ANDREW NEIL: Andy Burnham is not Labour's new messiah — and he might not even be much of an improvement on Starmer. mol.im/a/15896057

This is an important post, worth reading in full. The BBC would seem to have a death wish when it comes to impartiality.

The BBC Has Ruled. Brexit Damaged The Economy. No Further Debate Required. The BBC's editorial complaints unit has decided that the negative economic impact of Brexit is now a settled fact. Not a contested judgement. Not one side of a live debate. A fact, in the same category as man-made climate change, requiring no balancing view. The ruling followed a Radio 4 Today programme segment featuring Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, alongside Liam Byrne and Sir John Gieve, both long-standing advocates of closer EU alignment. All three agreed Brexit had damaged growth. The presenter, Katya Adler, did not challenge the premise or introduce a dissenting voice. A complaint followed. The ECU's response is the revealing part. It acknowledged the segment failed to "acknowledge the alternative case" for pursuing opportunities outside the EU rather than realignment with it. That part of the complaint was upheld. But the central complaint, that three pro-EU voices agreeing with each other on air is not balance, was dismissed. The reasoning given was that this reflected "the consensus among economists" and there was no "significant body of economic opinion" on the other side. This is worth pausing on. The BBC is not claiming it found balance. It is claiming balance was unnecessary because one side of the argument does not meaningfully exist. The institution that is legally required to be impartial has ruled itself the arbiter of which questions are still open and which are closed, and Brexit has just been moved into the closed file. The economics itself does not support the certainty on display. The headline figure driving much of this narrative, an 8 per cent hit to GDP since 2016, comes from an NBER paper built on a "synthetic control" model that constructs a hypothetical non-Brexit Britain from a basket of comparator countries. The largest weighting in that basket, over 60 per cent, is the United States, a country currently riding an AI investment boom and a separate fiscal stimulus. The model also weights Estonia and Greece more heavily than France or Germany. On a straightforward per capita basis against France and Germany, the actual comparators, Britain's performance since 2016 sits roughly in line with both. An 8 per cent gap simply isn't visible. This is a model producing a number that then gets reported as "the consensus," which the BBC then cites as the reason no alternative view is required. That loop, model produces number, number becomes consensus, consensus becomes fact, fact requires no balance, is the mechanism. It does not require a conspiracy. It requires an institution that has decided which conclusions are respectable and which are not, and which then treats its own prior decision as evidence. The same posture has been on display all week. A government department can decide its diversity targets are lawful without seeking legal advice to check. A police force can decide a book about dismantling "inner white supremacy" is leadership training. A broadcaster can decide an economic question is closed and that deciding so does not breach its own impartiality rules. In each case, the institution marks its own homework, and the mark is always a pass. None of this requires Brexit to have been a triumph. Britain's economy has genuine problems, most of them unrelated to single market membership. But a state broadcaster, funded by compulsory licence fee under threat of prosecution, has now formally placed one of the most consequential political decisions in modern British history beyond the reach of its own impartiality obligations. Reform's Lee Anderson called it being "blinkered by groupthink." The more precise description is an institution that has stopped being able to tell the difference between its own assumptions and the facts. "The BBC is not claiming it found balance. It is claiming balance was unnecessary because one side of the argument does not meaningfully exist."

Belfast houses more asylum seekers per capita than almost any other place in the UK. One in 200 people in Belfast is an illegal migrant. Who could possibly have foreseen civil unrest? It’s the immigration, stupid.

