Earlier Guido totted up the known ‘Burnham Bill‘ – what a Manchesterist administration would cost the British taxpayer. All likely to kick in come September…
Burnham is a wild advocate of nationalisation. As Guido noted, his pet policy to bring the water industry into ‘public ownership’ would cost at least £100 billion according to the government’s own estimates…
Looking a little closer, the Government’s current policy position is that ‘regulatory capital value’ or RCV – an Ofwat measure – is considered the “closest proxy for the total value of the sector’s debt and equity”. According to Ofwat’s company financial models for 2025-2030, Thames Water’s RCV is estimated to be £30 billion in 2030. The projected time that nationalisation would take place under Burnham…
Thames Water is a regulated business. If it were nationalised, its creditors would need to be compensated. So £30 billion is the cost of purchasing Thames Water, not bailing out all of its creditors, which would be additional…
A good proxy is the Railtrack nationalisation – when the government bought the assets, a load of other associated parties had to be compensated too. Where is the money coming from?
The Bob Vylan fiasco isn’t over for the BBC after the duo said it would now sue the BBC. For what remains unclear…
A statement released by the act this afternoon says:
“We have decided to take legal action against the BBC.
In the immediate aftermath of our performance at Glastonbury 2025, The BBC wasted no time in placing labels upon us that did not, do not and never will fit.
As a corporation that receives the majority of its funding from the public, it has disappointingly continued to prove how little it represents the interests of the people and our access to unbiased news and information.
The BBC have attempted to silence those that oppose the heinous crimes taking place in Palestine, instead labelling them as anti-semitic, editing their speeches, removing their content and even blocking the release of documentaries that challenge the desired narrative of The BBC and it’s [sic] top brass.
These responses are unacceptable.
So seeing the opportunity to remind them the power of the people that they are attempting to silence, we had no choice but to take on this fight.
In fact, we take great pleasure in serving them that reminder in court.”
Another headache for new Director General Matt Brittin, who is in front of MPs at the Culture select committee next week for the first time…
David Lammy’s new “Judicial and Legal Diversity Board” to increase ethnic minority representation in the judiciary has had one meeting and has already spawned an entire ecosystem of sub-committees, working groups and “task and finish” units. A peek behind the Civil Service curtain…
Guido’s FOI Unit has uncovered documents revealing the extent of bureaucratic sprawl:
- The Board itself, co-chaired by Lammy and the Lady Chief Justice. Meeting twice a year.
- A Steering Group of director-level officials from every member body, meeting every eight weeks.
- An Analytical Advisory Group, newly created to “collectively improve our data.“
- A Task and Finish Group on Widening Access for Employed Lawyers.
- A Task and Finish Group on Legal Education.
- The absorbed Combined Statistics Working Group.
- The Judicial Race Working Group, wheeled in to give a presentation.
- Two further Task and Finish groups marked “tbc” on the Board’s timeline. No one knows what these are for yet…
Nine bodies, each of which draws “organisational resource” out of the MoJ, the judiciary, Judicial Appointments Commission, Bar Council, Law Society, CILEx, the Legal Services Board, and the CPS. The main Board meets for just 90 minutes twice a year. The sub-groups will file reports in September and December 2026 that will inform the creation of other groups. At the first meeting of the main board David Lammy said it was crucial that he was the first black Lord Chancellor, which indicates “the symbolic importance of leadership”…
The MoJ under Lammy has launched a new strategy to increase representation – which is already over the national average in some respects – by hiring without CVs and forcing non-white people onto appointment commissions. Is he in a rush?
UPDATE: Shadow Justice Secretary Nick Timothy tells Guido:
“David Lammy is campaigning for appointments to be based on skin colour or sex rather than merit, yet the law says judges should be chosen for merit alone. Responding to my letter, he could not explain how his new public appointments strategy is lawful, and refused to disclose his legal advice – what does he have to hide?
There was no Equality Impact Assessment for it, and the Equality & Human Rights Commission have not replied to my request to disclose any advice provided. And the new judicial appointments chair told Parliament she doesn’t believe in appointing on merit alone. This is extreme DEI madness – and it may be against the law.”
Incoming PM Andy Burnham backed a campaign by his transition policy chief – then a think tank director – to hike benefits spending by £90 billion. Funded by massive tax increases…
Andy Burnham’s transition policy chief Miatta Fahnbulleh made clear to Sky News that cutting welfare by reducing cash handouts or eligibility is off the table. Instead the nebulous “let’s get people into work” line was trotted out again…
Fahnbulleh’s New Economics Foundation, a think tank of which she was director for seven years, ran a flagship campaign for a “living income” in 2021. Fahnbulleh has held the idea so close she put it on campaign material for her 2024 run at the Peckham constituency…
The campaign reached a crescendo with a 2022 policy paper. This is the proposal:
- Scrap Universal Credit entirely and replace it with a new “National Living Income” costing an extra £71 billion a year, on top of the £100 billion+ already spent on working-age welfare. £90 billion extra in today’s money and comparable to the defence budget…
- NEF describes this as “restoring all of the cuts since 2010, and then investing the same value again.“
- Introduce a £187-a-month payment handed to most adults in the country, the “national allowance,” regardless of whether they work. Tapered for those earning above £100,000…
- Every benefit cap, limit, and sanction would be abolished, including the two-child limit and the benefit cap.
- A top-up to bridge the gap between disability benefits and 100% of the single-person “Minimum Income” – taken from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
- Auto-enrolment and weekly payments.
- Increase that Minimum Income payment in stages.
- Fund this with tax rises on savers, investors and pensioners: equalising capital gains tax with income tax, hiking dividend taxes, extending National Insurance to investment income and to pensioners, scrapping entrepreneurs’ relief, and removing the National Insurance upper earnings limit.
- NEF’s modelling said the top 25% of earners would foot the bill, and the plan is explicitly designed to be hugely redistributive.
Andy Burnham was a special guest as the NEF’s launch of its campaign, alongside Miatta Fahnbulleh. He also went on to support a pilot scheme of the campaign in Manchester just last year. At its launch event he said:
“We are saying to the government, let us here in Greater Manchester rethink the entire benefits system and turn it from a negative deficit model that’s trying to see the worst in people into an empowering system that builds people up rather than knocks them down.”
Burnham has indicated as of the one press interview that he’s done since winning in Makerfield that he will not attempt to cut benefits. Instead he backed a gargantuan socialistic ‘rethink’ of the system thought up by his policy chief – will Andy rule this out?
Badenoch said at her speech on Monday morning: “We are absolutely ready to fight a general election. We saw the results in Aberdeen South: 50% of the vote. Because we can unite the country… It’s about uniting the country, for God’s sake, behind a centre-right agenda.”
