You Engage

Believe in the UK, GB & NI 🇬🇧 Devolution has failed. FPTP protects the system, the silent majority are disenfranchised deliberately. A reformation is needed.

[You Engage @YouEngage]

In effect the WFA finished Starmer before he started.
Miliband as Chancellor will do the same for Burnham

🤞

[Benonwine @benonwine]

A 9-year-old boy was walking home from football when he spotted something that didn’t look right.

Three grown men were allegedly trying to drag a girl into a van.

Most people would freeze in that moment.

Most adults would.
He didn’t.

He started shouting, ran straight at them, and caused such a scene that they panicked and fled.

The girl got away.

Nine years old.

That isn’t just bravery that’s extraordinary courage.

Fair play to that lad. A true little hero he deserves a medal👏👍🇬🇧

[spiked @spikedonline]

Reform needs to learn the lessons of Makerfield. Above all, it needs to develop a forward-looking, positive political programme that goes beyond its opposition to immigration. It needs to show working-class people that it is on their side, says Frank Furedi.
https://t.co/eesu1r4q64

[You Engage @YouEngage]

@LastBlairite The mask well & truly slipped here. Andy who ?

[You Engage @YouEngage]

@SimonDanczuk The people that voted for her will be thrilled. SNP / IRA sympathisers at the heart of government while we've been asleep at the wheel.

[Peter Bleksley @PeterBleksley]

This is a hugely important post…

[You Engage @YouEngage]

@PeterWestmacott Of course he was. That was his whole problem in a nutshell.

[You Engage @YouEngage]

@KEdge23 Insensitive & I don't care about Starmer but these shits should have shown at least some respect.

[You Engage @YouEngage]

@rpuppington 🤷🤦‍♂️🤣

[You Engage @YouEngage]

@PaulEmbery Quite 🤢

[You Engage @YouEngage]

@JackDunc1 How to win friends & influence people Part 1. 🙄🤦‍♂️

[You Engage @YouEngage]

If Burnham fails you get the impression he'd be just as happy at the car lot with Max Branning provided his ego isn't tarnished. Or maybe Trotters emporium as long as he is the boss & Del Boy steps aside. Dodgy 🤔

[You Engage @YouEngage]

BBC Politics Live: Stella Creasey says Lab need to decide what they represent & how to deliver their plans. Surely that's 2 years too late - they clearly had no clue when they took office

[Emma Woolf @EJWoolf]

3 things yesterday which prove UK is no longer a serious country:
- Scottish MP sworn in, smirking & openly mocking the oath in the chamber
- Steve Bray permitted to blast out music while the PM was making resignation statement
- Burnham & the MPs selfie
What. An. Embarrassment

[You Engage @YouEngage]

The backstabbing shenanigans of the Labour Party are non of my business. However looking at Burnham v Darren Jones, Jones looks a safer & more serious bet than the so called shifty "King of the North". There's something about Burnham many can't quite put their finger on. Dodgy

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

She Pledged Palestinian Freedom From A West Bank Pulpit. She Has Never Made That Pledge For Nigeria's Massacred Christians.

On Sunday morning Dame Sarah Mullally, the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury, stood in a church in Birzeit in the occupied West Bank and told the congregation she would use her role to seek the peace you desire and the freedom you deserve. It was a specific, named, actionable commitment. A promise from the senior Christian voice in Britain to one community in one conflict.

Search for an equivalent promise made to Nigeria's Christians and you will not find it.

In 2024 alone, over 4,000 Christians were killed in Nigeria, the majority by Islamist Fulani militia and Boko Haram affiliates. The Open Doors World Watch List, the most comprehensive annual survey of Christian persecution globally, documents severe persecution across more than 50 countries. Iraq's Christian population has collapsed from 1.5 million before 2003 to fewer than 250,000 today, one of the most complete destructions of an ancient Christian community in recorded history. The Coptic Christians of Egypt face sustained institutional discrimination and periodic massacres. Sub-Saharan Africa is experiencing what some researchers describe as a slow motion genocide of Christian communities, conducted largely by Islamist groups, largely in silence.

Dame Sarah has not made a five day pilgrimage to stand with any of them. She has not stood at a pulpit in Kaduna or Cairo or Kirkuk and pledged to use her role to seek the freedom they deserve. The Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, used his Christmas Day sermon at York Minster to say that Israel had committed genocidal acts. Neither Archbishop has used that language about the groups killing Christians in their thousands across Africa and the Middle East.

