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

Was Starmer a Tory?

I think the discussions on this get skewed by the MN demographic when free university gets brought into it. My parents didn’t go to university. When I went, 20-25% of school leavers went to university. I think it doesn’t feel like this to much of MN because their parents are more likely to have gone to university than across the population in general.

What % of today's pensioners benefited from free university? Less than 15%, do you have any sympathy for the other 85% or not?

But there was a much much better job market then for those who didn’t go to university? Jobs for life pretty much, final salary pensions and the like. A nice bounce from your discounted purchased council house, or even just a massive rise in your house value because of the economy.

Nothing like that currently for our young adults now - and without them earning and paying tax, there will be even less available going forward to pay for the many more, longer lived pensioners coming down the line….

Also, MN appears to be more likely to have rich parents with large pensions. My DM had a £4k state pension and £4k from a joint private pension my self employed DF paid into which paid to DM when DF died. No point in talking to her about looking into credit credit or the like, she’d have been horrified at the thought so didn’t bother.

Let’s add in cheap housing, not having to save tens and tens of thousands in deposits, gold plated pensions in many cases.

Its not the fault of young people that they were encouraged to go to uni as their main option while everything else was hollowed out. There are very few apprenticeships or other option. I work with young people so I know exactly how bad things are.

Is this his Lord Ali moment, he should have just refused to discuss this. He's the PM of the whole country now and shouldn't be bowing & scraping to the owners of a football club (even if they're the rulers of the UAE).

I think it’s easy to flip it on its head though. I never went abroad on holiday (and didn’t have one at all after aged 12), my DM cut my hair until
I was 16, all my clothes came from jumble sales, TV and radios were all second hand. Central heating was quite normal in general I think but we lived rurally and didn’t have it. We never ate out. The idea of living like this to my “I’ll just get myself a grande Frappuccino” DD would be the same as a trip to the moon. I’m not saying her stopping buying tat will buy her a house but her quality of life to date is vastly higher than mine was at her age.

Probably, but I think he wanted to honour his father. And also, the fact that he was delivering the speech in the city where he was born, literally on the street where his father worked and was talking about working class aspirations that drive him and his brother's because of his parents made it entirely relevant. He also would have wanted to honour him given his very recent death.

Maybe this was the case where you grew up but in my community of the de-industrialised NE it definitely was not.

Its quite obvious you didnt listen to the whole speech as much of that was addressed.
You are right, though it would be so much better if Thatcherism had never happened. You can tell he wanted to nationalise gas and electric again, but the costs in doing so are just too high.

Not everyone chose to buy their council house.

Possibly the ingrained guilt of defying the teachings of the church.
A lot of his policies are in line with the Catholic social teaching.

I thought AB said he wanted palliative care sorted first so people had an genuine choice rather than him being completely against AD

He did more than honour his father, he literally used his father's death for political gain, and as I've said above I actually agree with most of what he said. He had the choice not to insert his father into the speech, but he went ahead and did it.

Tony Blair sold university for all and people voted for him to provide it.

Do not blame old people if what he sold everyone was a load of rubbish. He won a landslide. Younger people voted for him too. ie the parents of those going to university now voted for him.

Only history will tell.

The generation who are pensioners now tended to only move out of parental home when they married and had been working for a few years and saving for deposits etc.
The unmarried sibling usually female would stay in parental home and end up caring for parents and would often stay in the home once parents had died.
The younger people now who have been to university don't want to return home and restrictions.

I am wondering how much the Manchester City debacle will impact on him.
As he was the Mayor of Manchester.
He says his relationship with the Saudi’s can stand up to scrutiny.

@Monty36

just to be a bit pedantic, City’s owners are from Abu Dhabi so Emiratis, not Saudis.

Yes, you are quite right. UAE. Issues are not any different though.

So you are doing exactly what everyone does and blaming young people 🙄

My 18 year old and the 18 year old students I work with every day had fuck all to do with this shitshow. Why should they be saddled with 70k of debt just to improve their lives and prospects?

It was so good. Definitely worth watching in full. The pause 😭

Nobody said it would. He’s just said the savings from that will go towards it. The triple lock had to end, and it makes good political sense to tie it to something that mainly benefits the same voting cohort.

I paid 1 pound 35 in VAT on my last statement. I'll be 14 pounds a year better off. Im in Scotland and scrapping right to buy will do very little for housing at all. In my area there is a house building programme but it's not enough to replace the ones sold off.

Burnham probably didn't write his speech either. He'll have a team who do that for him.