To ask if you watched Andy Burnham’s bloody good speech?

[Househunt2026]

As in actually watched it and didn’t just doom scroll the commentary? It was bold and honest and pragmatic and actually made me hopeful that we have someone at the helm with a vision for a better tomorrow who has Britain’s best interests at heart.

The National Care Service is a masterstroke, paid for out of scrapping the triple lock and the very real savings of reducing NHS bills on A&E and hospital beds for elderly who should be in care but have nowhere to go.

Scrapping right to buy and increasing council control of housing, boosting the technical education track for young people, pushing renewables, nuclear and energy sovereignty, public control of key utilities for water to get bills down and reduce pollution, investing in people & getting them back to work, leasehold reform by Christmas and everyone’s energy bill will be reduced by fast tracking decoupling energy prices from global gas pricing and by having no VAT on energy bills by TOMORROW!

You can watch the whole thing here and be directly informed instead of getting your perspective filtered through all the bots and misinformation peddlers online m.youtube.com/watch?v=jyjTT_55Gi0

Agree. It should never have been introduced! And I'm a conservative capitalist (small c, not a Tory).

There you go, despite your rudeness. Didn’t your mum teach you to say please.

https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/video/2023/04/24/why-countries-may-start-competing-for-more-migrants-world-development-report-2023

A lot of people have disabilities where they simply need adjustments or part time work and flexibility and that is what we should be focussing on. It’s better to work for most people and have a sense of self worth and purpose than to not work at all. This applies equally to young adults with mental health issues and eg post menopausal women. Also for plenty of people health issues they experience can be transitory. Once you drop out it’s so much harder to get back in without the right support.
I am looking at some of my friends who have young adults with very serious mental health challenges as an example. I can tell you that those who are well connected and rich and have managed to get their DC the best of medical care and work experience are doing much better than those that don’t. Trapping people on benefits and in their rooms and into a meaningless life with no purpose is unnatural and cruel. As for the ageing population, again, I know a ton of very active very fulfilled mid to late 80 year olds-typically advantaged well connected living life to the full and doing a ton of stuff still including charity work, social calendar, family business etc etc
I the the broader and more active a life and rich in experiences the better for most people. That is also why we fight for severely disabled children to go to school and if at all possible we should also allow some forms of work/purpose even if it is just chores in assisted living. And for the elderly, if we all live longer, activity and purpose also needs to be encouraged and the mindset of making yourself useful in the community/society in whatever way you can.
Instead we have become a very entitled and demanding society where everyone is me me me -cash for my demographic etc -and so of course the politicians, all of them are struggling. You can only have a successful society if everyone in it values it and does their bit to the best of their ability, with some help from others. And the middle aged and old need to lead by example for a start.

Because all migrants are the same, qualitatively….

Oh ok, one measly link about something that may be needed, in the tittle.

My mother taught we well, mostly how to cut through the waffling some people seem to love.

The thing is, the immigrants we need are the immigrants with skills and money we are actively chasing away.

Maybe someone’s mother should have taught them better than to hate them.

That link looks like waffle. Do they get to AI at any point or in 2023 they’re dreaming of mass migration still.

In which case your concept of cross-party is not the same as Burnham’s. You’re now suggesting that it’s just cross party on the left, ie a consensus of two or three parties who already have a basic consensus in place. Burnham has claimed that his vision of cross-party politics is to try to reach a consensus with a broad range of parties including Con/Ref. It’s a story that plays well to the gallery, but it’s actually a well worn strategy to try to disarm opponents. That, coupled with electoral reform, is Burnham’s gamble to neutralise the right. Maybe it will work (I certainly hope so), but I’m not naive enough to think that Burnham has any higher purpose for his “new way of doing politics” shhtick.

I'm gutted it's only being removed for m new build council houses and not from current housing stock, but it's still something

You're absolutely right in everything you say except the "simply" in the first line.

While ever we have unemployment, and fully able people are unable to get a job, then "reasonable adjustments" for people who are entitled to the same pay but are unable to deliver the same productivity aren't necessarily "reasonable" to any employer needing to run a business.

