Andy Burnham has said Russia did interfere with the Brexit referendum and warned that similar activities were taking place in France and Germany.
The prime minister told The Rest is Politics podcast that upon arriving in No 10, he had asked about possible Russian interference in the 2016 vote, adding: “I’ve had the clear answer that, yes, there was.”
“I think we’ve been too much on the back foot on that actually and we haven’t informed people sufficiently about the extent to which people are seeking to disrupt the political process from overseas,” he added.
TIL the UK has a new PM. I just read a little about him and he seems worlds better than starmer.
Any Brits who would like to chime in? I always like hearing local perspectives
If you were to take Burnham’s pulse, he’d have one. I’m not sure about Starmer in that regard.
There has been a significant presentational change, plenty of symbolic gestures with little practical impact (for example, sanctioning Israeli settlers but still selling weapons to Israel to kill Palestinian civilians) and Burnham has had the good sense to dump some unworkable Starmer policies, but overall, there is still significant continuity with Labour under Starmer. So I’d say it’s too soon to tell if Burham’s going to deliver anything more than Starmer did (which was almost nothing). I sincerely hope he does, but I’m not optimistic.
I see. I suppose it makes sense to reserve judgment until he’s had a few more months to deliver. We’ll see where it goes I guess.
But overall this seems like a good course-correction. All the Brits I talked to in the last couple years seemed almost convinced they would end up with a Reform government. They seemed to view it as inevitable. You could really sense the dread.
Now that dread has lifted. And that’s a positive, even if the new PM isn’t perfect.
i don’t think i ever heard anyone say anything good about Starmer. He’s one negative person.
He was a token though. That’s basically all he had going for him…
Oh and his support for Ukraine was a redeeming quality, but I feel anybody besides Reform would support Ukraine by default, so I’m not sure that says much about him…
Support for Ukraine is basically UK’s honest attempt at doing the right thing regardless of ideology.
I was honestly blindsided leading up to 2024 when I was telling people that the republican congressman in our district supported ending aid to Ukraine, and I got hit with the response: “Good, why should we be paying for that anyway?”
Like, how do you even begin trying to reason with someone so crass, callous, self-centered, uninformed, and short-sighted that that’s how they view the situation?
given that politicians usually represent some big business benefactors first and stand for their interest, it is natural to expect that they are thoroughly uninformed about anything above their pay grade.
Brit here. Starmer spent two years doing absolutely fuck all. That’s an absolute gift to far right parties; why bother voting for Labour OR the Tories if they don’t make any difference to your life at all? Vote for us, and we’ll make life hard for poor brown people and trannies, that’ll fix decades of underinvestment in your communities. I can’t blame people with hard lives who have been betrayed by politicians for so long, for grasping at any straw available, but it should be so easy to shut down the lies of the far right.
Burnham isn’t as left-wing as I would like. However, as mayor of Manchester he did some good work in bringing public transport under public control, and housing the homeless. He’s come in and started making the right noises about making change - reforming social care, ending the pension triple-lock, bringing the water supply back under public control. He seems committed to electoral reform; it’s long overdue in this country. He’s making moves towards rejoining the EU. He’s given Ukraine the schematics for building their own Storm Shadows; expensive tech, but hopefully they’ll be able to make good use of it.
On the other hand; he’s chickened out of reforming campaign donations, and using the G word to describe Israel’s genocide in Palestine. He has not corrected the dreadful decision of our high court from a few years ago giving free reign to discriminate against trans people - that’s set back LGBT rights in this country a decade or more, and is a disgrace. He also failed to tell Trump to go suck a dick in favour of ‘diplomacy’.
He’s been (mostly) using the right words so far, and he has previously shown he’s turned the right words into action. I’m hopeful - been a long time since I’ve been able to say that about our government. But we need more action.
That’s a good, balanced explanation. Thank you.
Time will tell, but he seems better than anything you guys have had in a long time. Certainly better than we’ve had in the US in a long time.
And it might be enough for Labour to establish a more stable position, opening the door for further-leftwing movements without risking a regression into right-wing populism. Based on the sentiments and worries I was hearing just a few months ago, even if he’s not perfect this is still much better than people were expecting to get.
We shall see where it goes!
It happened arround the same time as the whole Count Binface vs Nigel Farage thing, which I only know because that caused problems for reform trying to win the PM’s old office.
So even though Farage won his local election, it lampooned him enough to torch reform’s hopes of a governing majority?
I feel Labour’s decision to dump Starmer likely helped too.
I mean that too, but more specifically because the two elections were happening around the same time and Farage pulled canvassers from the other district where they did actually have a chance of winning to his own district instead, which should have been a safe win for him and would have been even safer if he hadn’t called the by-election himself.
He’s a good speaker who at least sounds far more sincere and honest than anything in the last 20 years. He’s going to take a big chunk of voters who were center/center-right and ‘had no choice’ but to vote reform. Labour now seems like the only sensible choice. Beforehand there was no sensible choice.
No centrist and few on the centre-right would ever have voted Reform. There’s very little middle ground between Labour and the fascists that can be recaptured. There’s far more potential for Labour to win back people who have stopped voting, and some of the voters who have changed over to the Green Party. But to do that, Burnham will have to jettison the Reform-Light cabinet ministers such as Shabana Mahmood and Yvette Cooper. So far, he’s shown no inclination to do so.
That’s a good summary, makes total sense. Thank you!!