The Cheques Go Out. The Men Arrive. The Women Pay the Price. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office published its aid allocations without apology or embarrassment. Afghanistan receives £192 million. Somalia £143 million. Yemen £142 million. Sudan £141 million. Nigeria £138 million. The Treasury writes the cheques. The Foreign Secretary insists the money saves lives. Neither of them will say what the figures actually represent. Afghanistan is governed by a regime that in April 2024 announced the enforcement of stoning and flogging for women accused of adultery. The UN's own Special Rapporteur describes a system of institutionalised discrimination amounting to gender apartheid. Girls are banned from secondary education. Women have been stripped from public life by decree. Britain sends £192 million a year, routed through NGOs the Taliban has simultaneously banned women from working for, which rather defeats the stated purpose. Somalia ranks second on the Open Doors World Watch List for Christian persecution, behind only North Korea. Christians identified in the country face torture or death. Women and girls face forced marriage and sexual violence as instruments of social control. The Somali parliament has repeatedly failed to pass legislation on FGM and sexual violence. Britain sends £143 million. Yemen, where FGM affects up to 84 percent of women and girls in some governorates, and where apostasy carries the death penalty, receives £142 million. Sudan, which has 15 million women and girls who have undergone FGM, receives £141 million. Nigeria, whose northern states operate sharia courts with apostasy laws punishable by death, and where 14 million women and girls have undergone FGM, receives £138 million. Five of the ten top recipients of British aid appear in the Open Doors top ten for Christian persecution. The government knows this. The figures are its own. The same government presides over the Channel. Between 2018 and 2024, 147,568 people arrived illegally by small boat. Of those for whom data was recorded, 76 percent were males aged 18 to 39. In 2024, the leading nationalities were Afghans, Syrians and Iranians. In the first half of 2025, 70 percent of those crossing were young males from Afghanistan, Sudan and Iran. They arrive without verified documents. They arrive without verified ages. They are processed at Manston and dispersed into communities across Britain, often into hotels operating with minimal supervision. The crime record is now a matter of parliamentary record. Louise Casey's report into rape gangs identified asylum seekers among those involved in the sexual exploitation of young British girls. The five nationalities most likely to cross the Channel saw a 110 percent increase in sexual offence convictions between 2021 and 2024. Foreign nationals account for one in seven sexual offence convictions while comprising one in ten of the population. In London, they account for over 40 percent of sexual assault charges while comprising 25 percent of the population. The Sun found 339 charges in six months across only half the asylum hotels in operation. The Mail on Sunday found 708 charges across a third. A YouGov poll found 93 percent of Britons support the deportation of illegal migrants convicted of rape and violent crime. Ninety-three percent. The highest rate of support was in Scotland, at 97 percent. The British public has arrived at a verdict. The political class is still writing the briefing notes. Britain is funding, at scale, some of the most repressive and misogynistic regimes on earth. Britain is simultaneously admitting, without adequate screening, large numbers of young men formed in those same societies. The connection is not complicated. The refusal to state it plainly is a political choice, made in the full knowledge of the consequences, and those consequences are being borne by British women. "Britain is funding some of the most repressive and misogynistic regimes on earth."

David Lammy’s new diversity plan appears to be illegal. He should publish his legal advice.

Let’s pause net zero for a decade and see who cares about putting defence above Ed Miliband’s expensive energy obsessions.

Suicidal empathy is the Labour government splurging £10 billion a year on welfare for foreigners, £13 billion a year on foreign aid, and £15 billion in the coming years on hotels & HMOs for illegals and then saying “sorry no money for our own national defence” 🤡

Since Blair - 30 years ago - people voted against mass immigration. Every election, they got up, got dressed, found a pilling station and voted to end mass immigration. 30 years they did that. Nothing changed. In fact, it got worse. So they organised marches and protests, and events and petitions and wrote to their MPs and tried every single thing they could legally, to tell the powers that be, that they wanted an end to mass immigration. The state has deliberately ignored and removed all legal options from the British and Irish people to legally, peacefully, have their demands answered. THEY, and nobody else, have created and caused division and riots and fury. The toothpaste can not go back in the tube. We are where we are because, and only because, of 30 years of failed government.

🚨As I write, African males who arrived in the UK illegally and have a history of attacking women are being granted leave to remain. It’s so insane no one can believe it. It’s true. Men from Sudan, Eritrea, Afghan cannot have asylum claims rejected. Because human rights.

