Burnham backlash: UK Digital ID plans in peril if Manchester mayor succeeds Starmer

Re: Prime Ministers

The Belgian ID card is also proof of address. As part of the application process (at least if you're applying for the one for foreigners) the police call round at a random time to prove you actually live there. I didn't ask how the local system works - but in that case you've got voting and credit / utility bill records.

I guess that works because each commune (local council) is also a local police force.

But that's a much bigger system than a NI card with photo on it.

Re: Prime Ministers

"The ability to re-join the single market and properly manage free movement is a very good argument for ID cards."

Wrong! There's no good argument for ID cards. Unless you're a Stasi wannabe. And they're not (and never have been) a requirement for being in the EU single market.

Re: Prime Ministers

These are all solvable and avoidable but a blanket "NO" just lets governments get on with doing whatever is convenient for them.

Re: Burnham would come to dunce inane

> "[Burnham] used to be an unapologetic believer in New Labour"

Exactly.

And I clearly remember this because I first became aware of Burnham when he was a member of the New Labour cabinet during their final years in power. In 2008, Shami Chakrabarti (then director of Liberty) had taken the side of the Tory David Davis in opposing Labour's plan to detain terrorist suspects for up to 42 days without charge. In response Burnham attempted a mocking, character-assasinating smear insinuating the two were having an affair.

And since that first impression of Burnham was of him so obviously showing his true colours- a snide, bullying c***, an attack-is-the-best-form-of-defence apologist for New Labour's strongly authoritarian tendencies and a generally nasty piece of work- it's the one that stuck. And it's why I wouldn't piss on his phoney, self-serving "King of the North" good guy peoples' hero act of recent years if it was on fire.

From what I've heard, he's widely-mocked by many within Labour too, for shifting his principles and beliefs to suit his own career.

Re: Burnham would come to dunce inane

"I suspect he's popular because people don't know much about it. But have been told he's been a "successful mayor of Manchester"."

I suspect there are a significant proportion of the electorate still remember him form his previous tenure as an MP, and probably won't have terribly positive memories about it.

Regardless of how Starmer is performing, I really can't see any of the possible replacements being better. Indeed, I am pretty convinced that most of them will definitely be worse. The biggest danger is that far from improving the standing of the Labour Party, the upheaval will turn even more voters to Reform, which I would regard as the worst possible outcome.

Re: Burnham would come to dunce inane

If they wanted a Labour politician with a solid record of running a complicated city competently they already have one of those in London, but for some mysterious reason nobody in Labour is even thinking about Sadiq Khan...

Re: Burnham would come to dunce inane

"Some form of national ID would make a lot of things both easier and more reliable and less open to abuse. "

Where can I get the drugs you're on?

A national ID would make pervasive state surveillance a whole lot easier. And open up lots more opportunities for abuse. Since we'd be looking at a government-run exercise in futility, your national ID would also be a clusterfuck of unreliability and cost over-runs. Let's do that.

BTW, there's been next to no voter fraud => no justification for demanding ID. This was introduced by the Home Office as a way of softening up the public for ID cards and the Big Brother surveillance society. Fuck 'em.

Re: Burnham would come to dunce inane

Wes Streeting had a 500 vote majority at the last election and is yet another in a long line of ambitious, professional politicians since Blair that make my skin crawl.

How is Burnham any different to that though? He's another one who's gone from MP's assistant to special advisor to MP to minister. I got the impression he went up North to be a mayor in order to escape the dilemma of serving in Corbyn's shadow cabinet or sitting on the back benches - or more charitably because he wasn't willing to serve a leader he didn't believe in.

My worry is that everyone standing in this race is saying things that seem mad to ordinary voters. I heard a Labour MP the other day say that if Burnham wins and decides to spend more money to grow the economy, "the markets will just have to get in line."

Or Burnham the other day who said that he'd like to rejoin the EU in his lifetime, because "I'm in favour of unions of all types. The EU, trade unions." I mean really? OK maybe he's not actually that stupid and just thinks we the voters are. How about the Soviet Union...?

Boring competence would be nice. But that's surprisingly difficult to achieve in reality. Because I strongly suspect that finding a set of policies that most of the Labour Party can get behind will be very difficult - which has been part of Starmer's problem. If you've no idea what policies you want, even if you can't achieve them all, you've no plan and you'll just get pushed around by events even more than a normal government does.

