"I want to rejoin, I hope in my lifetime I see this country rejoin the European Union. I'm absolutely clear about that."
Andy Burnham, In conversation with Pippa Crerar and Kiran Stacey of the Guardian Politics Weekly podcast, Monday 29 September 2025.
Before Anyone Crowns Burnham, Ask Him About Operation Augusta.
The Westminster commentary has settled on its preferred narrative. Andy Burnham is the answer. The King of the North. The popular, relatable, effective politician who can reconnect Labour with the voters it has lost. Union leaders are backing him. MPs are championing him. The NEC has cleared his path. Nobody is asking the question his own record demands.
Operation Augusta was a Greater Manchester Police investigation into a grooming gang of up to 100 members who abused at least 57 children, some as young as 12, all in the care of Manchester social services. The operation was shut down. The official reason was lack of resources, despite Greater Manchester Police having gained over 1,000 additional officers in the preceding years. Of 97 individuals identified as suspects, three were imprisoned. That was recorded as a success.
When the subsequent review was published and MPs wrote to Burnham challenging him on the failures, his response was described in Hansard as supine. He accepted the lack of resources argument without challenge. MPs noted there was no sense of injustice in his reply. The minutes from the meeting where the decision to end Operation Augusta was taken had disappeared. The minutes from Manchester City Council had disappeared at the same time.
The Rochdale review, which Burnham also commissioned, identified 96 men still deemed a potential risk to children who remained at large. That review covered failures between 2004 and 2013, documenting multiple failed investigations and apparent institutional indifference to the plight of hundreds of girls, mainly white, from poor backgrounds. Burnham described it as a lamentable strategic failure. He expressed anger. He called for a duty of candour on public servants. What he did not do was explain what his mayoralty had done to locate and prosecute the 96 men still identified as dangers to children.
To be precise, Burnham commissioned these reviews. But commissioning a review of institutional failure is not the same as confronting it. The reviews documented failures that occurred both before and during his mayoralty. His response to parliamentary challenge on those failures was judged inadequate by MPs who examined it.
Now the same political class that failed to press him on those questions is preparing to hand him the keys to Downing Street. Union leaders who represent workers in the communities where these failures occurred are backing him without condition. MPs who sat through the Hansard debate on Operation Augusta are championing him as the clean candidate. The media is treating his popularity as a sufficient qualification.
The parallel with the Mandelson affair is not superficial. The central argument of this affair has been that institutional accountability has been systematically avoided by a political class more concerned with managing consequences than confronting them. The grooming gang failures in Greater Manchester represent exactly that pattern applied to the most vulnerable children in the country. Girls in care were failed. Suspects were identified and not prosecuted. Evidence disappeared. The response was described as supine.
A political culture that cannot ask these questions of its preferred successor has not learned anything from the crisis that is forcing the current Prime Minister out. Changing the leader without changing the culture of institutional evasion simply reproduces the problem with a more popular face attached.
Before anyone in Westminster, in the unions or in the media decides that Andy Burnham is the answer, they should read the Hansard record of Operation Augusta. They should ask what happened to those 96 men. And they should require a better answer than the one he gave the last time he was asked.
"Operation Augusta was a Greater Manchester Police investigation into a grooming gang of up to 100 members who abused at least 57 children, some as young as 12"
The Blair family are looting the British people with the help of the government.
This is a tale of how your taxes flow into the pockets of those connected to power in a closed loop.
The UK government is handing £500 million of taxpayers money to a Sovereign AI fund to be led by Suzanne Ashman, daughter-in-law of Tony Blair.
That same government has already been funnelling tens of millions into Multiverse, an AI training company founded by Euan Blair, Tony Blair's son.
Yes, Euan Blair is married to Suzanne Ashman.
Multiverse receives up to £18,000 per person. Cohorts of 100. Multiple rounds. You do the maths.
They generated £79.6 million in revenue last year, largely from government contracts and taxpayers money. This is despite falling below the targets for the service they are supposed to be providing.
They don't need to compete for customers in any meaningful market sense. They need to maintain proximity to the people who control the budget. That is a completely different incentive structure.
No price signal exists to tell anyone whether £18,000 per head for an AI business analysis course represents value for money. No profit and loss mechanism. No competitive pressure. No consequences for overpaying.
The bureaucrat who signed off on this contract will never feel the cost. The taxpayer who funded it will never know the counterfactual.
Now look at Multiverse's AI Advisory Board.
Doug Gurr, former Chair of the Alan Turing Institute, the body that directly advises government on AI strategy, also sits on Multiverse's advisory board.
The same Multiverse being paid by the government whose strategy he helped shape.
Kersti Kaljulaid, former President of Estonia and member of Microsoft's AI advisory board, is also advising Multiverse.
Professor Michael Wooldridge, Head of Computer Science at Oxford.
Dame Wendy Hall, one of the most connected figures in UK technology policy.
Think about the circularity. The Alan Turing Institute advises government on AI strategy. Its Chair advises Multiverse. Multiverse receives government funding.
The people shaping the policy are advising the company that benefits from it.
It is a closed loop.
This is the Cantillon effect in its purest form. Money does not flow equally across the economy. It flows first and most generously to those closest to the people who control the budget.
This has received zero coverage from the mainstream media.
This should be a national scandal.
NEW: The Electoral Commission has paid a charity run by Labour activists to produce foreign language literature and to encourage foreign nationals to vote in the Senedd elections.
British elections should be conducted in the languages of Britain. Read more below 👇
@jaydee1066@BeedleB@itvnews LOL funded by the Welcome Trust with it's board of governors having links to companies receiving government green levies 🤣😂🤣
Today, Keir Starmer has banned Kanye West from entering the UK because his ��extremist views pose a threat to the country.”
