sof

[David Lammy @DavidLammy]

god forbid a man enjoys his bank holiday

[ALASTAIR CAMPBELL @campbellclaret]

Whoever is Prime Minister in the coming months for heaven’s sake try to get David Miliband back into UK politics to be part of your team. His interview on Today programme just now a reminder of how much his voice and his brain are missed.

[Mike Kane MP @MikeKaneMP]

Yesterday whilst campaigning in Makerfield, my small team & I visited this wonderful cafe. The staff were welcoming, attentive & incredibly friendly. The lack of respect shown to the vulnerable adults who work there says so much about Reform and who they are.

[Andy Burnham @AndyBurnhamGM]

Mr @christiancalgie has been busy putting out a partial version of events these last few days, amplified by yourselves.

I think it’s time all your readers had the whole story. They were all out of order and, if they had any decency, would now hold their hands up and apologise.

[James Armstrong @PoliticoTeacher]

I'm a Green Party member and will be campaigning for a council by-election candidate this weekend.

But, if I was in Manchester, I would be campaigning for Burnham. Stopping Reform matters far more than party politics.

[Andy Burnham @AndyBurnhamGM]

I can confirm that I will be requesting the permission of the NEC to stand in the Makerfield by-election.

I grew up in this area and have lived here for 25 years. I care deeply about it and its people. I know they have been let down by national politics.

Ten years ago, I decided to leave Westminster. Why? Because, after 16 years, I came to the conclusion that our national political system does not work for areas like ours. I learnt this fighting its failure to invest in the Wigan borough, for justice for the Hillsborough families and against its treatment of Greater Manchester during the pandemic.

Over the last decade, I have been challenging this failure from the outside and building a new and better way of doing politics. We have built Greater Manchester into the fastest-growing city-region in the UK and put buses back under public control, introducing a £2 fare cap to help people with cost-of-living pressures.

However, there is only so much that can be done from Greater Manchester. Much bigger change is needed at a national level if everyday life is to be made more affordable again. This is why I now seek people’s support to return to Parliament: to bring the change we have brought to Greater Manchester to the whole of the UK and make politics work properly for people.

Millions are struggling and they need the Labour Government to succeed. It has already made changes to make life better for them in its first two years. After this week, we owe it to people to come back together as a Labour movement, giving the Prime Minister and the Government the space and stability they need as the by-election takes place.

I want to recognise the difficult decision taken by Josh Simons and the sacrifice he and his family are making. I have worked closely with him as Mayor on issues like flooding and illegal waste dumping and have seen first-hand how effective he has been. He has put the communities of Makerfield first, made a real difference for them and should take great pride in that.

Finally, I truly do not take a single vote for granted and will work hard to regain the trust of people in the Makerfield constituency, many of whom have long supported our party but lost faith in recent times. We will change Labour for the better and make it a party you can believe in again.

ENDS

[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.

[David Cornock @davidcornock]

Nostalgic for those heady days of 2018 when ministers could shrug off PPS resignations….

[Consulate General of PR.China in Manchester @ConsulateChnMan]

CG Tang is honored to have great exchanges with Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham @AndyBurnhamGM on deepening cooperation across various fields. Looking forward to building on the 40th anniversary of Wuhan-Manchester ties to bring the partnership to new heights.

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

Hundreds of millions of people throughout the world are immersed in extreme poverty. Yet, disproportionate wealth remains in the hands of a few. It is an unjust scenario, in the face of which we cannot fail to question ourselves and commit to change things. There is no lack of resources at the root of disparities, but the need to address solvable problems related to a more equitable distribution of wealth, to be achieved with moral sense and honesty.

[Chatham House @ChathamHouse]

Tonight, in his first ever public event in the United Kingdom, President Ahmed al-Sharaa of Syria spoke at Chatham House and shared his vision for the future of post-civil war Syria.

The event was chaired by director @bronwenmaddox and held on the record.

[Nostos @NostosLit]

― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals

[Hassan I. Hassan @hxhassan]

New testimony lays bare the machinery that hid Syria’s missing children and destroyed their identities.

Morgan Laffer reports on years of systematic abuse and the new government’s inadequate efforts to uncover the truth, for @newlinesmag. https://t.co/x4ZcTEeebF

[Alexander Clarkson  @APHClarkson]

One long term prediction I think you can risk making is that this is the last conflict in which the Strait of Hormuz is such a concentration of risk for the global economy

[Aaron Y. Zelin @azelin]

I see no one has learned anything from Syria

[rome @romeramreem]

Umberto Eco said: “The more you know, the larger the rows of unread books.”

[gel @gelsbelovedfitz]

Another reason I love classics is they are kind of this underrated form of social training. They teach you how to speak with intention, listen carefully, disagree without yelling, hold conversations, etc.