Andy Burnham has taken a break from pledging not to enact Starmer’s policies and today’s been talking to train operators at the Rail North Committee meeting, mostly about the “big deterioration” of services by Northern Rail. Burnham was aghast at state-owned Northern’s continued use of fax machines – “How is earth is that the case in 2024?” He went on the attack:
“Your modernisation plan, like your training plan, is moving nowhere near fast enough. You could get rid of this stuff tomorrow. You could put in place IT to support people to communicate differently.”
Northern Rail’s response? Yeah, sure. But the unions…
“We wouldn’t be able to get rid of them tomorrow without an agreement with our train unions. We have to look at these issues with the depth and complexity they have and the historical issues that we absolutely are going to address. It isn’t as simple as turning them off tomorrow because at the moment we have an agreement to use the processes that we have and in order to change that, we do have to change the agreement.”
Burnham has discovered the unions. Remember Louise Haigh gave ASLEF train drivers a pay rise to £70,000 and reversed the previous government’s commitment to get rid of “Spanish practices.” Which allows staff to start their lunch break again if their boss starts talking to them and blocks the use of technology like video calls…
Starmer spoke to Nick Robinson for the Today Programme on Polanski’s criticism of the Golders Green police officers:
“I want everybody just to imagine what it might be like. You’re trying to arrest someone who has already attacked two people and has no regard for life. We know that tasers were fired. I know from my own experience with the police, that there are only two shots in a taser, and once you’ve shot them, there’s nothing left. There’s a guy on the ground, he’s got a rucksack on. And I don’t know what was going through the mind of those officers, but if I was there, I’d be thinking, he’s going to detonate something. He’s going to blow me up and everybody around here. In those circumstances, I think you can quite see why what could have gone through their mind is, we need to do whatever we can to disable this guy…
Now, when I then see Zack Polanski come out and retweet or support a criticism of that, I think it’s disgraceful… He’s not fit to lead any political party.”