The First Duty?

As a former Chief Secretary to the Treasury who was preparing to become its First Lord, Andy Burnham is taking the advice of Andy Haldane, a former Chief Economist of the Bank of England; of Richard Hughes, a former Chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility; and of Jim O’Neill, a former Chair of Goldman Sachs. Their advice is to scrap the triple lock, which delivers an internationally pitiful pension from an age that would provoke civil unrest in any serious country.

Heaven forfend that money should go to the people who spent it, and thus into the consumer economy that employed the young even amidst the endless increases in the pension age. Those increases have also caused much of the explosion in claims for working age sickness and disability benefits, both among the old who were being damaged physically and therefore often mentally by being kept in the workforce, and among the young who were being damaged mentally and therefore often physically by being unable to join it or to progress in it. If you want more wars, then you want an awful lot more both of physical disability and of lifelong mental illness. But the benefits for those go straight back into the real economy. Not so the money to the military-industrial complex, as President Eisenhower called it.

For only the twenty-second highest population in the world, the sixth highest military spending is still not enough for those generous future employers, the arms companies. And for all the convulsions in the Parliamentary Labour Party between 2015 and 2024, the one thing on which they all agreed was WASPI. Did even the seceders to Change UK dissent from that? Even if each of the 3.6 million WASPIs had been paid the full £2,950, then that would have added up to £10.62 billion, most of which would have rapidly made its way to the tills. Now keep an eye out for everything that cost more than that.

Still a Reserve Officer, nudge nudge wink wink, Al Carns was a Conservative-voting Colonel in the Special Forces, nudge nudge wink wink, until June 2024, when he resigned his commission and joined the Labour Party after the General Election had been called. He was then parachuted in a new sense, into the Birmingham Selly Oak seat that had been vacated at the last possible moment by Steve McCabe, Parliamentary Chair of Labour Friends of Israel. The General Election was on 4 July. On 9 July, Carns was made a Defence Minister. Less than two years later, and with no chance of winning, he is the only potential rival who might delay Burnham’s coronation by forcing a contest. So everything has to be tailored to persuading him not to bother. And as well as practically limitless military spending, he also wants an amnesty for veterans of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, a principle that, once conceded, could not be denied in relation to any other deployment prior to the conferral of total immunity by the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act and the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act. Think on.