Has Andy Burnham ended up as PM somewhat under false pretences?

[Imdunfer]

Please note that this is from a left wing Labour supporting paper.

It turns out that the marvellous redevelopment of Manchester that was the central plank of his credibility to become PM was triggered by the fall of Mubarak in Egypt in 2011 and what were effectively, or previously close to, bribes set up by the then Tory government to retain our massive defence contracts with the Middle East.

The owners of Man City, recently found guilty of breaking well over 100 financial football rules, are heavily involved. UK developers were excluded from access to large development contracts. Man City was sold a deal including the naming rights to the stadium, owned by the council, for £750k a year when professional rights brokers estimate the market value to be between £10m and £15m a year for the name alone.

The question is, did a local Mayor with no experience outside politics and only a tiny amount of experience of cabinet roles, (3 jobs in 3 years), get to be Prime Minister without a challenge on the strength of the development of the centre of his city that he actually only had a small part in creating?

https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2026/oct/25/thats-the-way-the-city-works-how-the-uae-changed-the-face-of-andy-burnhams-manchester

This is a very good post once again @pointythings. I would definitely like to see long-term solutions to joblessness. Especially since I have 2 teenage DDs, one with SEND, and i want there to be genuine long-term opportunities for them.

Edited because I somehow deleted half my first sentence! 😂

Excellent point, Pointy!

@pointythings "What I am also not hearing is anything about the role of employers who benefit from not offering the kinds of jobs that people can live on and plan their lives around"

Just who is benefiting ? Not the employer, certainly.

That's the kind of horseshit I hear from people who have never run a business and employed people. It now costs about £28,000 to employ someone on the minimum wage, which is why there are fewer jobs about. NI contributions have gone up about 15% for starters. Small businesses can't afford that unless it's passed on to the consumer, and then everyone moans about the 'cost of living.'

In areas where work is seasonal it can't be done because you can't have someone sitting on their backside half the time on your dime.

Now even Poundland, that operates on a "pile 'em high sell 'em cheap" business model is going to the wall.

Some people just need a reality check 🙄

Don't forget that one of those wrecking the economy in that crisis was Sunak.

When supermarket workers no longer need topping up with in work benefits to survive I'll have some sympathy. While these companies (and others) are making billions in profits at the tax payers expense, I gave no sympathy.

Yes, and what about the landlords who are raking in a fortune via benefits?

The small high street florist or cakeshop aren't making billions in profits.
"At the taxpayers expense" - what does that mean? They still pay tax. Here's Tesco's contribution to the tax bill.

Breakdown of Tesco's Tax Contribution

• Taxes Borne (£2.4 billion total): These are the actual costs to the business:
• Corporate Income Tax / Profit Tax: £503 million (or an income tax expense of £830.2 million per financial reporting metrics)
• Business Rates: £736 million
• Employment Taxes: Paid as an employer of over 340,000 colleagues
• Customs and Fuel Duty: £111 million on imported goods and fleet fuel
• Environmental Taxes: £63 million
• Other Taxes: £150 million (including retail taxes, property taxes, and unrecoverable VAT)
• Taxes Collected (£4.3 billion total): Taxes generated from operations and passed on to authorities (such as VAT collected from customers and employee PAYE).

And what is your solution to that? What are you going to suggest that will create a society in which businesses can thrive and workers can afford life's essentials on a full time wage? One of the key things we need is for the cost of housing to come down - but we are allowing housing firms to land bank until they can maximise their profits, and if we suggest changing that we are met with howls of outrage.

I feel for small and medium businesses, but are we ever going to look at the wage multiple - which has exploded since the 1950s? Are we ever going to look at why people are hoarding money offshore instead of spending it? Are we ever going to mention that yes, there is such a thing as greed, and it's wrong?

Why is the answer from the political right to always go after the poorest and the weakest in society?

