£700,000 for Migrants. 18,000 Homeless in Manchester. That's the Burnham Method.
Andy Burnham is asking the voters of Makerfield to send him to Westminster. Before they do, they should know what he has been doing with their money in Manchester.
This week it emerged that Burnham's Greater Manchester Combined Authority is spending £722,685 on schemes to help migrants navigate the British welfare system. The Safe Transitions programme will provide guidance in multiple languages helping refugees understand their rights, entitlements and access to housing, benefits and public services. A Refugee Lodging Scheme will match refugees with resident landlords who will support them to access housing, benefits, employment, education and community networks. Greater Manchester already hosts more than 8,500 people in asylum support accommodation. More than 18,000 people across the region have no permanent address. One in every 61 people in Manchester alone is homeless. The £700,000 is not going to them.
This is not a one-off decision. It is the visible expression of a consistent set of political instincts that Burnham has spent years developing and is now quietly concealing ahead of June 18.
Since 2019 he has repeatedly called for the abolition of the No Recourse to Public Funds policy, the rule that prevents migrants from immediately accessing Britain's welfare state and social housing. He called for it on his mayoral website in 2019. He signed a joint letter demanding it in 2023. He launched a pilot programme in Manchester called the Living Income Campaign, designed to top up the incomes of those living under NRPF conditions and build the case for scrapping the rule nationally. He has now quietly dropped that position. Not because he has changed his mind. Because he is campaigning in Makerfield.
His allies have confirmed that as Prime Minister he would tear up the multi-billion pound Home Office contracts with private asylum accommodation providers and hand responsibility to local councils. Dispersal housing rather than hotels. The saving is real. Hotel rooms cost £145 per person per night against £23.25 for dispersal housing. But dispersal housing means more migrants placed directly into communities like Makerfield, Wigan and the surrounding boroughs, without the visibility of a hotel that can be identified and closed. The cost saving comes with a community cost that nobody is discussing.
Meanwhile Makerfield itself tells a different story to the one Burnham is presenting on the doorstep. The constituency sits within a region where Reform won all eight council wards in May's local elections with around fifty percent of the vote. Around two thirds of the constituency voted Leave in 2016. The voters who went to Reform did so because they feel their communities have been transformed without consent, their housing lists lengthened, their public services stretched and their concerns dismissed. Burnham's answer to those concerns is to spend £700,000 helping more migrants access the same overstretched system.
The repositioning on NRPF is the tell. A politician who held a position for six years, built a pilot programme around it and signed letters demanding it nationally does not abandon it because he has been persuaded by the evidence. He abandons it because the polling in Makerfield made it electorally inconvenient. The same thing happened with his position on EU rejoining, held on Saturday and walked back by Sunday when his team realised around two thirds of the constituency voted Leave.
The voters of Makerfield are not being asked to elect a mayor. They are being asked to send a potential Prime Minister to Westminster. The £700,000 tells them more about what that Prime Minister would do than any doorstep conversation. It tells them what he does when nobody in Makerfield is watching.
"One in every 61 people in Manchester alone is homeless. The £700,000 is not going to them."
So even after police KNEW Digwa was a liar and a murderer they STILL wanted to put out disinformation that would’ve prejudice the case and LIE to the public.
The Nowak family had to intervene. That is beyond disgusting.
As I said, put Hampshire police in special measures.
The force is not fit for purpose. The fatal far-left ideology has infected it from top down.
Shabana Mahmood Called George Floyd's Death An Unspeakable Outrage. She Called Henry Nowak's A Political Grandstanding Opportunity.
On June 4th 2020, four days after George Floyd died in Minneapolis, Shabana Mahmood wrote to her constituents. She described his death as an unspeakable outrage. She shared the anger of the Black Lives Matter movement. She condemned Donald Trump in the strongest possible terms. She pledged to ensure Black voices are heard at the heart of our democracy. She signed it with a Black Lives Matter hashtag.
This week Shabana Mahmood stood at the despatch box and told the House of Commons there must be no two tier policing. She said the police have a sacred duty to act without fear or favour. She warned that anyone using Henry Nowak's murder to stoke division should be rejected.
Henry Nowak died on December 3rd 2025. Mahmood said nothing for days. The Commons Speaker had to order the government to make a statement. When she finally spoke she described the national outcry as political grandstanding and accused those naming the problem of stoking division.
Four days after George Floyd died she had already written to her constituents. Four days after Henry Nowak's killer was convicted she had to be ordered to speak by the Speaker of the House.
