Cultural Forces Frontline, Indeed

Andy Burnham can prance around Kiev in a state of undress with other D-list celebrities such as Volodymyr Zelensky and Emmanuel Macron, but the serious players John Ratcliffe and Archbishop Paul Gallagher both arrived in Moscow yesterday, and they are just the ones we know about. No one is there to destroy jobs at home by handing over intellectual property in return for nothing but a target on their backs.

There is money for Ukraine, where there may never be another election except perhaps in the small corner that Russia had managed to capture as if that meant that Russian troops were about to march up Stanley Front Street. But there is no money to renationalise Thames Water, even though British Steel was recently renationalised without a penny of compensation to Jingye Group, putting Burnham well to the right even of Keir Starmer. Nor is there any money to build the promised 100,000 council houses per year, or indeed any council houses at all.

While there is nothing wrong in principle with being a private landlord, just as there is nothing wrong in principle with being a private employer, the landlord class is now largely the lanyard class, and Burnham is as determined to wage class war on its behalf as Starmer was, with Angela Rayner as committed this time as she was last time. Do not give a damn about Oasis, the Stone Roses, New Order, the Smiths, the accent, or not bothering to put on a tie. Boris Johnson did not have the vowels or the musical taste, but he was also a scruff.

Dolly Parton: Her Coat of Many Colours

Dolly Parton was an astonishing lyricist. Something like Coat of Many Colors could be taught in schools as serious poetry. In fact, it should be. As should, well, in principle which of her compositions should not, and why? I can wait. As Paul Knaggs writes:

There is a precise moment in the biography of modern American celebrity where wealth ceases to be a tool for self-preservation and becomes a fortress of total isolation. The ultra-rich construct manicured worlds designed entirely to ensure they never again have to smell the air, taste the bread, or look into the eyes of the working poor from whose labour their fortunes were extracted.

Dolly Parton, who has died at the age of eighty, spent six decades violently defying that iron law of capital.

She was, on paper, a billionaire pop icon, a titan of intellectual property, and an empress of country music. Yet she was perhaps the only figure in the modern cultural pantheon who retained, intact and uncorrupted, a working-class soul. Her life was a masterclass in how to make wealth without surrendering to the insidious amnesia that usually accompanies it.

She was born on 19 January 1946 in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River in Sevier County, Tennessee, the fourth of twelve children. Her father, Robert Lee Parton, could neither read nor write. He earned his living as a sharecropper and later on building sites, and the story goes that he paid the doctor who delivered Dolly with a sack of cornmeal because there was no cash in the house. Her mother, Avie Lee, kept that huge family fed and sang the old Appalachian ballads her own Welsh ancestors had carried over generations before. Dolly called her childhood “dirt poor but spiritually rich.” It was a description that refused pity, and it was true.

That refusal ran through everything she did. When her mother stitched her a coat from rags and told her the Bible story of Joseph while she sewed, young Dolly wore it to school proudly and was mocked by the other children for it. She turned that humiliation into “Coat of Many Colors,” a song that did not ask for sympathy so much as insist on dignity. Most people who claw their way out of that kind of poverty spend the rest of their lives trying to hide where they came from. Dolly wrote a hit record about it and sang it for the rest of her career.

She guarded what that poverty had taught her about power just as fiercely. In 1974, Elvis Presley wanted to record “I Will Always Love You.” His manager, Colonel Tom Parker, told her the deal came with a condition: half the publishing rights, handed over, or there would be no recording. Parton said no. “This is the most important copyright in my whole publishing company, and I can’t do that,” she told him, by her own account. She cried all night over it. Elvis never recorded the song. Eighteen years later Whitney Houston did, and it became one of the biggest hits in American music history, still Parton’s copyright, still Parton’s money. She understood something the men running the industry around her did not: that owning your own labour is the only real protection a working person has against those with more power than them.

She never treated that understanding as a private victory. When wildfires tore through the Smoky Mountains in 2016 and government relief moved at its usual bureaucratic crawl, Parton’s My People Fund sent displaced families a thousand dollars a month in direct, unconditional payments, no forms to fill in beyond the basics, no hoops to jump through to prove they deserved it. She built Dollywood into the largest employer in that part of Tennessee and paid park workers a wage they could live on, with tuition help most theme parks would never dream of offering.

