@AndreaDudding

Member of UNISON & Labour Party. All views my own, RT's & likes are not endorsements. she/her.

[@AndreaDudding @AndreaDudding]

For everyone who asks “how do we pay for it?”
Or says “We can’t afford it”
Or
But £trn debt
But the deficit
But interest charges
None of this matters 👇

https://t.co/ccMwBSfULh

[Nick Dearden @nickdearden75]

Just three UK data centres will account for more than 1% of the UK’s carbon budget by 2033. It’s like building several international airports. No wonder they’re lying about it. We’ve got to stop this madness.

https://t.co/XPLPxXPVGl

[Clive Lewis MP @labourlewis]

Westminster may finally be about to have the argument it has spent 40 years avoiding.

If Andy Burnham returns to Parliament, the political class will know how to cover it. A leadership drama. Who is up, who is down, whether Keir Starmer can survive, whether Labour is once again turning inward. The familiar machinery of Westminster psychodrama will whirr into life.

That framing misses the larger point. Burnham’s possible return matters not because of what it says about Labour’s leadership, but because of what it reveals about the British state: what it can still do, what it has forgotten how to do, and what kind of country it must become if it is serious about resilience.

Britain is finally having a more serious conversation about national security. The Strategic Defence Review, the pivot back towards Europe, the recognition that hybrid warfare turns citizens, infrastructure and civic institutions into part of the front line: all of it marks a real shift in how the state thinks about its own survival.
But at the centre of that conversation lies a question that the defence establishment, and most of Westminster, still does not want to answer. What kind of society do you need to be before resilience is possible?

Finland is now the model everyone cites. Comprehensive security. Whole-of-society defence. Civilian preparedness woven into military planning. British strategists admire the Finnish system and ask how it might be copied. But the admiration stops short of the uncomfortable question: why does it work there?

The answer is not geography or history or some mysterious quality of Finnish national character. It is structural. Nearly 80% of Finns say they would defend their country if attacked. In Britain, the figure is closer to 33%. That gap is not an accident. It exists because Finland has spent decades building a society in which people have a genuine stake in what they are being asked to defend. Energy is affordable. Housing is available. Public services function. Institutions command trust. The Nordic welfare state is not a sentimental add-on to Finnish security policy. It is the foundation of it. You cannot ask people to defend a country that does not work for them.

Britain has spent 40 years building the opposite. The privatisation of essentials – energy, water, transport, housing – transferred wealth upwards from households to shareholders while making the basics of everyday life more expensive. The state, stripped of the tools to control costs at source, has been reduced to compensating after the fact.

Out of every pound the Government spends on housing, 88p goes to subsidising private rents. Just 12p goes to building homes. When energy prices spiked in 2022, the Government spent £40bn in a single winter cushioning the blow, not because it had a resilient energy system but because it lacked one. Debt interest now consumes more than £100bn a year. Britain has the highest debt servicing costs in the G7: the compounding price of financing failure rather than eliminating it at source.

This is what bond market dependency actually looks like. It is not an abstract fiscal condition. It is the consequence of a state that has been stripped of the supply-side tools that would let it cure the problems it now pays, indefinitely, to manage. And here is the paradox the Treasury refuses to confront. The countries that borrow most cheaply are often those that have retained the public investment model Britain abandoned. The spread between UK and Dutch borrowing costs has widened sharply not because markets fear public investment, but because they have lost confidence in a model that borrows to subsidise private failure while never addressing its causes.

This is the connection Britain’s defence debate is missing. The familiar framing, that social spending is what must be sacrificed to meet the NATO target, is not merely politically toxic. It is strategically illiterate. Cutting the foundations of social cohesion to fund the hardware of national defence is self-defeating. You end up with planes and no pilots, submarines and no crew, an army that cannot recruit because the society it is meant to protect has stopped believing in itself.

I think Burnham understands this. That is why his programme is more interesting than the leadership gossip suggests. What he has been building in Greater Manchester – public control of transport, expanded social housing, investment in the productive foundations of the city economy – is not a nostalgic rerun of postwar nationalisation. It is a proof of concept for a different kind of state.