That asymmetry is not accidental. It reflects the ideological framework the Church of England has absorbed so completely that it can no longer see it operating. The same progressive institutional culture documented across British policing, the NHS, the BBC and the Ministry of Justice has captured the Church of England too. Its moral grammar has been rewritten. Suffering that fits the framework gets named, visited and pledged to. Suffering that does not fit the framework gets a footnote in an inaugural address that mentions Myanmar and the Democratic Republic of Congo alongside Ukraine and Russia, carefully balancing the optics without committing to anything specific.

This matters because the Archbishop of Canterbury is not merely a religious figure. She is in law and in cultural memory the senior Christian voice in a nation whose institutions, laws, liberties and moral inheritance were built on Christian foundations. When that voice makes its most specific and most actionable commitment, it is not to the 4,000 Nigerian Christians killed last year. It is not to the last 250,000 Christians clinging on in Iraq. It is not to the Coptic families burying their dead in Egypt. It is to the community whose cause resonates most comfortably in the progressive institutional culture the Church now inhabits.

Justin Welby resigned over catastrophic safeguarding failures. Dame Sarah was installed while live safeguarding complaints against her remained unresolved. Abuse survivors called it a galling betrayal. The Church pressed ahead. The institution that could not pause a ceremony for its own survivors has found the moral clarity to make a specific political commitment from a West Bank pulpit within weeks of taking office.

The Church of England once stood for something that transcended politics. It spoke for the persecuted, the forgotten and the voiceless regardless of whether their cause was fashionable. It does not do that now. It speaks for those whose suffering fits the approved narrative and stays carefully silent about the rest.

Nigeria's Christians are still waiting. They will keep waiting.

[You Engage @YouEngage]

@DavidLammy @SandyofSuffolk 🤷

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

.@AndyBurnhamGM Keir Starmer gave huge service to the country?

He accepted more than £100,000 in gifts from a donor simultaneously given a Downing Street pass. He filmed a stay home pandemic message from a borrowed £18 million penthouse dressed to look like his own house. He removed winter fuel payments from 10 million pensioners without a manifesto commitment and reversed it a year later. He told Parliament full due process was followed on Mandelson while two aides resigned within 48 hours saying otherwise. He branded ordinary British people concerned about immigration as far right. He oversaw two-tier policing in which people were jailed for social media posts within days of the 2024 riots while other disorder was handled with conspicuous restraint. He legislated to silence online dissent while boosting the BBC algorithmically, the same BBC being sued for ten billion dollars for fabricating a world leader's words. His net approval collapsed to minus 66, the worst since records began. That is the service you are thanking him for.

Orderly and responsible transition?

Britain is about to install its sixth Prime Minister in seven years without a single vote from the general public. You yourself won 54.8 percent of the vote in one constituency on a message that amounted to get Starmer out. That is the mandate on which you now propose to lead a country of 67 million people. You described this as a positive process of renewal. The public will note that renewal, in this context, means one professional politician replacing another without anyone being asked.

Economic growth, cost of living, public services, housing, opportunities for the next generation?

You spent six years as Mayor of Greater Manchester spending £722,685 on migrant welfare programmes while one in 61 people in Manchester is homeless. You backed a policy that would have given migrants immediate access to the welfare state and dropped it the moment you needed Makerfield's votes. You want to equalise capital gains tax with income tax rates and restore the 50p top rate, policies that every serious economic analysis warns will reduce investment and growth at a moment when the tax burden is already at its highest since 1945. These are the solutions you are bringing to the issues that matter most.

Political change should never distract from the responsibility to improve people's lives?

Belfast burned while this government legislated for faster removal of social media posts about it. The asylum appeals backlog hit 87,450, roughly the population of Carlisle, while the removal rate sat at 4 percent. A generation of young British workers was priced out of entry-level jobs by cheaper imported labour while the government called the falling net migration figure progress. The country you propose to improve has been left more fractured, more indebted, more surveilled and more divided than at any point in recent memory, not by accident but by a government that chose to manage dissent rather than address its causes.

The Labour movement has always been at its strongest when it looks forward with confidence and purpose?

The country will be looking forward too. At the record you are about to inherit, the positions you have quietly buried, and the policies you will quietly resurrect once Makerfield is a distant memory. Confidence and purpose are easy to project from a press statement. They are considerably harder to sustain when the HMRC payroll data, the asylum statistics, the Belfast footage, the two-tier prosecution record and the gift register are all still on the public record.

The transition has begun. So has the scrutiny.

"The asylum appeals backlog hit 87,450, roughly the population of Carlisle, while the removal rate sat at 4 percent."

[You Engage @YouEngage]

@MichaelLCrick Mayor of Gtr. Manchester 🤔

[You Engage @YouEngage]

@AndyBurnhamGM @FacundoSavala 👍