And she never stopped thinking about the children she once was. In 1995, inspired by a father who never learned to read, she launched the Imagination Library from Sevier County, the same county she was born in. Every enrolled child anywhere in the scheme’s reach gets a free, age appropriate book posted to their home every month from birth until they start school. By last fetes it had passed three hundred million books sent, free, to children whose families could not otherwise have afforded them. It remains one of the largest literacy programmes ever built by a single person, and it was never treated as a tax write off or a photo opportunity. It was personal. She knew what a house with no books in it looked like, because she had lived in one.

Dolly Parton became one of the richest women in American entertainment and never once mistook that wealth for a licence to forget where she came from. She spent it building libraries out of a childhood spent without books, and wages out of a childhood spent in want.

She came from nothing, built an empire, and then spent that empire making sure the next child born on a mountainside like hers would have a book waiting in the letterbox.

I Had To Have This Talk With You

Your beauty is beyond compare,

With flaming locks of auburn hair,

With ivory skin and eyes of emerald green.

Whatever happened to Jolene? Most recently, she has married Kemi Badenoch. This is their charming wedding photograph, and while who knew that butch-femme was still a thing, congratulations to the happy couple on subverting the racial stereotype attached to it.

LinkedIn today wants me to add Giorgia Meloni as a friend or whatever they are called on there. The algorithmic fairies must see me as an asset to the cause of dissuading Badenoch from doing a deal with Nigel Farage. Farage’s last deal with the Conservatives gave a huge majority to Boris Johnson. Based on his time as Mayor of London, Johnson was always going to become the Prime Minister of Stonewall, of Net Zero, of the Boriswave, of the Northern Ireland Protocol, of the war in Ukraine, of the absolute conviction that the restrictions that he had imposed on everyone else did not apply to his own circle, and of the “legal but harmful” clause of his and Nadine Dorries’s Online Safety Bill. If you had projected something else onto him, then that was your problem. For many of you, it still is. However, there has never been any suggestion that Farage laboured under any such delusion. He knew what he was doing, and he would know what he was doing again.

Farage modelled Reform UK on the Reform Party of Canada, and he introduced Preston Manning at last year’s Birmingham conference as his “inspiration” and “the Godfather of Reform”. While there is a lot wrong with Canada in general and with Mark Carney in particular, has Farage said anything about Donald Trump’s belligerence? Meanwhile, Carney’s British fan club should consider that he was making a stand for No Deal and for total sovereignty over trade agreements. Yet on one point, a confluence events has furnished an obvious compromise. Lake Ontario? Lake America? No, it should be Lake Dolly. Who could object to that? Far more intractable would be the dispute between the people who wanted their city to be known as “Dolly” and those who instead insisted on “Londondolly”. But one thing at a time.

The Wrong Debate At The Wrong Time

Zubir Ahmed writes:

As a doctor, I have spent much of my professional life caring for people at some of the most vulnerable moments they will ever face. I have seen the anxiety that surrounds the prospect of dying, and the desperate wish of patients and families to avoid unnecessary suffering.

Naturally, we all want people facing the end of life to be treated with kindness and respect. But when considering the debate on assisted dying, true compassion demands that we ask a more fundamental question. What kind of society are we building if, before we’ve fixed the systems designed to care for people, we introduce a system designed to help them die?

Andy Burnham has been right to raise this as a priority issue at the start of his tenure as prime minister. Speaking at a care home recently, he explained that assisted dying should not be introduced while Britain’s palliative care and social care systems remain under such strain. A choice between death without adequate care and suicide is not a real choice.

Indeed, as parliament prepares for yet another vote on assisted dying in England and Wales on 11 September, I fear that the offering has been somewhat mis-sold to the public. A state-controlled medicalised dying process is still a process – one where there remain risks of complication and suffering. The reality of assisted dying is more complex than the promise of a perfectly controlled death.

Many people imagine a system where a person facing a terminal illness can choose the exact moment and manner of their death, free from distress. But the legislation does not and cannot provide that certainty. A patient who self-administers medication to begin the dying process may still experience complications. The process may take time; it may require medical intervention. It may not happen where or when the person imagined. The promise of absolute control can therefore become something different in practice: an appearance of choice that does not always deliver the agency people expect.

