How long do you give Andy Burnham as PM?

[AndyBurnham2L]

Build ‘em up.
Knock ‘em down.

Short honeymoon and then the grumbling will start. It will all be over for him by Christmas.

So, who’s next?

Simon Reeves Scandinavia has a fascinating visit to the Sovereign Wealth Fund office. episode 3 I think.

https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-would-opening-up-north-sea-oil-again-resolve-the-current-energy-price-problems-for-the-uk

Norway is also 78% tax on their oil business. I agree eye watering. But Gov is also nakedly hostile to North Sea Oil (Net Zero zealots like Ed Milliband). That doesn’t help.

It’s not about energy price impact it is about tax revenue and economic productivity. Brent crude is thick and heavy and unsuited to domestic fuel (but useful for other things when sold internationally).

You might not care about the energy prices, most people do.

Renewables is the way forward.

The Norwegians were appalling and did not compensate the families of the victims for 26 years, in one disaster.

"I would go so far as to say that the Norwegian Government murdered my father because they knew that they were diving with an unsafe decompression chamber."

This from a British woman re: Byford Dolphin cover-up

With less tax revenue from North Sea Oil the government needs to find tax from other sources (like you and me).

We still have a significant strategic national resource we can sell (and tax) as part of a sensible managed transition.

BP, Shell etc were treated very generous wrt tax in the past, about time they started paying.

How much more tax above 78% would you like them to pay?

You sound like Rachel reeves lol. I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that, they have a choice and between the 3 majors their upstream exit is taking 15 billion tax from the economy.

you can’t force companies to operate and hand over all their earnings, you simply can’t, if it is not financially viable they simply exit. As they are doing. So many jobs lost as well due to it,

That's not what I said.

78% if fine, similar to Norway.

Agree. This is what other countries ( including Norway are doing. They are selling their oil and putting the revenue towards developing renewables because the storage isn't reliable. As is China. Burning coal but also developing renewables with the money made from being able to access reliable cheap energy.

Better Reeves than Kwarteng,

Oh yes. The 1970s. Labour and conservatives in and out of power all the time. Is that what Burnham wants to return to?
I wondered which bit of the 70s he wanted. I considered miners strikes, I considered petrol shortages. I considered high inflation.
I hadnt considered constant elections and changes of government

But he hasn’t said he wants to go back to the 1970s, has he? He has said wrong choices were made in the 1980s and he wants to make new choices, to redress the results of some of those wrong choices.

The back to the 1970s rhetoric seems to only exist in the imaginations of his detractors.

To the original question: 18 months

Agree with PP who said AB has never mentioned the 70s, it’s a made up lie by the right wing media. He did say 40 years which takes us to 1986.

Andy Burnham believes in aspirational socialism.

https://fabians.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/TheLabourLeadership.pdf

This is the belief that the nation will prosper if you give everyone the best possible chance to succeed.

This sounds lovely, yet incredibly naive. It fails to recognise the national psyche. It fails to recognise that we are as a nation bitter and resentful of success, believe we are owed a better life than what we have, and that it is someone else who is responsible/to blame for our predicament.

So yes you can rob the rich and pour it even more over those who are aggrieved or prevented from being the best they can be. But it is a waste of money and won’t change a thing.

Utter crap. If we ‘went wrong in the 1980s’, as Burnham said, we must have been right in 1970s.

Why does the left tell so many falsehoods?

Which means he was quite happy with the first Thatcher government.

I find this confusing because it takes us to all but a year of her second ministry. I thought it may have been that her policies hadn't taken hold but as she came in in 1979 they would have.

It would make sense for him to say that he wants to go back to pre- Thatcher, not the Thatcher years.
However, either he wants to go back to the Thatcher years, or, he wants to go back to the 70s. He hasn't said which particular bits of the 70s were so wonderful.

He was born in 1970. How much did he understand about politics when he was at primary school?

It also doesn't make sense to criticise the Blair government. It was the most successful Labour government since the 1940s. Andy was part of that government.

But, he thinks that Blairism failed to tackle Thatcherite economics.

More bullshit…

https://x.com/andyburnham/status/2083261738829377930?s=46&t=wjgj9AHysRwn3YQi4vJFdw

It is really difficult to engage in a discussion in good faith with someone who makes sneering generalisations about “the left”.

But, it’s also hard to ignore such blatant misinformation. What Andy Burnham said was:

Britain took a series of wrong-turns in the 1980s. Political power was centralised and economic power was privatised."

Factually that just does not mean the same thing as “we must have been right in the 80s” - it means there were different choices that could have been made, but because those choices weren’t made we now have to deal with a massively over centralised, and disastrously privatised state.

He then goes on to pitch his vision for re-dressing the consequences of those wrong choices and that vision is very patently not a return to the 70s - not least because the 70s were defined by a state-controlled economy with huge decisions dictated by central government. Burnham's vision is the exact opposite: his defining idea is decentralising power to local communities. So, very patently not a return to the 70s.

Disagree with that vision by all means, but the return to the 70s thing is just such a lazy and obviously false attack line.