Here’s the problem. The liberal political class wants us to treat atrocities like Belfast as single, random, isolated incidents. “Yes, it’s horrific, but don’t overreact,” they say. “Let the police do their job. Justice will be delivered. Let’s remain united,” and so on. But the public can see that such incidents *aren’t* random or isolated. They are, in fact, all the consequence of massive state failure in the area of asylum and immigration. All roads lead back there. That’s why people are angry.. They are sick of the platitudes that get trotted out after each fresh incident. They don’t want to hear them anymore. They know that the decisions of establishment politicians have brought us to this current pass, and they don’t trust those same politicians to fix things, especially when some of them refuse to even recognise that the public’s anger is justified. There has been a huge vibe shift in recent years. Imagine - God forbid - there were another 7/7. Does anyone think the public response would be anything like as restrained as it was then? We are in really dangerous territory. The public don’t want flowers and candles and “Don’t let them divide us.” They want someone who says, “I recognise that the state has failed abjectly. We have allowed far too many people to settle in the country without knowing who they truly are. It has disrupted your communities. Your anger is justified. And I will do everything in my power to put things right.” Any politician unwilling to articulate that message, fully and sincerely, is effectively sanctioning more years of growing social disharmony and discord. Things cannot heal until those in power recognise the extent of the problem and what it will take to fix it. And, on both counts, most of them don’t. That’s why the next few years are going to be very, very turbulent.

The Border Stays Open. The State Will Close the Conversation. Before the fires in Belfast had been extinguished, the government had identified the threat. Not the border. Not the system that granted Hadi Alodid legal residency in seven months without a verifiable European asylum history. Not the Albanian gangs advertising guaranteed passage to England on TikTok this morning. The threat, as defined by this government, was the conversation. Liz Kendall announced on Wednesday that social media firms would face new legal curbs during times of crisis. Platforms would be required to remove incendiary content more quickly when tensions were heightened. The definition of crisis and the definition of incendiary would be set by ministers. On the same day, Jonathan Hall, the government's own terror watchdog, said he had raised the national security dimension of mass migration with the government and received no reply. One question got legislation within forty-eight hours. The other got silence. Stephen Ogilvie lost an eye on a Belfast street. The government's legislative response targets the people describing what happened. This is not new. After the summer 2024 riots the same reflex operated. People were jailed for social media posts within days of the disorder. The sentences handed to those who wrote the posts sat in the same range as those who burned the buildings. The machinery of the state was directed at speech about disorder rather than the conditions producing it. Belfast is the same pattern at higher intensity. The border stays open. Discussion of what happens at the border will be suppressed more quickly next time. The British asylum system did not malfunction in the case of Hadi Alodid. It performed. Sudan to Paris. Paris to Dublin. Dublin to Belfast by bus. Asylum claimed in February 2023. Refugee status granted by September. Legal right to remain until 2028. There is no French record of him as an asylum seeker. The Irish government will not say how he entered Ireland. None of that prevented the system from processing him correctly by its own rules. The rules are the problem. The government has no intention of changing them. Albanian gangs are advertising the same route on TikTok today. Filmed inside Dublin airport. Guaranteed passage. Seven thousand pounds payable on arrival. Operation Gull has arrested more than 900 people using it in a year and the advertisements continue. Enforcement is cataloguing this. It is not closing it. Jonathan Hall, the government's own independent reviewer of terror legislation, said immigration must be treated as a national security issue. He said he had raised whether migrants from certain countries presented elevated risks of serious violence. The government responded with silence. The terror watchdog, a King's Counsel appointed to scrutinise national security law, is recording not a political failure but an institutional one. The question was asked through proper channels. Nobody answered. The pattern is coherent even if the government will not name it. The terror watchdog raises the national security dimension of mass migration and hears nothing. The gangs film themselves inside Dublin airport and advertise openly. The border operates as it always has. And ministers announce that posts about the consequences will be removed more quickly next time. That is not an oversight. That is a set of priorities. A government that cannot close a border it knows is being exploited, cannot answer its own terror watchdog, and cannot explain how a man with no verifiable asylum history acquired British residency in seven months has chosen a fourth option. Control the account. Leave the causes intact. "Liz Kendall announced on Wednesday that social media firms would face new legal curbs during times of crisis."

Perhaps the grimmest part of John Healey’s brutal resignation letter is that defence spending, projected to be 2.6% GDP by 2027, will only reach 2.68% in 2030. A pathetic 0.08% increase over three years after all that Starmer rhetoric about the dangerous times we live in and how UK would lead the way stepping up to the crease. A real leader would have told Reeves to cough up the dosh and ordered Miliband to hand over a big chunk of his net zero budget. But he’s probably too weak to do either.