I am far from the only medical professional to be worried about the prospect of assisted dying being available on the NHS. Among those raising concerns about the bill’s dozens of flaws have been the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Complex Life and Death Decisions (CLADD) group from King’s College London, the Royal College of Pathologists, the British Geriatrics Society and numerous other medical bodies and care authorities. The same concern comes up again and again: is it really a “free choice” when palliative care and social support fall short?

A person’s wish to die does not happen in isolation from their circumstances. It can be shaped by whether they feel supported, whether they fear becoming a burden, whether their family is coping and whether they have access to the care they need. That is why the state of our care systems cannot be treated as a separate issue from assisted dying. Timely access to palliative and social care remains too often determined by where someone lives rather than what they need. For some families, excellent end-of-life support is available; for others, particularly in rural areas as well as constituencies experiencing high inequality, the experience is one of waiting, uncertainty and having to fight for services that should be guaranteed.

A Labour government founded the NHS on a principle that remains as important today as it was at its creation: that healthcare should be there when people need it most, regardless of their circumstances. A postcode lottery in care cannot be ignored while debating a new legal pathway for people at the end of their life.

In Scotland, this concern has been expressed clearly, and was an important reason why, in March, 85% of Labour MSPs voted against the legalisation of assisted dying in Holyrood. The bill introduced in Westminster by my colleague Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP for Spen Valley, in October 2024 did not fare much better: too many concerns about patient welfare meant the House of Lords would not rubber-stamp the flawed text. And yet, on 11 September, MPs will be faced with yet another vote on assisted dying before the care systems are improved to a level which even makes that debate appropriate. Andy Burnham has his priorities right: this is the wrong debate at the wrong time. This is why I, and many others, will be voting against this bill, in pursuit of comfort, dignity and appropriate care for people who are vulnerable and dying.

A Good Place To Start

Jeremy Corbyn writes:

As the local MP, I meet lots of people suffering from immense stress and need. There is one issue, however, that comes up more than any other: housing. In London today, renters are spending more than 40% of their median income on rent. Around one in five UK tenants spend over half their take-home pay on rent. More than 1.2 million households are languishing on social housing waiting lists. 

Unaffordable rents are driving more and more people out of London, which is having several knock-on effects for our community. All of Islington's state schools are operating below capacity; three have already been forced to close in Islington North in recent years. The housing crisis has been compounded by the mismatch between private rented sector rents and the local housing allowance, which has been frozen by successive governments. In our own borough, less than 2.4% of the properties that are available in the private sector are within the local housing allowance. There has been increasing evidence of landlords refusing to allow prospective tenants to top up the rent from their benefits.

The situation is making many prospective private sector tenants homeless and dependent on the short supply of available hostel accommodation. This includes many families with children. Clearly, we need an increase in the local housing allowance. However, without government action to address the ever-rising private sector rents, local authorities will still end up supplementing private landlord’s income - an absurd use of public funds. I was pleased to hear Andy Burnham’s recent commitment to end rough sleeping. However, I was beyond disappointed to hear the housing secretary rule out private sector rent controls in that same week.

Rent controls exist in many cities across the world as a means of reducing the cost of living, ending excessive profiteering in the private sector, and easing the grotesque exploitation of people who are in desperate housing need. While around 5,000 people are sleeping rough, around 300,000 people are homeless, in large part because of unaffordable rents. There is no answer to the housing crisis that doesn’t include controls on private rents, alongside a massive council housebuilding project. We are facing an ever-pressing housing crisis that has reached epidemic proportions in every city in the country. If the government was serious about tackling it, then it must show that it is prepared to stand up to private vested interests. Bringing in rent controls would be a good place to start.

Burnham’s Economy: War Without End

Paul Knaggs writes:

Andy Burnham’s first trip abroad as Prime Minister was not to Brussels, or Washington, or anywhere that might have signalled a shift in Britain’s economic direction. It was to Kyiv. Six weeks into a premiership he opened by promising to be a “circuit breaker” for towns like Barrow and Blackpool, the places he has spent a career promising to rebuild and has yet to find time to properly visit as Prime Minister, Burnham used his first flight out of the country to mark Ukraine’s independence day, standing outside St Sophia Cathedral to tell the crowd that Britain had kept the flame of European freedom alive in the last century and that Ukraine now carried it in this one.

