‘The People of Aberdeen, in Scotland, are dancing in the streets because the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has stated that he will be opening up, all the way, the invaluable North Sea Oil!’ So rambled Donald Trump on Truth Social following BBC reports that new drilling at Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields in the North Sea would be permitted by the incoming administration. As these were existing projects introduced by Sunak and paused by Starmer, to allow drilling a

In his first week, new UK PM Burnham proclaimed himself protector of pubs, in a signal he believes the politics of the pub within the UK is worthy of concern. He is right. Yet the pint of lager on the bar can also be considered within an international frame. If you want to understand why the globalised world economy leaves people confused and feeling dislocated, then sit down, have a beer, and it might start to become clearer. The world’s brewing industry giants offer reflect

Following a fortnight of activity which possessed a more rhetorical than policy-oriented substance, Andy Burnham has now selected an almost unimpeachable cause as the first major test of his Premiership; reform to England’s withering social care system. The system in its current form is, it must be said, fragmented, unfair and ruinously expensive for an increasingly large number of families across the country. Its pressures universally buckle the already struggling local auth

In the Spring I picked apart the shifting sands of the Labour Party’s power dynamics. In that article I made the distinction between the soft left faction that the media seem so desperate to carve out, and the actual soft left. I argued the media’s imagined soft left, epitomised by figures such as Ed Miliband and Andy Burnham, is actually just the left-leaning element of the faction descended from New Labour Brownites. The actual soft left is the faction that can trace its ro

Much was made of the Online Safety Act last year, which covered self-harm and suicide materials, misinformation and disinformation, and social media algorithms. Perhaps the most hotly discussed point was the requirement for porn site users to verify their identities, the major reason being to prevent children from accessing harmful material and improving their internet safety. The influence, in particular, of misogynistic or extreme acts found in some porn films nowadays, ha