Sean Blake

[Doinkadect Klomberbatch @Doinkadect]

What non-Brits need to understand is there’ll be more national mourning when this cat dies than we had for the Queen

[MatchTalks @MatchTalks_]

This video should be taken down by FIFA
This 5 minutes video shows all of Argentina theft from England, this can't be real.

[Sky News @SkyNews]

"The VIP lane was a textbook case of corruption and cronyism."

The daughter of Christina Fulop, who died from COVID, speaks out after it was revealed that nearly £10bn of taxpayers' money spent on PPE was wasted.

https://t.co/MhLrzHFVBZ

📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602, Freeview 233

[KoKoPopz @Ko_Ko_Popz]

@implausibleblog Crooks...

[Sean Blake @SeaneBlake]

@BBCSport @WelsbyElton Then please can you change your iPlayer online schedule for this Wednesday to reflect the fact that BBC One will be switching from Wimbledon to the World Cup England match 16.30-20.00

[Sean Blake @SeaneBlake]

@DailyMail Talk about hypocrisy from the paper that supported Oswald Moseley’s ‘blackshirts’ in the 1930s up until the Munich Agreement gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler in 1938. Daily Mail also made excuses for the apartheid regime in South, a cruel concept it excused and largely supported.

[The Halfway Post @HalfwayPost]

BREAKING: Donald Trump is reportedly furious that the annual ranking of US presidents by a committee of 50 top presidential historians was released today, and the committee almost unanimously ranked Trump’s second term as the worst in US history.

[Mike H @mikoh123]

Robert Kenyon was given one job today in preparation for today’s #makerfield debate on the BBC.
That job was to remember a short question for Andy Burnham and deliver as if he had came up with it himself.
The question and delivery was just painful to watch.

[Sean Blake @SeaneBlake]

@woosieowens7 @UKinjustice2025 You mean one of the Boutflours, I assume.

[Gordon Fielden @GordonFielden]

https://t.co/CfRn6okwLF

[Sean Blake @SeaneBlake]

@MichaelLCrick Compare @ChrisMasonBBC’s @AndyBurnhamGM interview with that of ITV’s Harry Horton @itvnews this evening. Horton got far more information for viewers than the unctuous Mason, who failed in his “gotcha” attempts to present a single change of mind in 24 years by Burnham as a scoop.

[Sean Blake @SeaneBlake]

@dibster56 @MarinaPurkiss The trouble is that a front page with a stonking great headline remains visible in the rack where people queue at supermarket checkouts and in train stations and at airports. The message lingers.

[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.

[Duke of Lambeth @DukeTinoM]

@MarinaPurkiss @FellaLeeds The instigator in chief 👇

[Sean Blake @SeaneBlake]

@ryanwsales88 @BladeoftheS 2 followers: are you a bot?

[Sean Blake @SeaneBlake]

@Carolechapman17 @TedUrchin @paulabearthe2nd @MaryGreenway1 No, that was another gathering of over 40, including friends, which Johnson attended in the garden of Downing Street. Afterwards, Martin Reynolds, the PM’s PPS, emailed “we seem to have got away with it.”
The karaoke/broken swing event was on the eve of Prince Philip’s funeral.

[Sean Blake @SeaneBlake]

@PaulMcG01699714 @BethRigby @cathynewman She was an anchor @Channel4News & to my mind a very fine investigative journalist . I shall miss her quick mind @c4news which perhaps has been on the slide recently, although @GaryGibbonC4 may be still the most respected reporter at Westminster. @SkyNews is lucky to have her

[Sean Blake @SeaneBlake]

@DanielJHannan He had a party in his flat upstairs for a group outside his immediate circle or ‘bubble’ which was attended by many in Carrie’s circle. And talking of being 40 miles away at Chequers,he attended a gathering of 40 in the garden of Downing Street organised by ‘Party Marty’ Reynolds

[Gordon Fielden @GordonFielden]

https://t.co/XRtrhUCu0n

[Maria 💜 @mariachetcuti1]

80% of the British Media is owned by 5 non-domiciled billionaires. Not one of them live here or pay UK tax. Everything our vindictive opinion led MSM is now broadcasting is for their personal profit and dubious foreign political allegiances.
Our government needs to intervene NOW!