The occasion itself was real enough. Burnham was chairing his first meeting of the so called Coalition of the Willing, the grouping set up by Britain and France to coordinate support for Ukraine, and he used it to press allies to dig deeper into their own missile stocks. Patriot interceptors have grown scarce since supplies were diverted to the Middle East during the war with Iran, and Kyiv is bracing for another winter of Russian strikes on its power grid. Alongside the missile appeal, Burnham announced that Britain would let the defence firm MBDA declassify UK components of the SCALP missile, the French sibling of Britain’s Storm Shadow, clearing the way for France and Ukraine to build an assembly line for the weapon on Ukrainian soil, extending its reach deeper into Russian territory. Zelensky, for his part, told the coalition Ukraine faces a defence funding gap of €27 billion for next year alone, and pointed his allies toward the frozen Russian assets sitting in European vaults as one place to find it.

The security case Burnham is making is the same one Starmer made before him: an aggressor state, a fight for democratic survival, a debt Britain owes for keeping its own flame alive once. It is a clean story, and it leaves out where this war actually started. It did not begin as an unprovoked assault on a peaceful neighbour in February 2022. It began in 2014, when a government in Kyiv was toppled with active Western encouragement, when Russian speakers in the Donbas had their language rights stripped and answered with a bid for autonomy, and when eight years of shelling, logged daily by OSCE monitors on the ground, killed far more people in Russian-speaking Donbas than anywhere else in that theatre, as this paper set out at length via the former Swiss intelligence colonel Jacques Baud.

The Minsk agreements meant to settle it, negotiated and guaranteed by France and Germany, were never honoured by Kyiv and were quietly abandoned by the West that had promised to enforce them. Russia crossing the border in February 2022 was not the opening act of this war. It was the moment an eight year civil conflict, manufactured and sustained by EU and US sponsorship of one side, turned into a war between states. None of that makes the missiles falling on Kyiv this winter any less real. It does mean the moral architecture Burnham is building, in which Britain has no choice but to arm one side indefinitely, rests on an origin story that starts eight years too late.

There is also the question of who is still actually running this war. Washington set its strategic terms, supplied the intelligence, and provided the political cover for the coalition Burnham now chairs. Then its attention moved on, first to the Middle East, where its Patriot stocks now go instead of Kyiv, and then away from the war altogether under an administration with no appetite to sustain it. What Burnham has inherited is not a fresh cause but an old one whose principal sponsor has largely left the building, and every coalition meeting produces the same request from Kyiv: more interceptors, more declassified technology, more money to close a funding gap that keeps reopening. A war both sides insist is winnable if the West simply does more has, by that same logic, no natural end. That is not solidarity. It is a subscription with no cancellation clause, and Britain has just signed up for another year.

This is the inheritance Burnham has stepped into, and the language of solidarity has folded itself around a second, quieter argument: that arming Ukraine is also how Britain rebuilds itself. This is the part of the pitch that should stop Labour voters in the old heartlands in their tracks. Burnham has made reindustrialisation the organising idea of his premiership, and again and again, when pressed on where the jobs will actually come from, his answer runs through a barracks or a shipyard rather than a factory making anything a household could use. At Portsmouth Naval Base, hosting Zelensky, he called defence a “top priority” precisely because of the jobs it promises. At Farnborough he told the air show that Britain would reindustrialise the nation through exactly this kind of investment. At Barrow in Furness, where BAE Systems already employs thirteen and a half thousand people building Trident’s replacement submarines, his government has pointed to an £8.4 billion contract phase promising eighteen thousand more jobs by 2030. The Ministry of Defence’s own figures show spending with industry running at £31.9 billion a year, supporting 274,000 jobs, with munitions employment alone reported up by more than half in twelve months. Reindustrialisation, in Burnham’s Britain, increasingly means one thing: the sovereign capacity to make things that kill people, at scale, for as long as the war lasts.