The Bee Network is the most visible example, but the argument behind it travels. A state that can shape markets is not condemned to subsidise their failures. A state that produces affordable energy through public generation does not need to spend tens of billions cushioning every price shock. A state with a serious public housebuilding programme does not need housing benefit to rise endlessly in line with private rents. A state that builds institutions people can see, use and trust begins to restore the civic confidence on which resilience depends.

The real constraint on Britain is not money. It is capacity: the workers, institutions, supply chains and public purpose needed to turn national will into national renewal. Britain’s tragedy is not that it has run out of money. It is that after 40 years of hollowing out the state, it has made itself less able to act.

Burnham’s critics will reach for the familiar warning. Borrow more, spend more, spook the gilt markets, repeat the Truss disaster. But this misunderstands both the problem and the opportunity.

Bond markets do not have ideological preferences. They have functional ones. They prefer clarity, credible revenue streams, productive investment, and a state with a plan. What they punish is not public ambition but incoherence. A properly designed productive state programme would not be a leap into fiscal fantasy. It would be an attempt to end the much costlier fantasy that Britain can keep borrowing to compensate for broken markets while refusing to repair them.

The defence conversation and the economic conversation need to become the same conversation. Finland did not build national resilience by choosing between welfare and security. It built resilience by understanding that they are inseparable: that a country in which the basics work, where people trust one another and the institutions around them, is one that can face danger with something more than anxiety.

That is the deeper argument Burnham represents. Westminster will be tempted to treat him as a leadership story. It should resist the temptation. The question is not whether Burnham can return to parliament. It is whether Britain can return to the idea that the state should make life work. Because a country that cannot command the confidence of its people cannot truly defend itself.

[@AndreaDudding @AndreaDudding]

@labourlewis 👏👏👏👏👏

[Zoe Gardner @ZoeJardiniere]

The long-overdue change from First Past the Post to a Proportional Representation voting system simply has to be top of the agenda now.

[We Own It @We_OwnIt]

When Keir Starmer was running to be Labour leader, he promised to end the privatisation in:
🏥Our NHS
🏫Schools
💧Water
💡Energy
📮Royal Mail
🚌Buses
💻Council services
🚆Rail
⚖️Justice
📶Broadband
The majority of people who want PUBLIC OWNERSHIP are being ignored: https://t.co/0NPs6emZfv

[Novara Media @novaramedia]

John McDonnell delivers an existential warning, saying “we could lose the Labour party” under Keir Starmer's leadership after what is shaping up to be a catastrophic set of local election results for Labour.

“Our membership has dropped at least by half,” the former shadow chancellor under Jeremy Corbyn says. “The people who are going out and working on the ground are no longer there.”

Starmer is currently denying that he has any plans to step down, although he has taken responsibility for heavy Labour losses at the polls.

[Douglas Padgett @MMTmacrotrader]

DeepMMT continues its precision SPX forecasts.

I launched DeepMMT 3 years ago, and the track record speaks for itself. (see the 3 year history of calls below)

Not only has the model proven itself, but it's proven that the predominant driver of price is flows. MMT was right.

[Ben Phillips @benphillips76]

Sharing, without comment, British newspapers’ depictions of the only Jewish person currently leading a UK political party .

Times. Mail. Telegraph. Sun.

[Cat Hobbs @CatHobbs]

What is a distraction is the idea that a privatised water boss resigning will make ANY difference

South East Water serves its shareholders in Australia and Canada

The government should take it into special administration and PERMANENT PUBLIC OWNERSHIP

https://t.co/kdWbkfx89n

[Zoe Gardner @ZoeJardiniere]

As ever, there is no need to wonder why Labour has attacked the Greens so much harder than Reform over the last weeks.

It’s to the Greens their vote is moving.
The real question is when they’ll realise they could respond by moving left, not stamping on the left 🤷‍♀️

[@AndreaDudding @AndreaDudding]

Translation: we f*d up. Completely unnecessary

[Keir Starmer @Keir_Starmer]

These are tough results for Labour. There’s no sugarcoating it. We’ve lost brilliant Labour representatives who’ve stood up for their communities.