But again, I don’t think anyone within the Labour party is against getting people off benefits and into work. People might object to the “lifestyle choice” rhetoric because it is weaponised and used in simplistic, divisive ways. People might object to the idea that it can be by crude cuts alone - because time and time again it’s been proven that crude cuts alone don’t work. I just think the idea that there are Labour backbenchers who for some unspecified and unfathomable reason actively want people to be on benefits rather than in employment is a myth.

Which party does have a workable solution and long term strategy on this, do you think? I don’t know if Labour do have a grip on the scale AI job losses, TBF - but I don’t know whether any of the opposition parties do either.

The government need to make a decision ASAP as to whether they are going to listen to struggling workers or ignore us.
If the choice is to not to give us more of our money back they need to accept more of us will just give up work and claim benefits.

They just have no long term plan for anything so the little bits they do like £100 off gas bills is like a drop in the ocean to most people.
They either need to hold an emergency budget for workers or call a general election as people can't live like this for much longer.

They either need to hold an emergency budget for workers or call a general election as people can't live like this for much longer.

Only they don't, because they have this majority, they don't have to have a GE until the summer of 2029, we've just had a budget and any predictions of the IMF swooping in are premature at best.

@pointythings "And what is your solution to that?"

Stop increasing costs to small businesses so they can grow, for a start. Business owners are the ones who take the risks and can loose everything if they get it wrong.
In the past four years, while costs have been rising at an unprecedented rate, the number of firms reporting decreasing revenues has overtaken the number of firms reporting increasing revenues.
As a result of rising costs and revenues failing to keep pace, we now face a situation where more small firms expect to contract over the coming year (35%) than expect to grow (21%).

UK Hospitality chief executive Allen Simpson dubbed yesterday as 'the first Budget in several years to deliver any positive news for hospitality at all'.
The last two Budgets have seen retail and hospitality hit with shock increases to business rates, wages and employer National Insurance contributions.
Although there had been 'meaningful progress', Simpson said there was still 'a hill to climb' and urged the Government 'to go further, faster, to address the unequal tax burden on the sector' in order to boost economic growth and help create jobs for the young.
From "this is Money"

Yes agree with this. It’s a shame two years of hitting SMEs happened. It’s caused a loss in jobs, and that will mostly be to young people in hospitality and retail.

The PP asserted that they understood the scale and nature of AI-attributable job losses, but evidently they do not, given their silence.

I’m afraid ‘a substantial number’ does not cut it, either. Real-time data exists to inform you.

As to your ominous warnings of ‘civil unrest’, some of your fellow posters frequently scoff at such suggestions.

He had a fairly junior role with Chris Hohn’s hedge fund, TCI, during the GFC, so I have no idea what you are talking about.

I would prefer that too but at least investment bankers know how to create tax to pay to run the country.

Delete, misread post.

I fully agree that it would be good to have politicians with a broader range of real world experiences, who have lived lives and achieved things in a range of careers outside of politics.

But there’s a balance, I think - politicians do also need to be good at politics too. Rishi Sunak had experience in the world of investment banking, and Keir Starmer had had an exceptionally successful legal career but they were both, in my opinion, far too under-experienced at politics to be Prime Minister, and in both cases, I do think that was their downfall - to the country’s detriment.

They didn’t in 2008. The taxpayer had to bail them out.

A balance sounds good, ie not just politicians who haven’t worked in business which Labour are low on, and at least Rishi Sunak has an interest in AI. Given we’ll all be impacted I’d rather a gov that had some understanding of it.

Can't disagree with you there.

The lack of comprehension and context surrounding the GFC is staggering.

Once again, posters posting, without any real world experience.

The job of government was to regulate the excessive pursuit of profit by those organisations, but the governments worldwide were revelling in all the tax it brought in instead.

If we'd had people in government who understood what they were doing (selling mortgages to people who would never be able to pay them then bundling them up and selling them on in packages that couldn't be unravelled to work out what they were actually worth), then it would have been stopped.

Labour, by the way, are planning to reduce the restrictions that were put in place to stop it happening again, because they are chasing the growth that they know that will achieve.

And apart from building houses it's the only actual "plan for growth" I've heard them talk about.