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.
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!