Makerfield or Breakerfield?

Britain is about to have a direct Presidential Election, but the only electors will be in Makerfield. If Andy Burnham won, then he would in very short order become the First Lord of the Treasury, the man who wrote the next King's Speech, the man with his finger on the nuclear button, the man with a seat at the G7 and on the UN Security Council. At the Kinross and West Perthshire by-election, Alec Douglas-Home was already Prime Minister. We have never seen anything like this.

What legitimacy could Burnham claim as Prime Minister? The legitimacy of the victorious 2024 Labour manifesto, which promised to abolish leasehold, to make employment rights begin with employment and apply regardless of the number of hours worked, and to equalise the national minimum wage regardless of age, but not to erode the right to trial by jury, or to end the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates' Court to the Crown Court, or to impose digital ID, live facial recognition, and access to our NHS data on the part of Palantir.

Will Burnham plant his flag on that ground? No, of course not. For that, you need Amendment F to the Humble Address, defending the right to trial by jury and the right to access public services without digital ID, and tabled by Adnan Hussain with the support of Jeremy Corbyn, Ayoub Khan, Rosie Duffield, Iqbal Mohamed and Shockat Adam. Sectarians obsessed with abroad are such a blight on our polity.

Not that Burnham has won Makerfield. In 2024, second place went to Reform UK with 12,803 votes, amounting to 31.8 per cent. Its candidate, Robert Kenyon, became a councillor in the recent Reform landslide. And what luck, he is plumber. Yet the talk is of Maggie Oliver, who on Celebrity Big Brother in 2018, and unlike the subsequent Reform grandee Ann Widdecombe, was highly sympathetic towards India Willoughby in what was supposed to have been an all-female celebration of the centenary of votes for women.

Mention of Celebrity Big Brother calls to mind a rather better potential candidate of a rather better party. And it tells the fortune of Wes Streeting. In 1995, when Michael Portillo pledged his full support to John Major, then it became inevitable that Portillo would end up presenting Great Railway Journeys. The absence of a formal challenge in Streeting's resignation letter was a comparable moment. As to what would happen if Burnham failed to win Makerfield, no one knows.

God Is Gone Up

Alleluja, alleluja. Ascendit Deus in jubilatione, et Dominus in voce tubæ. Alleluja.

As the future founding Doge of the Most Serene Republic of Great Britain, I need to give thought to the form of my own and my successors' Fèsta de ƚa Sènsa. All suggestions gratefully received.

Question Time, Indeed

Jenny Chapman is on Question Time. It would be awful if the fall of Keir Starmer saw her thrown onto the slag heap. But if Josh Simons is out of Parliament, then will there be no investigation into Labour Together, which today relaunched itself as Think Labour, chaired by Nick Forbes, whose deselection by his own local party removed him as Leader of Newcastle City Council, on which there were now only two Labour councillors, the same number as on Surrey County Council?

Did Christopher Harborne give Nigel Farage five million pounds "so that I would be safe and secure for the rest of my life", or "as a reward for campaigning against Brexit for 27 years"? If the former, then why did Farage turn down free Police protection? What did he not want the Police to see? He need not have worried, since they managed not to see the drug dealers by appointment to Prince Harry. Speaking of drugs, the Green Party, and specifically how did Zack Polanski have the gall to question Sadiq Khan in detail about Council Tax when he himself was not paying it, nor even living in a household that did? Why did Polanski not vote in the local elections last week? And how could a Party Leader who went around missing votes possibly aspire to be Prime Minister or, far more probably in Polanski's case, Mayor of London?

A Green Mayor of London would be a bad thing overall, but not in every particular. When will the King be visiting Ishmail Hussein? Who, if anyone, either paid or radicalised Moses Edwards and Dominique Charles-Turner to set fire to a building that was being turned into a mosque? Why is Mark Rowley lying that the Met had changed the route of Saturday's Gaza march because of "persistent attempts" to assemble, march or finish near synagogues, something that had never happened, and which would in any case be irrelevant in a free society, as the Met acknowledges by making no attempt to reroute the Unite the Kingdom march away from the many mosques that it will pass? Why has Rowley banned the utterance of certain phrases that had never been uttered on these occasions, and will he react similarly to repetitions of the last Unite the Kingdom's calls for the expulsion of millions of British citizens, calls for the foreign invasion of this country in order to overthrow its Government, tearing up of the Palestinian flag, and physical violence against Police Officers?