Set that against what the same government has found for the crisis at home. Burnham’s flagship anti poverty pledge, announced in his first days in office, was £340 million over three years to end long term rough sleeping. It is a smaller sum than a single tranche of submarine contracts, spread over three times as long, to address a problem that sits alongside a food bank system distributing 2.6 million emergency parcels a year, forty five per cent more than before the pandemic, with parcels going to pensioners at nearly two and a half times the rate of five years ago. The VAT cut on household energy bills he has scheduled for October is being funded, his government says, by scrapping Starmer’s digital ID scheme rather than by any new revenue. Britain, in other words, can find billions for missile stocks and submarine yards inside weeks of a Prime Minister taking office, and has to raid one small savings line to find relief for people choosing between heating and eating.

The Communist Party’s general secretary Alex Gordon put the political charge of this plainly after Kyiv, accusing Burnham of continuing down the same road as Boris Johnson and Starmer before him and calling Britain Nato’s “messenger boy”. Whatever one makes of the source, the underlying observation does not require any particular party card to see. A government that campaigned on breaking a broken system has, within weeks, committed itself further into a military industrial relationship with the EU and Washington’s coalition partners than any of its predecessors, and has done so with barely a ripple of parliamentary scrutiny. Starmer’s £90 billion EU loan commitment for Ukraine, agreed in Yerevan days before local elections with no Commons vote and no published estimate of Britain’s exposure, set the precedent. Burnham has not reversed it. He has extended it, with a fresh SCALP declassification and a fresh round of missile appeals, agreed in Kyiv rather than Westminster, and announced to reporters rather than debated by MPs.

Even setting the war itself aside, the economics of Burnham’s reindustrialisation bet are not obviously sound on their own terms. Sympathetic commentators who share none of the left’s discomfort with Nato have made the same point from the other direction, noting that state subsidised factory jobs have a poor record of paying for themselves and pointing to the roughly half a million pounds per job the National Audit Office estimated it will cost to keep the nationalised Scunthorpe steelworks running to 2028. If reindustrialisation through defence contracts struggles to justify itself even inside a friendly audience, it should not be waved through unexamined simply because the word “Ukraine” is attached to it.

Which leaves the question nobody in Kyiv or Westminster wants to answer out loud. Burnham has built the beginnings of an industrial strategy on submarine yards, missile factories and drone assembly lines whose order books depend, in large part, on a war continuing somewhere. What happens to Barrow’s eighteen thousand promised jobs, to the rise in munitions employment, to the entire architecture of “security led growth” his government has started to build, if the fighting in Ukraine actually stops, or if Washington’s disengagement finally forces a settlement Britain has had no say in shaping? Nobody has said. A reindustrialisation strategy that quietly needs the war to keep running is not renewal. It is dependency dressed in the flag.

There is a version of British reindustrialisation that does not require a war to sustain it: public investment in the housing stock that leaves children breathing in damp, in the transport links that strand people from work, in the energy system that leaves pensioners rationing warmth in their own homes. That version does not need Kyiv, or Brussels, or a Coalition of the Willing to sanction it. It only needs a government willing to spend at home with the same speed and the same confidence it has just shown abroad. Burnham found billions within weeks for missile stocks. His own working class voters are still waiting to see what he can find, with the same urgency, for them.

Britain once fought the ideology whose Ukrainian standard-bearer, Andriy Biletsky, founded the very movement Kyiv now honours: a man who spoke openly of leading a crusade against races he called inferior. Zelensky has pinned medals on Right Sector veterans inside Ukraine’s own parliament, and Kyiv still keeps its monuments to Stepan Bandera, whose forces killed Poles and Jews alongside the Wehrmacht. Washington may have decided in 2024 that today’s Azov Brigade passes muster. It should not have taken a vetting process to ask the question in the first place. Britain should not have to burn its own house down to keep funding a war whose own allies it still has not looked at plainly.

Sealing The Deal

Priests would of course choose to be thrown to the lions or burned at the stake rather than break the Seal of the Confessional. But the Epstein Class has been exposed, so this whole furore is being got up in order to reintroduce the somewhat faded popular association of child sexual abuse with the Catholic Church instead.

They are playing the long game. Their very last motivation for discrediting the Church would be to protect children from sexual exploitation. On this as on so very many other matters, they need the Church out of the way so that they can get down to business. I shall almost certainly be dead, but in 50 years’ time, the Church will be “blamed” for “what is now the unbelievable fact” that there ever was an age of consent. Print this off and keep it.