Meet the New Boss:  Andy Burnham

King Charles III has just invited yet another Prime Minister (PM) to form a government of the Union of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The current monarch must be becoming accustomed to receiving these visits at Buckingham Palace. He had thought his coronation would just mean more visits to hospitals and mosques to take his mind off his appalling family, but new PMs are keeping him busy.

As for the latest Leader of His Majesty’s Government, when Charles assumed the throne, he must have been hoping for a stayer, a Thatcher or a Blair. They were the twentieth century’s longest-serving PMs, each in office for over a decade. But the King seems to spend a disproportionate amount of time granting the formal request every elected (or unelected, as we shall see) PM must make of the monarch to form a government. It wasn’t always like this.

Charles’ great-great-great grandmother, Queen Victoria, reigned for 64 years, from 1837 to 1901, and saw 10 PMs pass through office. Queen Elizabeth II beat Victoria’s monarchical record, reigning for 70 years and seeing 15 PMs come and go, from Churchill to Liz Truss, whose 44-day tenure as Conservative PM is the shortest in British political history. Statisticians will note the ratio of monarchs to PMs over time increasing in favor of the latter. King Charles III has currently held the throne for a few weeks shy of four years, and four Prime Ministers have already exchanged the keys to 10 Downing Street in that time. One more, and that will be half the number in office during Victoria’s reign, which was 16 times as long, at the time of writing. Even Larry, the Downing Street cat and chief mouser, has seen off six PMs and is on his seventh. Britain is beginning to make Italy look politically stable.

This will be the UK’s ninth PM this century, the fourth in four years, and the fifth to enter office mid-term and unelected since the turn of the millennium. This compares with eight mid-term replacements during the whole of the 20^th century, beginning in 1902 when Lord Salisbury handed over the office of PM to his nephew, Lord Balfour. Salisbury was 72 and in poor health, exacerbated by grief following the death of his wife. His name was Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, and his exemplary act of political nepotism gave birth to a colloquialism which survives in England to this day; “Bob’s your uncle”. This means that something has worked out perfectly and to your advantage. “You want to arrange a mortgage? Go to the building society, fill in a form, and Bob’s your uncle!”. The new handover of power may lead to similar sayings being coined, but they are unlikely to be as affectionate.

All British Prime Ministers enter office with the promise of political change, but the most significant change this century was introduced with the last PM to enter office last century. When Anthony Charles Lynton Blair was elected Labour Prime Minister in 1997, however, the first thing he changed was his name. “Call me Tony”, he famously told an interviewer, and Tony Blair was born, the man veteran journalist Peter Hitchens never refers to as anything other than “the Blair creature”. British politicians are notoriously leery of looking as though they come from too many rungs up the class ladder, and Blair was not the first Labour grandee to ruffle up his name the way Boris Johnson ruffles up his hair. He wasn’t even the first Tony.

In the 1970s, Labour MP Anthony Wedgwood-Benn made the same diminutive move to obscure his origins, and was always known as Tony Benn (unless his name appeared in the Socialist Worker newspaper, which is just as hard Left as its title suggests). Benn’s family was in part descended from Josiah Wedgwood, whose pottery and ceramics are world-famous, and in the 1970s it was still deemed more authentic for Labour politicians to be miners’ sons rather than descended from the landed gentry. It is an incidental curiosity of American 19^th-century English that “tony” was a slang word meaning something or someone who is fashionable, stylish, wealthy, and associated with high society. “Oh, they live in a very tony part of town”.

So, who is the latest British PM? Following the resignation of Sir Keir Starmer, who served the shortest term of any Labour premier in the century and a quarter the party has existed, a new PM has been voted in. Well, by around 25,000 of the electorate, anyway. This new PM will be Andy Burnham, whose CV reads: University, intern to an MP, policy adviser to an MP, MP, Mayor, MP. He has never been outside the Westminster bubble. Burnham was the former Mayor of Manchester, where despite being White English, he was nick-named “the first Muslim Mayor of Manchester” by uncharitable Right-wingers who found him over-friendly to the city’s Mohammedan hordes. Manchester also saw many, many White, underage girls raped and abused by groups of Pakistani-heritage men on Burnham’s watch (which gave him control over the police) in one of the most notorious “grooming gang” areas of the many spread across once-English cities. Manchester’s population has changed in line with Britain’s other main cities, and is now largely composed of Mirpuri Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. These are clan enclaves, and therefore valuable voting blocs for Labour. As Dr. David Starkey, the much-cancelled “historian of the Right”, puts it rather more acerbically:

The foothills of the Punjab have translated themselves into the villages of Manchester.

Burnham recently became a sitting Member of Parliament (MP) and thus eligible for the office of PM when he was handed a safe seat after the incumbent MP stepped down to make way for him. He duly won, and took office on July 20. The consensus opinion on the British political Right (such as it is) tallies with a line from the song Won’t Get Fooled Again, by English rock band The Who: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”. Others are not so sure. Viewed in the terms of the neo-Marxist authoritarianism currently suffusing British politics, Starmer may just have been the warm-up act.

