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

He’s a great orator but most of those policies were Keir Starmers. He’s just better at delivery.

The caveats she wanted to impose might have had something to do with it. She seemed to think she was in charge and wasn't going in with an open mind.

Exactly! Which is the intention because the other parties can then be painted as unreasonable etc . The Tories used to play this trick all the time and it worked a treat. At least AB was paying attention.

I'm not surprised. All she says is 'cut benefits to fund defence'. Completely closed to any other means of funding defence. Brings nothing to the table as to how we reduce welfare spend without creating a whole bunch of other expensive problems.
If her big idea of cutting by a third the benefits of a comparatively tiny group of claimants, those unemployed for 6 months or more who've never worked, which would save the average tax payer about 30p a week is anything to go by, she'll not be bringing much; and will seek only to use it to discredit the government, pretending we're being left vulnerable because work shy idlers are being given handouts.
If that's the quality of input the government want they might as well work with Farage.

They weren’t Starmer’s. He never mentioned social care at all and was terrified of any suggestion of Europe.

He couldn’t be much worse. This Labour government has been so poor at comms.

Labour always sounds like this.

No reason why it couldn't have been fully scrapped. Scotland did it

If they'd at least had a discussion, the position may have moved. But who knows?

It's obvious that the opposition will have different policy ideas to the government and vice versa, but no headway will ever be made if they don't at least have a preliminary conversation.

Digging heels in is not a useful trait from any party, IMO. It's partly why politics is so bloody frustrating these days.