As well as what is universally acknowledged to be my overdue peerage, I am angling for Andy Burnham to make me Ambassador to Washington so that I might visit an historic landmark that I longed to see, namely the childhood council house of Bridget Phillipson, which had no heating upstairs into the twenty-first century even though the householder was a councillor, and which the Phillipsons later sold on at an enormous profit despite its privations. In what must the buyer have been living, that even this was a step up? Perhaps such sacrifices had been to pay private school fees? I do not defend VAT on those fees, which raises a negligible sum and which cannot be a permanent source of revenue if it is also to be a blow against those institutions, but on average between 50 and 80 of them close every year, and their number has gone up. The plural of anecdote is not data. If you are opposed to breakfast clubs, then you are morally disqualified from opposing this.
Phillipson’s ostensible origin story is all very Burnham. If he were succeeded by Darren Jones, then would much of the Downing Street operation move to Bristol? Here in the North East, we feel no more affinity with Manchester than with London, a train journey of the same duration. Three years is the length of a Parliament in Australia, so Burnham could get plenty done. Unfortunately, he intends to do so, by handing over money and powers to Reform UK Council Leaders and existing or likely Mayors, even if it is true that, just as Christopher Harborne registers to vote in Berkshire, Reform is one point behind Labour in the latest opinion poll. Within the margin of error, but even so. Why, then, does Burnham want to give away so much power to Reform’s installed politicians? If not to restore and expand the great national project of industry, infrastructure, social housing, and publicly owned utilities, then why does Burnham want to be Prime Minister?
Not that there is any shortage of responsibilities that ought indeed to be returned to the local level at which they were exercised during that great national project. Burnham rightly wants to devolve power away from Holyrood, the Senedd, Stormont and City Hall, yet he wants to impose their model on the rest of us. Would we then have to wait another generation? Left behind, indeed. And left behind to whose tender mercies? If he had been English or living in England, then Peter Murrell would have been a quintessential figure of the municipal right-wing Labour machine. Reform actively cultivates links with the DUP.
In 2021, the DUP’s MPs and MLAs unanimously elected Jeffrey Donaldson as Leader, and we may now say with confidence that each of them knew at least something of his other life, with Emma Little-Pengelly and Ian Paisley having been company directors with Donaldson and his brother, of two different companies in the case of Little-Pengelly. That second existed mostly or entirely to send Jeffrey Donaldson around the world, at the experience of the Foreign Office, to promote peace deals such as he was opposing at home. In 2019, the MPs had already made him their Leader at Westminster, where he had been Chief Whip throughout the time that the DUP had provided the Government’s majority, when his character had been known to the entire Westminster Village. What would the BBC have broadcast if he had been acquitted? That recording must be somewhere. Let us see it.
During that time, in 2018, Theresa May first promised the conversion therapy ban that the present Government, insofar as there could be said to be one, was now proposing to introduce, thereby enshrining gender identity in law without defining it. So long as it kept getting more money, then the DUP illustrated its Irishness by treating the English as a moral and spiritual lost cause. As on, for example, Net Zero, the Conservatives were no use on this when they were in office, and their ranks included several people who were now leading members of Reform, even if, as Housing Secretary, Robert Jenrick did begin the process that has led to today’s repeal of the Vagrancy Act.
Alas, today is also the day on which we become subject to the Crime and Policing Act. The Police must now consider the “cumulative disruption” of previous demonstrations when restricting a new one even if it was unrelated, and the Police may now create create 24-hour “no mask zones” that would prevent many people from protesting without fear of reprisal, all while we were still waiting for the outcome of the Government’s own review of protest legislation. This is the background against which the right to trial by jury is being curtailed, the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates’ Court to the Crown Court is being abolished, under-16s are to be banned from social media so as to force digital ID on all of us, facial recognition is being rolled out all over the place, and there is talk of even further State regulation of the Press, since the last Government gave itself, and the present one has used, the power to decide who may or may not own a newspaper. Yet while David Lammy wants rid of juries, Shabana Mahmood wants a lay Independent Immigration Appeals Authority. Put our people on it. Put our people on everything. Sign up our institutions to sponsor refugees. Even if we had to set up those institutions from scratch.
Even if we had to set up those institutions from scratch, spot on.
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