Seven Votes, Four Counts

Jason King writes:

Social media posts alleging vote-rigging in Birmingham’s Glebe Farm and Tile Cross ward have attracted hundreds of thousands of engagements over recent days. They deserve a considered response, because the questions they raise about electoral integrity are serious ones — even if the answers, on this occasion, are rather less dramatic than the posts suggest.

The ward returned two councillors. Jess Ankrett of Reform UK came first with 1,394 votes. Shehryar Kayani of the Workers Party of Britain took the second seat with 1,163 votes, finishing ahead of Reform’s second candidate, Satnam Tank, by a margin of single figures. John Cotton, the Labour leader of Birmingham City Council, lost his seat with 896 votes. The strongest Labour candidate, Marje Bridle, finished fifth on 1,035. Neither Labour candidate was within reach of either seat.

Two recounts on Saturday returned identical results. A full second count on Monday — a more thorough process than a recount, involving the physical re-examination of every ballot paper — found seven papers that had not been recorded in any previous count. The result was unchanged throughout: one seat to Reform, one to the Workers Party.

The viral claims built around those seven ballots share a common flaw: they misread, in some cases dramatically, what the numbers actually show.

The most straightforward error appears in a post asserting that the Workers Party won by a single vote, with the clear implication that fraud had delivered them a seat they would not otherwise have held. This is wrong on both counts. The margin was six votes, established in the first count and maintained in every subsequent one. More fundamentally, the Workers Party did not gain their seat through the recount process — they held it throughout. The recounts, if anything, represented a risk to their position rather than an opportunity. It is worth noting that Reform UK, whose candidate Tank stood to benefit most directly from any change in the result, has raised no formal objection.

A second claim — that the seven additional ballots were cast for Labour with the intention of returning Cotton to his seat — requires only a moment’s arithmetic to dismiss. Cotton finished 267 votes short of the second seat. No configuration of seven ballots, however cast, could have altered that position. The claim does not survive contact with the result sheet.

A third post, which attracted the greatest engagement of all, was more carefully constructed than either of those. It recited the counting timeline with sufficient accuracy to lend itself an air of authority, then built upon that foundation a series of rhetorical questions implying that something corrupt had taken place. It stopped short, deliberately, of making any direct allegation. What it also stopped short of mentioning was that Cotton was never in contention, that the result had been consistent across every count, and that the parties who would have had legitimate grounds for complaint have made none through the appropriate channels.

That said, the seven-ballot discrepancy is not a matter to be waved away. Under the Representation of the People Act 1983, the Returning Officer carries a clear legal obligation to document and account for any variance between the verified ballot paper total — established and witnessed before counting begins — and the figures produced by the count itself. That documentation has not yet been made public. Agents from all parties were present throughout the process, as is their legal entitlement, and their accounts of events will be material to any proper assessment of what occurred. A variance of this kind, however small in percentage terms, sits precisely at the threshold where formal explanation is not merely desirable but required.

The discrepancy is a legitimate question, and it deserves a legitimate answer — from the Returning Officer, through the proper process, and on the record. What it does not warrant is the conclusion, stated or implied, that the result of this election was fabricated. The votes were counted, recounted, and counted again. The result was the same every time.

Reputational Damage

Andy Burnham is as bad as Wes Streeting. Josh Simons would still be the Minister for Digital ID if it had not been shown that he had falsely reported to GCHQ that critical journalists, including Keir Starmer’s Independent opponent at the General Election, were Russian spies.

All overseen by Suzanne Ashman, the daughter-in-law of Tony Blair of the Tony Blair Institute, not to say of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, that Institute’s digital ID is of a piece with the granting of unlimited access to identifiable patient data by NHS England to the Palantir of Jeffrey Epstein’s Peter Thiel, to the Palantir that was a client of Epstein’s Peter Mandelson, to the Palantir of ICE and IDF infamy, and to the Palantir with which Starmer and Mandelson had off-the-books meetings in Washington while Mandelson, under whom Streeting had learned so much, was Ambassador there.

Wesignation Honours?

Come on Keir Starmer, bring back Andy Burnham as Health Secretary by raising him to the peerage. Problem solved. It is not that Burnham was a good Health Secretary. But this appointment would annoy the hell out of Wes Streeting, which can only ever be a good thing. And otherwise, Labour was only 859 votes behind Stephen Gethings at Arbroath and Broughty Ferry. The relatively recent taboo against English Labour MPs for Scottish constituencies has begun to ease.