This is an outrageous, disgraceful smear on John Healey — and an outright lie. There are a ton of ways to finance more for defence — starting with net zero — without taking a penny from schools or hospitals. Reeves should be ashamed of herself for allowing this nonsense. Suggests she’s really desperate.

Welfare £333 billion Defence £62.2 billion Governments avoiding the elephant in the room again.

If Starmer were even slightly politically astute, he would realise after last night that the bare minimum required to prevent public order spiralling out of control is to do whatever it takes to stop the boats, close the hotels and detain asylum seekers. But no, the conversation is going to circle back to social media algorithms and the far right. He is on another planet.

Labour risks being forced to seek emergency help from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as Britain lurches toward a debt crisis, leading economists are now warning. Former IMF chief economist Ken Rogoff says, in a new interview, that there is “more than 50:50 chance” of a major UK debt crisis before the end of this decade. He is joined by Sir Charlie Bean, a former senior official at both the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility, who says the need for an IMF bail-out is now a “material risk” for the British economy. I not only firmly agree with Ken Rogoff and Sir Charlie Bean – but have been repeatedly issuing the very same warnings for a very long time. Because the grave risk of a major fiscal meltdown has been apparent for at least the last two years – to anyone who combines serious knowledge of UK economics and politics and global debt markets with an open mind. The UK's public finances were already fragile when Labour took office back in July 2024. But this government's misguided, ideologically-driven statist policies have made a bad situation much worse, seriously increasing the danger of a deep fiscal crisis - which would cause a disastrous state funding shortfall and a very nasty inflation spike. That would result in Downing Street being forced to follow the orders of unelected technocrats flown in from Washington and elsewhere. It would be a very major national humiliation combined with a deep economic slump and an even more intense cost-of-living crisis – in which low-income households, as ever, would suffer the most. Yet those of us that have shown the brains and courage to point out these inconvenient truths over recent months and years have long been dismissed and derided for our trouble - not only by ignorant politicians and approval-seeking journalists but also the overwhelming majority of "leading economists". Ahead of the general election in mid-2024, with Labour on course to win, the conventional wisdom among the great sages of broadsheet journalism and the economics establishment was that "the adults would soon be back in charge" ... Labour would "get lucky with the economy" ... and "Britain would now enjoy an extended period of political and fiscal stability". I thought that was total nonsense – not least as I was well aware Labour's plans irresponsibly to increase borrowing and spending would be met with deep scepticism by the global pensions funds, insurance companies and other institutional investors that lend governments serious money. My weekly @Telegraph "Economic Agenda" column of 23rd June 2024, a fortnight ahead of the general election, was a total outlier. I recounted the disaster of 1976 – when Britain was forced to go "cap in hand" to the IMF for a bailout – and warned that "The Ghosts of the 1970s" would haunt Labour's (so-called) economic resurrection". Six months later, after the October 2024 "Hallowen" budget in which Chancellor Rachel Reeves did indeed sharply hike borrowing and spending, I assessed the market reaction then doubled-down – warning more assertively in my column of 12th January 2025 that "The UK risks a return to 1976 unless Reeves changes course". And then again on 20th July 2025, as Labour's policies raised the costs of doing business, translating into price pressures which pushed up government borrowing costs even more, I again cautioned that "Inflation risks are taking Britain to the debt-crisis cliff edge". "It’s now screamingly obvious that Labour’s crude Keynesianism – “pump priming” the economy by upping state borrowing and spending – isn’t working," I wrote in that column last July. "Worse than that, this Government’s actions are pushing Britain towards a budgetary crisis every bit as serious as that in 1976 – when the UK was forced to go “cap in hand” to the IMF for a bail-out". It's been a lonely task issuing these warnings. I've been hounded in public debates, slagged off by senior civil servants and often dismissed by "leading economists" as "alarmist". So what do these same "leading economists" now say to Rogoff (Harvard Professor, Former IMF Chief Economist) and Bean (LSE Professor and Former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England)? The "economics establishment" – with very few honourable exceptions, the brilliant @jagjit_chadha among them – has been and remains extremely reluctant to point out the deeply unsustainable nature of this government's addiction to ever more borrowing. The systemic fiscal dangers of evermore "tax and spend" – and the prospect of a