There are many reasons to find Burnham’s accession spurious. Firstly, he is unelected in anything but a local by-election. The MP who stood down in Makerfield to make way for Burnham was Josh Simons. As a member of activist think-tank Labour Together — now Think Labour — Simons asked the Intelligence Services to investigate journalists who wrote negative pieces about Labour Together. But in standing down in order to give Burnham both his seat and the premiership, Simons wasn’t acting solely for the good of the party. Burnham has allegedly guaranteed him a top position on twice the salary Simons made as an MP. The “quid” is famously slang for the British pound, but no one in British politics does anything without a quid pro quo. The horse-trading that goes on when a new administration is formed revolves around rewarding loyalty, especially after what was effectively a palace coup, as Burnham’s coronation clearly was. The famous “sources at Westminster” have been whispering that Burnham had been planning Starmer’s ouster for a year. As for his new administration, welcome to government by midwit.

Burnham has made some appointments which show that this going to be a government of none of the talents. Angela Rayner, who was formerly Deputy PM to Starmer, returns to her old portfolio as Minister for Housing. She was forced to step down from the role nine months ago when it was discovered that she had failed to pay stamp duty on her own property. Louise Haigh will be the new Deputy PM, and is also a convicted fraudster. Part of her new remit would have been to keep an eye on ethics and fraud in the public sector. This part of her portfolio has been quietly removed. David Lammy, a stupid Black man even by the standards which currently obtain, was the interim Deputy PM, as well as being the Justice Minister who set in motion legislation to remove the right to trial by jury. Burnham has removed him, sending him to the back-benches where he can continue to bleat about reparations. Burnham must have realized that even the public were aware that Lammy was a talentless DEI hire. Lammy has been replaced at the Justice Ministry by Alex Norris, who has no legal expertise or experience whatsoever, which should stop him getting in the way. As Norris takes office, his Ministry of Justice is fighting in the courts to prevent the release of data relating to crimes broken down by ethnicity which would embarrass Labour’s non-White voters. A Black face or two in high office used to be mandatory, but it is not so important now for PMs to have Blacks in their administration just for the optics. Muslims are this season’s fashion.

Shabana Mahmood is a Muslim MP and was Home Secretary under Starmer. As she says on record, she “puts Islam at the center of everything I do”. She stays in position. She and Wes Streeting, a homosexual who was a great friend of the disgraced Peter Mandelson and who is the new Defense Minister, were caught on a “hot” microphone laughing and joking about the government’s “early release” scheme, which will see 6,000 violent criminals back on the streets before their due time. Burnham has already had to apologize for that, doubtless at the suggestion of his new Muslim Wormtongue. Ali Milani is now working directly for Burnham as a policy adviser. He chairs the Muslim Network and was pictured campaigning with New York Mayor Zoran Mamdani. He calls the grooming gang scandal a “vile racist campaign” which “puts Muslims in serious danger”.

Dame Antonia Romeo, memorably described by Rupert Lowe as “the queen of woke”, supervised the Islamic network in the Home Office, oversaw “non-binary awareness workshops” (involving paid time off at the Home Office), organized a round of “LGBT allyship emails”, and made sure the Pride flag was flown from government buildings. She is now the cabinet Secretary, the most senior Civil Servant in the country. Ed Miliband as Foreign Secretary is one of many members of the Fabian Society in the new Cabinet. Lucy Powell is Education Secretary. She described the grooming gang scandal, or rather any mention of it, as “dog-whistle politics”. Ruth Smeeth, now a senior Cabinet member, worked with the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, who work tirelessly to bring down Elon Musk’s X. The Comms team at Number 10 is stocked with technocrats with experience in the field of smothering information. Hayden Monroe, now a policy adviser, is the former campaign director for ex-New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern. She it was who told the Kiwi public during Covid that they must trust the government as their “single source of truth”. Sarah Brown worked for Sadiq Khan, the Muslim mayor of London and clear fifth-columnist. She becomes Director of Communications.

Burnham’s Cabinet contains more Oxbridge graduates than any other, and this says as much about Britain’s most venerable universities as it does about government. Quite apart from the midwit gallery of Burnham’s newly appointed Cabinet, the important posts are to do with communications, and this is where the new PM’s appointments take a more sinister turn.

Matthew McGregor, Burnham’s new Director of Political Strategy, is a former director of HOPE not Hate (HnH). This is an activist smear group similar to America’s SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center) and ADL (Anti-Defamation League). I have written about them many times here and elsewhere, as well as reviewing the last three editions of their annual report, State of Hate. Their tactics are questionable, to say the least. During the Southport riots, for example, the CEO of HnH, Nick Lowles, released a story that a Muslim woman had had acid thrown in her face. This was absolutely untrue and Lowles later admitted as much. But he justified his inflammatory lie by claiming that an anti-racist message was “put out there” as a result and the invented story was therefore acceptable. He then told the press that “Right-wing” marches were planned in a hundred towns. Again, this was total fabrication, but it kept the idea of the “far-Right” in the public consciousness. HnH do, on occasion, have to tread carefully. After the recent murder of Ann Widdecombe, their defamatory and inflammatory page on the former MP was quickly taken down.

