacklustre at best. Piccadilly Gardens is increasingly looking like an American fentanyl camp. Which reminds me, Shabana Mahmood recently decriminalised rough sleeping. Sounds kindly, but it signals more large scale squalid encampments adored by Roma criminals and addicts who refuse to stay in hostels which require them to get clean.

What else has Andy Pandy pledged? Ah yes. Renationalising stuff.

How?

Let’s start with water. The price tag of taking even just Thames Water into public ownership, which is already circling the plughole, with full nationalisation of the utility and its debts could cost the taxpayer between £4 billion and £10 billion. And that’s not chalking up long term pension burden. Now expand that across all utilities and the price tag is a totally unachievable £200 billion, almost as much as annual NHS expenditure. Then add to that the fact that China is already dragging the UK government to court over the state takeover of British Steel. The Jingye Group is threatening to sue the UK government and seek international arbitration over the nationalisation, with Beijing condemning the control of the Scunthorpe plant on national security grounds as "outright robbery" demanding full compensation for investment losses. China, the Labour Party’s comrades.

Now let’s pair that with Burnham’s unerring obsession with Brussels. Andy Pandy has repeatedly made mawkish overtures about returning to the bosom of Brussels, with his newly departed predecessor already trying to nail the UK to dynamic alignment as part of their reset of relations set to be formalised at a rushed summit in September, with the hope of concretising something in statute ahead of any potential snap election which could now pretty much only be announced after recess, if polling suggests the Burnham bounce could sustain a majority. Dynamic alignment with Single Market regulations, you know, like Competition restrictions and unbundling of ownership, means that these two ambitions would be in direct conflict.

The problem is, because there has been zero town halls, zero leaders debates, zero Paxman-style grillings, zero public addresses and zero democracy surrounding Andy Pandy’s auto-annointment, none of these facile objectives have been even remotely interrogated. Just lapped up like a Year 2 poster project by fawning parents.

Now underscore the lot of it with the harbinger of doom - the IMF’s - reaffirmation to ‘Too Big To Bail Out’ Blighty that without radical overhaul of overheads, nominally the ever ballooning welfare cost which Labour backbenchers performatively and indulgently denied the last time the Welfare Reform Act was tabled in Parliament, and the backdrop is one of a lurching, drunken old sot, promising to head to AA and deciding to go for one last hurrah down The Dog and Duck while clutching pamphlets on Cirrhosis.

But that’s OK, because Andy is nice. Andy is for us. Andy has long eyelashes. Andy likes to dress down. Andy is cool and wants to move the Number 10 operation to Manchester, 200 odd miles away from lobbyists, journalists, civil servants and Parliament, and thus functioning and accountability. It’s a bit like a brain surgeon suggesting he practises lobotomies from his Man Cave. But the Legacy Media are lapping it up, just as they squealed with delight when the wretched Starmer stormed to power with a record majority despite nobody having a clue what he stood for and having the charisma of a rubber brick at the bottom of a local leisure centre.

The fact that, essentially, an emoji with a hashtag is now the latest manifestation of power in this country underscores how feckless and vacuous we have become. Land of Tropes and Stories.

At least Starmer didn’t think the best way to kickstart his Premiership was doing a podcast with Lugs Lineker about bloody sodding Gaza. Andy Pandy predictably opined he would put an end to the sale of bombs and bullets to Israel being used to kill kids. Bombs and bullets that, checks notes, simply do not exist. Other than the odd widget and button cover, the arms relationship between London and Tel Aviv is hugely tilted in our favour, with access to cutting edge military technology and access to unparalleled intelligence on the ever rising tide of Islamism being pumped into Europe. Never mind Shinbet and Mossad warnings we have 500 jihadi trainers in the UK at present. Better fork out for some chem labs at the Britannia Hotel so our beatified new arrivals can mix up some Ricin. Hooman Rights and all that. Maybe some homeless miscreants can also get involved as a nice little affirming activity.

It all smacks of shallow, naive, nay, infantile politics during an era where we so desperately require seriousness.

Burnham’s Lollipop Politics may taste sweet over the summer

But it will all melt away to an insipid puddle of sticky nothingness by the time the school holidays end.