Re: Burnham would come to dunce inane

The case here reduces to three things: he hasn't visibly failed, he chairs a body designed to coordinate itself, and he isn't Wes Streeting. Greater Manchester's ten councils (not seven) cooperated before him because the GMCA is built to make them; crediting the mayor is like crediting the tenant for the load-bearing walls. "Kept the party in line" is meaningless when there's no whip, no welfare vote, and no Cabinet to balance. The one substantive achievement, bus franchising, has been left out... If the strongest argument for leading Labour is that he hasn't ballsed up a role the statute barely lets him balls up, the bar has gone through the floor.

Re: Burnham would come to dunce inane

@Charlie Clark

"Starmer was popular until his flipflopping on potentially unpopular policies made him look weak and indecisive"

I would disagree on his popularity - Labour got a big landslide, primarily because the electorate was sick of the Tories & so Conservative vote plummeted- that did not really mean Starmer was truly popular.

In terms of vote share just over a 1/3 so the big majority is just a flaw of UK FPTP system * (not helped by some dodgy constituency boundaries)

In terms of number of votes cast, less than Corbyn Labour got in losing 2019 election to shagger Johnson.

* A huge argument in favour of some form of PR

Re: who's the bigger liar?

It was Bliar who said Iraq had WMDs. He also said Iraq had rockets that could reach the UK in 45 minutes.

If you'd actually bothered to read the report that the government published at the time (which I did), you'd see that they said Iraq had missiles which could reach Cyprus - they even had a map showing the range circles of Iraqi Scuds and extended range Scuds - with Cyprus marked up on there. This was true, Iraq fired some of those Scuds at Israel during the 2002 war, and they were holding them in breach of the ceasefire agreement (and UN security council resolution) that ended the war in 1991 - where they agreed to destroy all their chemical weapons and long-range missiles.

Secondly the report's evidence for Iraq's stockpiles of chemical weapons was the massive amounts of chemical weapons that the UN inspectors had destroyed, before Iraq finally kicked them out in 1998 - minus the total amount of chemical weapons produced according to the Iraqi Ministry of Supply's own documents - which the inspectors had got hold of - and that was the assumed remaining stockpile.

I have no reason to believe that Blair didn't think that was the case - because almost everybody at the time did. Which means, by definition, he wasn't lying he was mistaken. To believe a thing for which you have good evidence and be wrong about it, is not a lie. It is an error.

I was amazed how little information was in that dossier. It was mostly info straight out of UN reports. At the same time, I was reading 'The Secret State' a brilliant book by Peter Hennessey on the early days of the Cold War. And what was fascinating was how little intelligence information we had from the inside of the regime - and how similar that was to the position 1950s politicians found themselves in when dealing with Stalin. Most of their information was technical. One of Hennessey's research students came across an accidentally declassified draft document on plans in case of nuclear war. And this assumed that there was a high chance we'd have no prior intelligence warning from political or communications intelligence - unless the Soviets chose to mobilise their forces, in which case we were observing those and would see changes in their behaviour. By the 60s we had some intel coming from senior levels, people like Oleg Penkovsky (a colonel in the Strategic Rocket Forces). But the parallels were interesting.

The 45 minute claim came from a source passed on by German intelligence - and Campbell was accused of sexing it up by changing the wording in the JIC report from "some sources indicate" they may be able to launch weapons in 45 minutes to - to something like we have intelligence that. So slightly firming it up. That was the real crux of the matter, many people thought they had WMDs, but ones that weren't easily deployable and usable - as opposed to in 1991 where chemical weapons were deployed (and some captured) and with the Corps headquarters in Southern Iraq and Kuwait.

Re: Burnham would come to dunce inane

The dishonesty went considerably deeper than careerism. Johnson sold Brexit as "taking back control", including over immigration, while conspicuously omitting who would actually wield that control. Two parallel policy moves landed in the same window of 2021 and together rewrote the UK skilled labour market.

First, the post-Brexit Skilled Worker visa, in force from January 2021. It widened the skills threshold to A-level equivalent, dropped the headline salary floor from £30,000 to £25,600, and set occupation "going rates" at the 25th percentile of UK earnings, with a further 30% "new entrant" discount available on top. For SOC 2134 (programmers and software development) this produced effective sponsor floors in the mid-£20,000s for roles whose UK contract rate sat at £400 to £600 a day. The route tied the visa to a single sponsoring employer, removing any practical ability to negotiate, switch, or push back.

Second, the IR35 off-payroll reforms in the private sector, effective April 2021. They shifted determination responsibility to the end client, which prompted blanket "no PSC" policies at most large employers and effectively closed the UK contractor market to British independent professionals. HMRC's own figures put the number affected at around 120,000 (take with a heap of salt - in practice figure was much higher).