McGregor has also worked with 38 Degrees, an online activist project which advocates for the banning of what they deem undesirable commenters from social media altogether, and the Good Law Project. They tried to block the Brexit referendum by petitioning the Supreme Court to rule that the vote was unconstitutional. They also worked on and for Obama’s campaign, in what seems like a clear breach of American law concerning election interference, and will have done nothing to improve the tattered “special relationship” Starmer did much to erode. McGregor is also on the board of the charity Reprieve, which actively lobbies against the stripping of British citizenship from so-called “ISIS brides”, such as Shamima Begum, who left Britain to go and marry an ISIS fighter, and is currently fighting to return to Britain. This policy of refusing to grant citizenship is deemed “fundamentally racist” by Reprieve, a stance McGregor presumably endorses as a board member. He is now in charge of government policy. McGregor — also said to be very keen on tackling anti-Semitism — is to be Burnham’s new Director of Political Strategy, effectively director of psy-ops.

Allison Phillips is also on the board of HnH, and is to be Burnham’s “Director of Transition”. She wrote a series of articles for Leftist warhorse New Statesman which shows that she has Nigel Farage and Reform UK as rent-free tenants of her every waking hour. Edward Dutton, of this parish, has produced many videos on HnH for his channel, The Jolly Heretic, and they repay inspection. This recent piece on McGregor shows exactly what HnH represent, and therefore the significance of what is a major appointment in Burnham’s incoming administration. Anyone deemed by HnH to be far-Right can expect an even rougher ride than they got under Starmer. Burnham’s new strategy team is full of what political commentator Conor Tomlinson calls “embedded apparatchiks.” HnH were always the unofficial government adviser on race and the largely mythical far Right. Now their operatives are installed at the highest levels of government and the Civil Service.

What of the British economy? Burnham is coming into office with an economy in debt to the tune of £3 trillion. The Treasury Labour have had the IMF (International Monetary Fund) on speed-dial for some time. Treasury officials, at their first meeting, will inform the new PM that inflation is gradually climbing, the national debt exceeds GDP (Gross Domestic Product), and £153 million is to be given to Pakistan in foreign aid. Even the OBR (Office for Budget Responsibility) has warned against further tax rises, but it looks as though Burnham has no choice. The welfare bill in the UK recently outstripped the tax weal, £333 billion against £331 billion. This means exactly what it appears to mean: once welfare recipients are paid off, many of them illegal immigrants, there is no money left for the NHS, defense, infrastructure, public sector wages and all the other slices of the fiscal pie taxation is supposed to cover. With debt higher than GDP (a large slice of which is swallowed up just repaying interest) and personal taxation already at its highest level since Britain was rebuilding after World War 2, money has to be found somewhere, as continued borrowing at current levels is not sustainable. Burnham has indicated a new wealth tax, and it may come as a surprise to many to discover that they are suddenly “wealthy”. Fiscal responsibility was one of the first casualties of this century’s political program, and accountability wasn’t far behind.

Accountability is mentioned by the political class in inverse proportion to the level of accountability to which they are subjected. Burnham has already given every indication that he intends to avoid accountability as much as is possible. His coronation was neatly handled by the Labour Party, who have fineigled the accession so that Burnham became PM on the day that Parliament goes into recess for the summer. He won’t face the “opposition” until mid-September. His first interview was not with a lobby journalist or newspaper editor, but with Gary Lineker, an ex-England football player who is now a TV pundit who refers to the Falkland Islands by their Spanish name; Las Malvinas. However, despite attempts to assemble a communications and strategy team (far more important than the Cabinet, which is largely theatrical) under the radar, early appointments give a clear indication of Burnham’s plans.

Burnham is taking a baton a long time in the forging. The Labour Party we see dismantling White Britain today began its project proper with the “New Labour” government of Tony Blair. This change in direction was the ultimate result of a movement which, perhaps, began in 1968 with the student rioting in Paris which almost brought down De Gaulle’s government, and the Prague Spring. It is a type of neo-Communism, with its Marxist dialectic of oppressor/oppressed transposed from class to race. Labour’s current incarnation, under Andy Burnham, will be further to the Left than Starmer’s, which is why Burnham has been playing the role of a cheeky, chummy northerner. He quotes lyrics from and plays music by famous Manchester bands The Smiths and New Order. He dresses in black sports jackets and black T-shirts and is rarely seen in a tie. He loves football. He’s playing the “ordinary bloke” card which was one of the few bits of optics Blair could never quite pull off. But Burnham is not an ordinary bloke. He is an avowed Socialist, and made his affiliations clear with his appointments and acknowledgements in his first week in power, indeed with his very first speech.

After he was declared Labour Party leader, and therefore PM, by his Muslim Home Secretary, Burnham was clear as to who he wanted to thank first: “All our affiliated trade unions, all our Socialist societies”. It all sounds very working-class, but the White working class will not interest Burnham except to further deplete and demoralize them. As he is a northerner, Burnham may be familiar with lyrics other than those of 80s pop bands. One in particular is an old satire of the consequences of advancement, and will undoubtedly apply to the latest British PM:

The working class can kiss my arse.
I’ve got the foreman’s job at last.

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