The letter she wrote in 2020 is worth reading carefully because it is the most precise document available for understanding what happened this week. She writes that her work deeply reflects the cause for social and racial justice. She writes that she will carry on working to ensure Black voices are heard at the heart of our democracy. She writes that she wants her work to continue to be reflective of black and ethnic minority experiences in Birmingham.
Not all voices. Black voices. Not all experiences. Black and ethnic minority experiences. That is the Home Secretary who told Parliament this week there must be no two tier policing. Her own letter is a precise description of two tier political engagement. One standard applied to George Floyd. A different standard applied to Henry Nowak.
The progressive institutional machinery was operational within hours of Floyd's death. The hashtag was ready. The language was ready. The political network was ready. Mahmood's letter was part of that machinery. It was produced within four days because the machinery runs automatically when the case fits the framework. Black Lives Matter had been founded in 2013. By 2020 it had dozens of local chapters, a global network, corporate donors worth hundreds of millions of dollars and political allies embedded across every major Western government. When Floyd died every node of that network activated simultaneously. Mahmood's letter was one activation among millions.
Henry Nowak's case does not fit the framework. His killer used the progressive framework as the murder weapon. His case does not vindicate the ideology of anti-racism training. It exposes it. And the Home Secretary whose entire political career has been built around that ideology found herself at the despatch box this week condemning its most visible consequence while declining to name its cause.
She wrote in 2020 that she would ensure Black voices are heard at the heart of our democracy. She has kept that promise. The question Henry Nowak's family is entitled to ask is which voices were heard at the heart of the institutions that trained the officers who handcuffed their son. The Hampshire Race Action Plan. The NPCC guidance. The College of Policing practice bank. The Metropolitan Police neutrality myth. All of it built by the same political framework Mahmood has spent her career advancing.
There must be no two tier policing. She is right. The letter she wrote in 2020 explains precisely why there is.
Can the government explain to me why this UK trained British doctor can’t get a post yet are still giving visas for foreign doctors at her skill level?
It is immoral that the very best of our own educated young people can’t get NHS jobs & migrants can!
🚨NEWS: An arrest in Southampton last night is being investigated after it appeared a Police officer repeatedly kicked a man in the head
The incident was caught on camera
So, it turns out that Vickrum Digwa was also known to police and had been questioned on a huge knife theft from a Sikh temple in 2023.
This is getting worse for the police…
Elon Musk has reportedly offered to help fund a private prosecution against the UK police force.
Who hopes Henry’s family accepts the offer and pursues every possible avenue to get answers and accountability?
Farage was heckled today at PMQs for stating that millions of people across Britain are upset and angry about two-tier policing. Is he right?
Yes or no?
🚨BREAKING: KEIR STARMER STANDS BY SIKH'S RIGHT TO CARRY KNIVES
What a disgrace he is
A young boy just murdered on the streets of Britain and his response is to say he will not ban the Kirpan Knife being carried on our streets
Absolutely despicable man
@Keir_Starmer You know what makes me feel sick? The fact you're only commenting now because you've been forced to.
You *TOOK THE KNEE* 15 days after a career criminal died in America.
You couldn't care less about white Brits.
You're a disgrace.
RESIGN!
You utterly vile man.
It is completely wrong that these violent thugs are being let off from a further trial for the assault on PC Marsden
They viciously beat three police officers and the evidence is plain to see on CCTV - including the assaults on female PCs Ward and Cook for which Amaad and Amaaz have already been convicted
At the time, the police officers were falsely accused of racism. This is yet another case of criminals using false allegations of racism to try to get sympathy. With such clear CCTV evidence, we need justice to be done by prosecuting these thugs for all their crimes
https://t.co/1wnDeaZa3F
If Henry Nowak had been black or brown skinned, Keir Starmer would have made a public statement by now. As would half of the Labour Government.
But he was white, he was murdered by a non white who had a religious exemption for the sword, then falsely smeared as a racist.
FILTH.
The word 'Islamophobic' has been invented by the Muslims to forestall any criticism
Funny that many people don't realise this
I could use the same tactic...
"I don't want any 'Cleesephobic' comments as they might upset me"
Do you have an 18 year old child?
Well in Britain, they can be stabbed, coughing blood, alone on the pavement
And our police will let them die
For politics.
💔💔💔💔🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧
Apparently this video isn’t enough evidence to convict the guy in blue for assaulting all three police officers
Yet Lucy Connolly got two years in prison for an off colour tweet - prosecutions Keir Starmer encouraged
Labour’s two tier justice system has to end
🚨Keir Starmer vows to shield Muslims and hunt down Islamophobia with his final breath.
Ignores grooming scandals and native victims.
Priorities reveal where his loyalty lies.
Britain’s leadership has flipped.