Andy Burnham

Tree of the year 2015, see footnote.Here we go to lockdown, again. It's been tried before and does not work. Or it's been tried before and was so successful we repeat it. What do you think? One good question leads to another; what ever happened to the Conservative party? We have in a previous article, see below on the Home page, asked the same question about the budget. That article was posted on May 1st a few months after the party came to power. Yes hindsight is a wonderful thing but we should not be shy of taking advantage of the long view. As further on again the shape of things is even clearer. Prior to the December 12th 2019 General Election the whole of UK politics was in the doldrums. The combined efforts of Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn had damaged more than their own parties. The entire UK political mechanism was frozen. Then along came Boris Johnson. He was neither of them and, so it seemed, only semi-attached to the Conservative party. At the time this looked like an advantage. Thus you could vote for him because you had grown weary of May or Corbyn or both. You could also vote for him if you were weary of the Conservative party, so why not? He was the odd ball, not like the rest of them. Then again if you wanted Brexit, and 17.4 million people did, he was an obvious choice.

Long ago and far away Corbyn gets arrested!
In May of this year Ed Miliband and the Labour Party lost the general election and Miliband resigned. It's not fair to pin all the blame on him but this has to be the starting point for looking at the win by Jeremy Corbyn of the Labour party leadership election. Miliband did however, and perhaps unintentionally, do both Corbyn and his party a favour by introducing the £3 membership idea.

Some estimates say membership is rising at a faster rate than at any time since the second world war when Clement Attlee came to power and now stands at 554,272 members and we know that 251,417 voted for Corbyn. Naturally the Corbynistas will say 'if only our man had been in charge in May'. But it's not that simple. Corbyn came in late to the contest with a bit of a fanfare from some in his party who wanted the election hustings to brighten up. They hoped he would swing the contest towards the other candidates but the opposite happened.

But the original idea at least showed a bit feeling for the public, if you look at the votes for the other three candidates they only total 171,247, without Corbyn the interest shown in the contest would have been reduced. Second placed Andy Burnham was simply revolting, being all that was wrong with not only Labour but also in UK politics generally.

Ready for Mr Burnham
Any thing's possible, so they say. While MPs from all parties in the House of Commons have expressed their opposition to the 42 detention legislation there is a lingering doubt about some of the support for David Davis. Are some of the more rubber-necked Nulabour types thinking that in supporting Davis they are wrong-footing David Cameron? Others take a less subtle approach and seem to put the boot in.

Take Andy Burnham for example, he is the member for the Leigh constituency of Greater Manchester and The Culture Secretary so sits in the Cabinet.