But…
Last week, Keir Starmer invited a LITERAL ISIS TERRORIST to 10 Downing Street.
47 years ago Iran 🇮🇷 lost its Freedom. For 47 years Iranian women have been abused, raped and murdered. Don’t let the UK become the next Iran !! 🇮🇷 🙏🏻 @pinkladies_uk@WomenForRestore
🚨FIFTY BREXIT BENEFITS - MEGATHREAD🚨
I have collated 50 tangible Brexit benefits, fully evidenced and demonstrably true.
Some may not like that they exist - but that doesn't change the fact that they do.
👇Scroll down to see them in this megathread 👇
#BrexitBenefits2024
Don't listen to Al Gore.
Al Gore is not a scientist. But I am.
There is no “climate crisis.” That is political jargon, not a legitimate scientific term.
In fact, in the United Nations IPCC AR6 WG1 report—considered by most academics to be the “gold standard” of climatology—the term “climate crisis” appears exactly ZERO times.
🔗https://t.co/0NLdWOSvSW
The Clean Air Act of 1970, as explicitly written, does not classify CO₂ and “greenhouse gases” (GHGs) as “air pollutants.”
🔗https://t.co/Hd37BYMgMV (p. 1690 / 15 in .pdf)
But in the case of Massachusetts v. EPA (2007), the Supreme Court was asked whether or not the EPA had authority under the Act to regulate CO₂ as an “air pollutant.” The Court ruled in a narrow 5–4 decision that under Section 202(a)(1) of the Act, the EPA had the authority to regulate any emissions from motor vehicles should they “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”
🔗https://t.co/sCGcdRcsJL
The Court's ruling to allow unelected bureaucrats at the EPA to make regulations without Congressional approval was a direct artifact of the 1984 Chevron Deference framework. Obama decided to take advantage of this and ordered the EPA to cook up a so-called “Endangerment Finding” to advance his administration's climate agenda items along without having to go through Congress to properly amend the Clean Air Act of 1970.
In June 2024, however, the Supreme Court decided to overturn Chevron in a 6–3 ruling in the Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo case. As such, bureaucrats can no longer interpret vague laws and interpret them to implement desired regulations. This, however, did not apply to cases like Massachusetts v. EPA (2007) that were decided under the Chevron framework.
🔗https://t.co/tvFWDnOW76
The Supreme Court needs to overturn Massachusetts v. EPA (2007) as soon as possible, and force Democrats to go through proper channels to impose regulations, not lean into executive powers like petty tyrants to get what they want (something they accuse Trump of doing on the daily). They can go back to the drawing board and amend the Clean Air Act to classify CO₂ as “pollution,” or they can let it go.
As for whether or not climate change is an urgent problem, while the IPCC WG2 and WG3 reports (used for policy) have taken an activist stance and say it is, there is not much in the way of actual observational evidence to suggest that we are facing a humanitarian crisis.
The quality of life continues to improve despite the modest warming (mostly seen in overnight lows) over the last century. Key figures include:
1⃣ Average life expectancy has more than doubled on every continent since the 19th century.
🔗https://t.co/xqSxg7VjMm
2⃣ The total number of deaths resulting from weather or weather-related natural disasters have decreased by over 96% since the 1920s. That figure is despite a six billion-person increase in global population over that time.
This trend has mostly to do with the advent and the improvement of warning coordination systems, but any increase due to supposedly “worsening” extreme weather is masked by it.
🔗https://t.co/RgELre0aZ7
3⃣ Global crop yields have been at all-time record highs in recent years, despite droughts and floods (which have always been a thing).
This is because many crops have been genetically modified to produce higher yields.
Innovation wins.
🔗https://t.co/ENQvE408dt
Anyone who claims that we are facing an “existential crisis” because the planet is a little warmer than it was a century ago is either an uninformed stooge OR is a charlatan.
It just so happens to be that Al Gore is the latter.
He is a liar.
I have spent the last ten days at our inquiry listening to the testimonies of women who have been raped and abused by packs of mainly Pakistani Muslim men.
One girl was raped, and then had a whisky bottle forced into her. It shattered inside her.
She was 12.
12, Prime Minister.
This has happened all over Britain. Everywhere. It still goes on today. NOW.
Thousands and thousands and thousands of British girls treated as meat. As dirt. As pieces of shit.
What are you doing about it?
The honest answer is this.
F*** all.
You are more concerned about clinging on to the Muslim vote than acting to protect vulnerable British girls.
I have never been so furious at a British Prime Minister. You honestly disgust me.
You should be ashamed of yourself. I truly mean that.
Act now, and I mean now, or history will be appropriately brutal.
Is it "offensive and wrong" to say Britain is being colonised?
Is it offensive to notice you're the only English person on the bus on the way to work in the morning?
If you open the Metro and read the government has just published a report on decolonising the countryside are you supposed to celebrate it? To agree that yeah, there probably are too many English people in the English countryside, actually.
You get to work, and your boss makes you do a mandatory DEI course where you're obliged to admit to your white privilege, even though you were born in a two up two down terrace, a home you could only dream of owning nowadays. Is it offensive and wrong to question what this has to do with stacking shelves in Tesco?
Is it offensive and wrong to hear when you get home that your kids' teacher made them wear a hijab to celebrate Eid?
Is it offensive and wrong to worry about that HMO down the road? To read the Facebook posts from local parents about the strange men who have been hanging around the school gates?
Is it offensive and wrong because none of this is happening? Or because it is happening, but it's offensive and wrong to notice?