Andrew Nickson

I comment on what is going on in the world today.
Hago comentarios sobre lo que está pasando en el mundo.

[Andrew Nickson @RAndrewNickson]

The arrogance & hypocrisy of @AlistairCarns is incredible. After only 2 years as an MP, he wants to challenge @AndyBurnhamGM for @labourparty leadership 'cos of need for democracy' yet he was 'parachuted' in as LP candidate @Sellyoak without ANY consultation with local party.

[Andrew Nickson @RAndrewNickson]

https://t.co/fh0fdmeInV
Vance said “Donald J Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time,”

[Andrew Nickson @RAndrewNickson]

Here's a fact that may surprise some of you: violent crime has been falling in the UK for over past 20 years, exactly the time that net immigration has been rising. If you are tempted by the views of the extreme right, please check this out - it is true.

[Andrew Nickson @RAndrewNickson]

Eight of the 16 matches at FIFA 2026 so far have been draws - that's exactly half of the total. Is this a record?

[Andrew Nickson @RAndrewNickson]

After two years of doing nothing about bringing water back into public ownership despite overwhelming public support, @Starmer suddenly moves against @Thameswater two days before the @Makerfield bye-election. What a surprise!

[Andrew Nickson @RAndrewNickson]

La identificación total de su administración con Donald Trump, el presidente más corrupto de la historia de Estados Unidos, acabará persiguiendo el legado político de Presidente Santiago Peña @SantiPenap de @Paraguay.

[Andrew Nickson @RAndrewNickson]

The total identification of his administration with Donald Trump, the most corrupt president in the history of the United States, will end up haunting the political legacy of President @SantiPenap of @Paraguay.

[Andrew Nickson @RAndrewNickson]

The Railways Bill comes back to parliament on 3rd June. We have just a few days to make sure MPs back amendments to protect passengers' rights and our environment. I've emailed my MP. Can you take 2 minutes now to email your MP? @we_ownit https://t.co/WucrwtN3m6

[Andrew Nickson @RAndrewNickson]

The General Medical Council are targeting Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah again - join thousands of doctors to support him and demand the GMC leadership resigns! https://t.co/j3P5UXwQuo

[Andrew Nickson @RAndrewNickson]

Excellent analysis of the 'hollowed out' state of Britain by Clive Lewis MP

[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.

[Andrew Nickson @RAndrewNickson]

@labourlewis Excellent analysis by Clive Lewis - thank you so much.

[Andrew Nickson @RAndrewNickson]

My article just published about the centenrary of the first women's football match in Paraguay.

https://t.co/kNdcnaj3B9

[Andrew Nickson @RAndrewNickson]

El centenario del primer partido de fútbol femenino en el Paraguay https://t.co/kNdcnaj3B9

[Andrew Nickson @RAndrewNickson]

@BBCWorld news gone overboard (excuse the pun) about HantaVirus outbreak as top story for past 36 hours, despite all its reports agreeing that risk is minimal- meanwhile genocide in Gaza and Lebanon continues.

[Andrew Nickson @RAndrewNickson]

The turn-out rate of UK local elections is a crucial issue that is ignored by the media. It is usually around a pathetic 30%, less than half of the typical national rate 65%. Unless the rate has surged it will be a poor indicator of the general election result.

[Andrew Nickson @RAndrewNickson]

Cynical Kier Starmer drags out the anti-semitiism card in desperate effort to halt slump in municipal elections on 7 May - it won’t work, you pathetic man.

[Andrew Nickson @RAndrewNickson]

Sickening Kier Starmer trying to make political gain against Polanski from Golders Green attack. If you think a suspect has an IED in his rucksack, the last thing you do is kick him.

[Andrew Nickson @RAndrewNickson]

@BBCWorld boasts that ‘Wherever news springs, we’re there’ - this is simply not true.

[Andrew Nickson @RAndrewNickson]

@BBCWorld boasts that it reports from “where the action is.” Yet its coverage today of the all-important Islamabad ceasefire talks is from ….. Doha!!!

[Andrew Nickson @RAndrewNickson]

@SaulStaniforth Yvette Cooper is another British war criminal