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.
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.