We need businesses to make profit and pay tax or we can't finance the system in the first place. It's a very vicious circle.

We need economic growth, but the only growth strategy Labour have done up with so far is build more houses, which would help but we're actually building fewer, not more.

Bugger.

I wonder whether Burnham is playing the famous dead cat strategy. He knows that Labour are hopeless on the economy and immigration and that these are matters that, rightly or wrongly, have been claimed by Con/Ref. So, Burnham is throwing out a load of big new policies like a national care system, a new EU relationship, electoral reform etc. This is designed to shift public debate onto new topics and these are topics where Con/Ref haven’t yet established a strong position or lead over Labour.

It was always going to be cross party on the left. Badenoch has already declined the invitation to work on the NCS plan. I haven’t suggested anything of the sort, incidentally. You inventing what I say is very tiresome. Fortunately my words are there for anyone to read.

Funnily enough, I'm a life long Labour supporter and am less anti right to buy.
It was shockingly poorly implemented, and the refusal to allow councils to build replacement stock with the proceeds was disgraceful, and a huge part of the reason for the current housing crisis. Its also been badly abused by the greedy, buying parents homes and turning them into private rentals.
But...I can't be completely against a scheme that enabled working class people to have something the middle classes took for granted. A little bit of property to call their own, their money saved into something tangible and in most cases, a fairly modest legacy to leave.
I'd support continuation of the scheme under strict conditions.
If you sell the local authority buys back with the same discount you recieved.
For every house sold, another is to be built.

So hopeless that you apparently campaigned for a Labour government throughout the Corbyn years. The years when someone you label as a Labour fangirl couldn’t bring themselves to vote for them. Make it make sense.

Clearly a Labour government isn’t hopeless on immigration since this one has had more impact in two years than the previous one did. Oh, I lie, it increased exponentially with the “Boris wave”.

The centre / centre left across the EU are feeling similar. The push around migration and the debt pile are too hard to counter.

Voters will push on the former and the latter will become impossible because it’s too expensive to service major debt.

Macron will be out, Merz is struggling, various issues arising in Spain too.

The EU could look different pretty soon and Burnham won’t have the easy political consensus.

I think most people understand “cross party”to mean how AB has explicitly described it: i.e working with parties across the political spectrum to reach a consensus. AB has said this so many times and so clearly that it’s not even debatable. But sure, you can pretend it just means working with parties on the left. What is debatable is the motive. Some people will think AB is doing it because of some great guiding moral compass and his deeply held political beliefs. I think it’s a clever political strategy and nothing more.

AB is an adept and determined politician. It is all he has ever done. He was told time and time again that the Labour Party didn’t want him as leader but, instead of doing the decent thing, he plotted and schemed and found a way to seize power nonetheless. You have to admire his tenacity. Doesn’t have a bone of decency in his body, but he’s tenacious and knows how to win. He’ll say and do anything to hold on to power and that is fundamentally what lies behind every policy he announces.

Badenoch has had the offer of cross party working declined (by Starmer) in relation to defence and welfare.

He will. It might not be enough. The landscape is changing because fewer voters are believing the status quo on migration especially is the way to go. That’s across the EU and other comparable countries.

There’s going to be some strong use of rhetoric and last chance saloon type politics as there’s a lot at stake for those who want to stay in power but the trend won’t reverse. We’ll finally get past it and people will look back and see a different time.

The offer to work cross party is one of the oldest strategies in the book. But it’s just that - a strategy that invariably works as a trap. I don’t believe it’s ever intended genuinely and certainly isn’t by Burnham.

You'd have to be certifiable to want to work cross party with the Greens, as they're batshit in the main!

I think at this point we just need the budget to happen so we can see if Labour understand the errors Reeves made and put policies in place to correct those (particularly in relation to how the policies killed youth employment and growth).

It’s very difficult to work cross party when some parties decline the invitation.

I’m fearful of reopening the EU debate. It’s a cynical political ploy and he’s playing with fire. The debates over Brexit almost destroyed us as a country and many families and friendships are still broken. In my view that particular issue needs much more time to heal before the debate is reopened.

As Badenoch found out when she invited the then Leader of the Labour Party.