Simon Sapper

Husband, father, trade unionist, broadcaster, writer, lover of loud shirts, Brentford supporter. Views my own! Retweets out of interest more than endorsement.

[Simon Sapper @simonsapper]

It’s been coming for a while now but I’m not going to be posting on here for the foreseeable - find and follow me at @simonsapper.bsky.social See you there!

[Simon Sapper @simonsapper]

New episode out now!
Organising For A Change - surge pricing and dynamic wages. A warning. Listen now at https://t.co/aj7x9IrcDY

[Trades Union Congress @The_TUC]

We won sick pay, pregnancy protections and an end to no-fault evictions because workers and renters organised and demanded them. Now Reform UK's Great Repeal Bill pledges to scrap the Employment Rights Act, the Renters' Rights Act, and even the Equality Act that protects you from discrimination at work.

Scrapping your rights won't lower your bills or raise your pay. It just hands power to bad bosses and rogue landlords.

Workers across the country are putting posters up in their workplaces and telling Parliament: oppose the Great Repeal Bill.

Take 30 seconds and sign the petition now:

https://t.co/E2ncbGgiFz

[Simon Sapper @simonsapper]

@AvantiWestCoast excelling themselves with 3 carriages with no aircon - 2nd time in a week I’ve been “treated” to a sauna by this company. #mustdobetter

[Andy Burnham @andyburnham]

Thank you to the @DailyMail for their help with my campaign. 🙏🏻

Yes I do think we should tax landowners who allow their land to be turned into illegal waste dumps, like Bickershaw. 👍🏻

[Simon Sapper @simonsapper]

Hungry diners, disheveled service and an over-reliance on nachos makes this a meal to forget. Read at https://t.co/KdFSxQa2SF

[Caroline Lucas @CarolineLucas]

I hope this isn’t true. There are times when it’s more important to put country before party. This is one of them. Burnham’s longstanding commitment to a fairer voting system could transform our democracy & counter dire threat of a Reform UK government https://t.co/PNfl5GnB0X

[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.

[David Yelland @davidyelland]

Irrespective of any leadership bid it is now crystal clear the UK tabloids pursed Angela Rayner irresponsibility and vindictively, forced her from office, danced on her political grave. Surely any fair onlooker will contrast this with their blind backing of Nigel Farage and inability to investigate his £5m gift from a Thai-based backer who appears to have at least two names.

[Simon Sapper @simonsapper]

On a stand but now waiting for busses to take us to the terminal. C’mon @HeathrowAirport get your act together!

[Simon Sapper @simonsapper]

Stuck for 70 minutes (and counting) at #Heathrow waiting for a stand. Kudos to @British_Airways crew for keeping us updated but how can airports allow themselves to be #gridlocked like this?

[Will Hutton @williamnhutton]

Starmer’s incapacities are obvious. However he has a mandate. As soon as he is replaced in however an ‘orderly fashion’ British media bias will become deadly. One rule on lack of mandates for the right: another for the left. The cabinet must plan skilfully; it could get worse.

[Simon Sapper @simonsapper]

Too often, outsourcing comes at the expense of our services and the workers who keep them going. If you want public services to work for people, not just profit, sign the Record of Support for Labour’s insourcing pledge. https://t.co/TyRRrxG7Zp via @megaphoneuk

[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.

[Simon Sapper @simonsapper]

Excellent food for thought here 👇
https://t.co/bf4CjZcLP2

[Richard Corbett @RichardGCorbett]

Just heard self-centred hypocrite Nigel Farage on @BBCNews say that no British politician has been physically attacked more than him. An insult to the memory of Jo Cox and David Amess, both murdered.

[Simon Sapper @simonsapper]

@freelander97 And it was!

[Alex Wickham @alexwickham]

BREAKING: Sources say Olly Robbins felt bound by the rules of the security vetting process NOT to tell the PM, No10 or the foreign secretary about the concerns raised about Mandelson

That means it appears No10 WERE in fact unaware he had issues with his vetting

And sources say in fact Mandelson DID NOT simply fail his vetting. Instead issues were raised and the FCDO security team and ultimately Robbins had to make a decision on whether to grant him DV clearance. It was their decision and there was no “overturning,” sources say

As @SamCoatesSky reports via former security official Ciaran Martin, Robbins was prohibited from sharing information about what happened with anyone outside the FCDO security team

Sources say the point of the vetting process is that it is extremely invasive and people who go through it must be confident they can tell the whole truth and not have highly embarrassing information about their personal lives leak or be spread around colleagues

That means the circle of people allowed to know about what happens in each vetting case is very small and the information is highly privileged

The decision on whether to approve Mandelson’s clearance, according to the vetting rules, is taken by a small team of FCDO security officials and ultimately Robbins, sources say

Under no circumstance is Robbins or that team able to share the details of the vetting case with No10 or anyone else, sources say. Robbins felt he could not share it with any minister or private office, sources say

It appears the PM and No10 were unaware of how these rules were perceived by Robbins and FCDO, and think he should have told them. Allies of Robbins think it is unfair he was sacked

But crucially it appears right now that Robbins did not tell No10 and they were actually in the dark about all this until Tuesday. What an unbelievable mess

[POA @POAUnion]

Another politician @KemiBadenoch that is so drastically out of touch. I worked at a London prison who had been operating a 4 day week since the 1990s. It was the same amount of hours as a 5 day week but condensed. It worked for the employer and employees and it’s stood the test of time. Some politicians need to get in the real world as do some so called news outlets. Steve Gillan Gen Sec

[Trades Union Congress @The_TUC]

This comes after years of campaigning from workers and trade unions.

Other rights include

• Stronger penalties for employers who breach redundancy rules
• Day-one parental leave rights
• Easier union recognition
• Whistleblowing protection for workers reporting sexual harassment

For a full list of rights in the Employment Rights Act:

https://t.co/Fq0nw7pE48

[Trades Union Congress @The_TUC]

NEW🚨| 9.6 million workers set to benefit from stronger sick pay as of today.

* 1.2 million workers - majority low-paid women - get access to statutory sick for the first time.
* 8.4 million will get sick pay from the first day of illness - instead of having to wait four days.