serious spike in gilt yields and related fiscal meltdown – are now so real and present as to be completely undeniable. Yet the UK government is about to shift even further to the left, pushing up borrowing and spending even more under a new leader, in a bid to appease the massed ranks of economic illiterates among Labour's Parliamentary party and activist base – making those dangers even more acute. Yet, still, the silence among "public intellectual" economists is deafening. I'm glad the likes of Ken Rogoff and Charlie Bean are now issuing clear warnings. So where is the rest of the "economics establishment" - those who purport to understand fiscal management and financial markets, and often funded by taxpayers' money? Britain is now clearly in the crosshairs of a very serious danger. The government's creditors are increasingly fickle and based overseas – with no regulatory or cultural obligations to lend money to the UK government. Those holding UK gilts are increasingly "speculative" rather than "strategic" long-term investors – looking for quick returns, financing their government bond purchases with "leverage" (money borrowed from elsewhere), which will quickly be withdrawn when senitment decisively shifts, causing a plunge in gilt prices and a sharp additional surge in government borrowing costs, setting up a vicious circle. The UK government is very heavily indebted – and the global investors we rely on to bankroll a huge slice of our state spending are alarmed that of the £132bn the government borrowed last year, no less than £110bn was spent on debt interest – as I wrote in a column on 17th May 2026, "As Labour lurches further left, the markets are calling time". Global investors are alarmed the UK has consistently had the highest inflation in the G7 (which pushes up borrowing costs) and has easily the highest share of index-linked debt (which magnifies the burden of inflation on the state's balance sheet). And they are deeply, deeply alarmed that when Labour came to power in mid-2024, the Office for Budget Responsibility was forecasting additional state borrowing of £323bn by 2029, the scheduled end of this Parliament. But Labour’s runaway spending and growth-crushing tax rises mean that the same five-year borrowing forecast is now £583bn – 80pc higher. And still, the trade unions, MPs and Labour activists who will choose Starmer’s successor now want even more. It is not too late to pull the UK back from the fiscal brink, to avoid the extremely painful and deep, lingering damage of being forced to go to the IMF and perhaps other multi-lateral creditors for a bailout. It is not too late to avoid the inflation surge, the currency crash, the shocking blow to consumer and business confidence alongside the sky-high interest rates that will seriously whack our economy – or the perhaps even deeper damage of yet more of the British electorate losing faith in the ability of our establishment to manage the country in a manner that avoids imposing serious hardship on so many hard-working people simply trying to make their way. But our political and media class needs to start acknowledging the economic and financial truth – that the UK government is borrowing and spending too much, taxation is now so high that it's hammering growth and employment, and that trying to finally get the economy moving by "moving further left", borrowing and spending even more, will result in a fiscal collapse. Smart, experienced, high-profile economists need to start speaking out – as Rogoff and Bean just have – raising the alarm in a bid to force the broader establishment to face reality. Before it's too late. If you've read this far, you clearly think this analysis is worthwhile and important. So please like and share. And for more, read my "Economic Agenda" column in The Sunday Telegraph each week – and subscribe to "When The Facts Change: Economics and Politics in a fast-moving world, with Liam Halligan"

The idea that all politicians must zip it, like Mr Collins in the presence of Lady de Burgh, whenever a bereaved family calls (whether or not on the advice of the police) for calm, no political divisiveness etc, is beyond absurd and very convenient for whoever caused the problem.

Since Andy Burnham wants to be the next Labour leader, here’s a reminder: Andy accused victims of Pakistani-Muslim grooming gangs of trying to “propagandise” the issue. He tried to block the grooming gangs inquiry in Manchester and nationally. He claimed that Pakistani-Muslims grooming gangs are a “thing of the past” despite clear evidence that little girls are still being victimised to this day, including in his local area. And what does he call the LITTLE GIRLS who were raped under his watch? Not children. Not little girls. “Young women.” Even on the most basic level, Burnham tried to shift the blame onto victims and refused to acknowledge that they were children. Countless little girls were raped, exploited and even murdered by Pakistani-Muslim grooming gangs, while powerful men like him turned a blind eye. Andy Burnham belongs in prison, not Parliament. And certainly not in 10 Downing Street.

Well worth a listen. The wonderful thing about Trevor Phillips is he has never been prepared to ignore bullshit and naked hypocrisy in public life without calling it out, wherever it comes from.