The rules have been changed to make it extremely difficult for there to be a contested Labour Leadership Election, but should there be one, then remember that Labour was the only British party with a member on Donald Trump's Board of Peace. For whom would he be voting? If he did not tell you, then work it out. And do not vote for that candidate. Well, not unless you would vote for Trump. Angela Rayner has been exonerated, while Ed Miliband became Leader against the odds, changed the Labour Party's Constitution dramatically, and would have won the 2015 General Election if it had not been for Conservative overspending that was never disproved, but merely deemed to have been no longer worth investigating after the 2017 Election. Think on.

Bonded Labour?

If you had a vote in a Labour Leadership Election, then vote for whoever Peter Mandelson would less or least want. Wes Streeting would not be a candidate at all except as Mandelson’s proxy, so that rules him out, but there was no talk of reigning in the bond markets from Andy Burnham when he was Chief Secretary to the Treasury. The people who used to have to pay tax are now allowed to lend the State the money, and of course the lender sets the terms. Yet why does the State issue bonds in the currency of which it was the sole issuer, and which it issued precisely by spending it? The best Chancellor of the Exchequer that the Conservative Party never had was Sir Peter Tapsell. As Keynesian and as Eurosceptical as Peter Shore, he identified the money markets, along with the media moguls and the intelligence agencies, as the heirs of the nabobs and of the Whig magnates whom past generations of Tories had made it their defining cause to cut down to size and to subject to the sovereignty of Parliament.

But instead, yields are now even higher than they were under Liz Truss. That ought not to surprise anyone, and it will not surprise regular readers of this site. Labour opportunistically pretended to oppose the abolition of the 45p rate of income tax, the only mini-Budget measure that had not been in Truss’s prospectus to Conservative Party members, but it supported every single one of the others. Had Kwasi Kwarteng’s loony list ever been put to a Commons vote, then the Labour whip would have been to abstain, and any rebellion in favour of it might very well have been larger than any against. The Streeting juggernaut has not come out of nowhere. Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell were derided for exploring the possibility that their policies might have led to a run on the pound, but Truss and Kwarteng obviously never even considered it, and nor have Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves. The City did not like many of Corbyn’s and McDonnell’s agenda, voted against them, and gave plenty of money to the other side, but had those agenda become Government policy, then the City would have factored them in, because that is what it does.

People who had always held the absolute infallibility of the Bank of England, the City, the money markets, and the American Administration of the day, have now spent nearly four years bewailing those forces’ removal of the worst British Prime Minister that they had ever seen even as a realistic possibility, never mind as an actual fact, although how little they knew what lay ahead. Those same individuals had considered it an unanswerable argument against Corbyn and McDonnell that those forces would never have stood for them. If their expectations in relation to Truss were anything to go by, then they would have been wrong about that. The Bank, the City and the markets have been wargaming a Labour Left Government forever. They would have got by, as they still would, not that a Left Government could ever now come from the Labour Party. It was the mini-Budget that they could not countenance. Now, though, they have it a second time. If Trussonomics had been accompanied by spending cuts, then the markets’ reaction would have been even worse. The fantasies of the Walter Mittys on Tufton Street and on the former Fleet Street bear no resemblance to the views of the Masters of the Universe. Since October 1997, when I was a fresher at Durham, City types have been telling me that I “would be surprised” at the real political centre of gravity there. I believe them. Ken Livingstone worked very effectively with it for eight years, his office largely staffed by the Socialist Action that Tariq Ali’s International Marxist Group had become.

As Shadow Shadow Chancellor for decades, and then on the frontbench, McDonnell cultivated all sorts of links that Truss, Kwarteng and the rest of the Tufties simply never did. They assumed that they had the Square Mile on side, when in fact nothing could have been further from the case. The City might not have liked any of McDonnell’s fiscal events awfully much, although it is rarely all that keen on anyone’s, but it could and would have lived with them all. It simply could not live with Kwarteng’s only one, to the point of forcing first his removal from office and then Truss’s. At 35, Kwarteng was making so little in the City that he could afford to become an MP instead. Truss managed nine years there before being unemployed for three, and then spent two as Deputy Director of some Westminster Village thinktank while she slept her way into a safe seat. She may be known only for a speech about pork markets and cheese, but as a disciple of Professor Patrick Minford, she wants Britain to have no agriculture, as would be the “free” market in action. In 2024, she was effectively made to defend that position on the stump in South West Norfolk. But what do we have now? Reeves, who presents her time on a bank’s complaints desk as experience as a banker and an economist. Yet with whom would any candidate for Labour Leader replace her?