Marc Noton

[nazir afzal @nazirafzal]

British politics in a nutshell

Step 1: invent or exaggerate a problem
Step 2: blame migrants, the poor, students, minorities or anyone with the least power
Step 3: promise action
Step 4: forget you’ve already had 14 years to act
Step 5: Create a new party & Repeat

[Adriano Del Monte @adriandelmonte]

Ollie Watkins just scored a double to beat Man City, away, after a 3 day session in Istanbul.

[England @England]

Come Together.

[Ben Mac @benfromsuffolk]

There are currently 1.2 cars per average UK household - a trend that’s only gone up since 1980

You can already see it when you drive through any housing estate that doesn’t have sufficient driveway space

It doesn’t encourage people to own less cars - it just creates more cluttered and narrow roads + paths as everyone fights over the available space

Stop mandating everything from the top-down, let the developers build what people actually need + want

[Darren Jones MP @darrenpjones]

It's not everything, and there's more to do.

But in government, delivery matters.

[Josh Fenton-Glynn MP @JoshFG]

The art of the parliamentary heckle is to puncture the pomposity and highlight the hypocrisy of your opponent. This is a brilliant example @mpmwilko

[Simon Harris @SimonHarrisMBD]

UK TV sport industry: ‘Why are so many people turning to illegal fire sticks?’

Also UK TV sport industry: ‘The 2026 Champions League final involving a UK team will not be broadcast free-to-air for the first time in 34 years.’

[Cherry @Cherryopenmind]

Tom Baldwin has hit the nail on the head, and doing it right there on Times Radio makes it even better.

The UK media has developed a toxic addiction to manufacturing chaos and chasing headlines instead of reporting real substance.

They are trying to use the exact same destructive recipe to shake a government that is actually delivering stability and growth. It is about time journalists took some responsibility and looked in the mirror.

You cannot build a stable country when the press is constantly trying to set it on fire for clicks.

10/10 for calling them out.

[Farrukh @implausibleblog]

CNBC TV show footage of the far right march in London

They've just about filled Parliament square

With barely anyone between Parliament square and Trafalgar square

On the cover image, look at the bottom, there's a giant screen, with pretty much no one to watch it - and apparently these were dotted all the way back to Trafalgar square

[BBC Politics @BBCPolitics]

Turning back to the leader of the opposition, the PM says he and Kemi Badenoch have something in common: "Our parties both had tough results at the local elections last week, the difference is she hasn't noticed," he says

Follow live: https://t.co/KAbXByemX3

[Dale Vince @DaleVince]

If only Ed Miliband and Rachael Reeves had actually ‘broken the link’ - our energy bills would be lower now - I’ve shown them both how ’the link’ added £43 billion to our energy bills in 2023. We allow the price of gas to set the price of all other electricity in Britain, even made from the wind and sun - and when global gas prices go crazy, so does the price of our own green energy.

Two weeks ago Ed and Rachael announced they were breaking the link, days later when the detail came out we could see they had done no such thing. Offering voluntary contracts to legacy green generation is a joke. Their own forecasts are for a 10% take up by 2030 - a pointless gesture - other than the great headlines they got. But a betrayal of the country and arguably the government, many of whom believed the rhetoric. Not breaking the link allows right wing types to continue to blame green levies for what is a fossil fuel crisis, made worse by a defective market mechanism.

Keir Starmer should take control of this - and actually break the link.

[Siob, Princess of Yorkshire #FBPE #FBR @Sillyshib]

The press have made the British people hate Keir Starmer like they made the British people hate Megan Markle. No one could give you a coherent reason why they hate either of them

[Faisal Islam @faisalislam]

If Starmer goes that would be 5 different PMs in five years, despite two of them having historically large Parliamentary majorities…

Impossible to plan, strategise and deliver even medium term economic plans, let alone long term thinking going on elsewhere…

[Matthew Stadlen @MatthewStadlen]

It’s not difficult to see how this plays out if the Prime Minister is forced to resign. First, Labour infighting played out in public. Then the new PM greeted with frenzied calls for a General Election by Reform MPs and their cheerleaders, egged on by those in the media who have been helping to stir the movement against Starmer. Madness.

[Matthew Stadlen @MatthewStadlen]

The shortsightedness of some Labour MPs and their wilful ignorance of recent political history almost beggars belief. They risk plunging their party into a vicious civil war less than two years into government and after nearly a decade and a half in the wilderness. Crackers.

[Brendan May @bmay]

Since Brexit we’ve been unable to sustain a PM for more than a couple of years.

The circus is ungovernable.

Not helped by a political media clique that, emboldened by social media, thinks its job is to start a ticking clock on a PM’s downfall the second they start.

Grim.

[My Left Paw 💙 (aka Darryl Griffin) @CheChe_Guevara]

Got to be honest there's a lot in what @Baddiel says here, you only have to look at the way some journos are foaming at the mouth with excitement over it. Can't help but think too many journos now try to make the news rather than report it 🤷🏻‍♂️

[Preet Kaur Gill MP @PreetKGillMP]

To my Labour colleagues we criticised the Tories for chaos and division and we cannot now inflict the same on the country ourselves.

People are angry and hurt, yes. But turning inwards helps nobody. We have a King’s Speech in two days.

Calm down, unite, and get on with the job.

[Danny Wallace @dannywallace]

What we crave is an old-school government so boring no-one knows their names. Competent, professional.
But we're led by a story-hungry media desperate for new drama for sponsored podcasts.
If they had their way we'd have a new PM every month, each worse than the last.

[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.