The combined design was what the systems integrators, the large outsourcers and their corporate clients had been lobbying for since before the referendum. The Home Affairs Committee had previously named Infosys, Wipro and TCS as ICT visa abusers, with transferees making up the majority of their UK workforces. After 2021 they could staff UK engagements at a fraction of the day rate that British contractors had commanded for the same work, while IR35 ensured those contractors were no longer in the market to bid against them. The going-rate methodology baked the undercutting into law.

EU skilled workers, who had previously dominated B2B service provision in tech, finance and engineering, largely left. They had alternatives: Berlin, Amsterdam, Dublin, Warsaw. Freedom of movement gave them outside options and therefore bargaining power. Sponsored Skilled Worker visa holders, tied to one employer and one role, have neither. That asymmetry is precisely the point. An EU worker can walk; a sponsored worker cannot, which is why foreign corporates and the big consultancies pushed for the design they got.

Leaving the EU created the policy window. Conservative ministers chose to fill it with a system optimised to deliver cheap, captive labour to the systems integrators, the care sector, agriculture and hospitality, against the express preferences of the electorate they had just told they were "taking back control". I heard wine and steak was legendary. Take notice that Labour did nothing about it (apart from tweaking the going rates slightly).

Re: Burnham would come to dunce inane

Boris Johnson wasn't "honest" or even "someone who's dishonest but knows what they believe in", unless you count the fact that he believed in advancing his own career and self-interest.

I completely disagree. Johnson has been a consistent social liberal, including defending peoples' right to wear the burkha (in an article against France actually banning it), admittedly in unhelpfully insulting language. Also a pretty consistent centrist on the economy - i.e. the centre left of the Conservative Party. Called himself a "Brexity Heseltine". Also a consistent Eurosceptic for 30 years before the Brexit vote. Whether he decided which way to vote for whatever reason - there were plenty of Eurosceptics who campaigned for remain.

He was hyper-ambitious. But you don't get to be PM unless you are. He was also consistent on policy throughout his political career. I wouldn't trust him, but unlike Starmer you'd have a pretty good idea what policies he stood for - which isn't something anyone can say about Starmer even after he's been PM for 2 years.

Johnson isn't honest. He'll lie outright, if he thinks he can get away with it. And sometimes seemingly because it's easier now, and the future consequences can just look after themselves. So totally unsuitable for PM. Someone like Blair tended to tell a lawyer's truth. Use of misleading language while not telling an outright falsehood. Brown mostly did that, but sometimes just lied outright, when he thought he could get away with it. Starmer also outright lies quite a lot, whereas I'd expected him to be like Blair and use lawyer tricks. But worse, Starmer lies about what he believes in. Blair was relatively consistent on policy, a sharp political operator and happy to use spin all day long, but still had actual ideas about policy and an idea of what his government was for. Starmer just seems to want to be in office - i.e. he's as unhealthily ambitious as Johnson. He's also a liar, although not as much as Johnson. But worse, Starmer lies about what he believes in, not just for everyday convenience to avoid scandal. He lied to his party saying he'd be "Corbyn but competent". Then immediately set about abandoning Corbyn's policies, while not being very much more competent.

I'm not a fan of any of these four politicians, but I'd prefer Blair to Brown, Brown to Johnson and all of them to Starmer. Because the first three at least had an idea of the policies they believed in - and in the end that's half of what you're voting on.

Re: "It would be a surprise if the party had not chosen him"

Corbyn (who was essentially moderate Scandi Left, not extreme in any way)

ROTFL. Corbyn the anti-Semitic, old Labour, hard left Red, not extreme? What have you been smoking?

Re: "It would be a surprise if the party had not chosen him"

tiggity,

It wasn't an establishment stitch up. Corbyn failed because he was crap at politics. And also because he was too far to the left of his own party, and most of his own MPs didn't think he was capable of doing the job, or agree with him on policy.

He's also not a scandi-lefty. The Scandinavians have free market economics, but with a better social safety net. However they also have contributory benefits more than we do. They also run their government services a lot more locally than we do, which makes government smaller scale and there's more private provision. Corbyn is much more of the big government, with large chunks of nationalisation if he can manage it, UK post-war consensus, with government doing a good deal of economic planning. So totally not the scandi-model. I'm not a lefty, but I'd vote for either party if I seriously thought one of them would try to implement that here.

Also Corbyn has a rather sixth-form opinion on international politics that drives away loads of voters.