People are still frustrated. Their lives aren’t changing fast enough. We haven’t offered enough hope or optimism for the future.

I was elected to change this country - tough days like this don’t weaken my determination to do that. They strengthen it.

[Common Wealth @Cmmonwealth]

Why does nothing in Britain work anymore?

In this video, we explain how privatisation has left Britain’s essential public services in ruin by baking a fragmented and inefficient cake.

🎂👇

[Dr Rachel Clarke @doctor_oxford]

This may seem arcane, but it’s a deeply concerning & spectacularly cynical move from this government to sideline NICE - the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence - whose role is vitally important in protecting NHS patients from the lobbying clout of the Pharma industry lobby.

Until now - and since 1999 - NICE has made independent, evidence-based decisions about which medicines constitute value for money for the NHS to buy. Largely free from political manipulation, it’s renewed internationally as a model of how to protect patients against excessive drug company prices. It enables the NHS to strike hard bargains with Big Pharma.

But @wesstreeting has just used a statutory instrument in parliament (that no-one has voted on) to award himself power to dictate what the NHS pays for drugs, overriding NICE’s vital role in insulating the NHS from pharmaceutical price gouging.

Why would he do something so self-evidently bad for patients? Because, it seems, this is a price the government is willing to pay to do a deal with Trump on US-UK drug pricing.

What an outrageous power grab for a man who claims to care about patients. Already hospitals up and down the country are cutting staff and closing services under pressure to make cost savings. But every pound spent on, essentially, increasing profits for US Pharma is money that *doesn’t* get spent on nurses, doctors and treatments we know are good value for money.

As the editor of the BMJ, @KamranAbbasi, wrote this week, this: "will end up harming vulnerable people to boost the profits of already obscenely profitable drug companies."

Starmer has shamelessly caved in to the White House. Even the former Tory Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, now a Lord, has joined forces with Labour and Lib Dem MPs opposing Streeting’s power grab.

Truly an appalling move from a government that claims they’re rebuilding the NHS while, in this case, blatantly undermining our abilities to provide cost-effective care.

[Richard Murphy @RichardJMurphy]

We have a massive crisis coming - and we'll only survive it using radical ideas, like taxing wealth more, now. https://t.co/YYjj1I77cf

[Alan Wylie @wylie_alan]

Long overdue: Why we need a new chapter on library funding 
https://t.co/K44MciCJqN
A piece on me and library cuts in the latest @unisontheunion magazine

[Isabella M Weber @IsabellaMWeber]

We face a historic energy crisis. Managing global oil shortages by relying on market prices is the law of the jungle: Darwinian rationing. But there is an alternative: A multilateral buyers‘ club defending a price ceiling and allocating the scarce oil supply fairly. The EU could take the lead positioning itself as a power of peace in the new world order.

Here is how it could work. 🧵

[Mériame @Msemen2020]

🇻🇦🇩🇿 To every Christian supporting Israel's "right" to colonize Palestinian land :

Today in Algeria, a nation that endured 132 years of French colonization and genocide, Pope Leo XIV said :

“Our presence here pays tribute to the spirit of a people who fought for their independence, dignity and sovereignty. […]
God desires peace for every nation : a peace that is not merely the absence of conflict, but an expression of justice and dignity.”

Colonization is a crime, whether in
Algeria yesterday or in Palestine today.

Peace without justice is hypocrisy.

What part of this don’t you understand?

[James Meadway @meadwaj]

Exactly the kind of waste @VerdantThinking’s recent report highlighted.

Tot all this up, using official figures, and a conservative estimate is £30bn is recoverable.

https://t.co/XSj618pmg2

[Dr Luke Evans MP @drlukeevans]

🚨 The Labour Government is fundamentally changing the way that patients access a specialist.

The Government says it’s reforming referrals. In reality, it's restricting access to specialist care for up to 1 in 4 patients.

This isn’t NHS reform. It’s rationing by another name.

[Paul Lewis @paullewismoney]

Breaking the law and avoiding tax using an offshore
trust a ‘technicality’ says Reform deputy leader https://t.co/DCn1PCW8pm