As we went to press, the Labour Party was in the midst of imposing a new prime minister on the people of the United Kingdom, following the resignation of Sir Keir Starmer. The latter will have served just two years in the post, becoming Labour’s shortest-ever serving prime minister.
It very much looks as if Labour MPs will elect one Andy Burnham to the post, him having won last month’s Makerfield by-election, which was engineered to enable his return to Westminster. So who is going to be who in the court of king Andy? And what will that mean for public policy?
God removes and sets up kings
The Bible says of Almighty God:
Dan 2:21 And he changeth the times and the seasons: he removeth kings, and setteth up kings: he giveth wisdom unto the wise, and knowledge to them that know understanding: (KJV)
Given that, is Mr Burnham the solution to the mess our elites have made of the United Kingdom, or is he yet more of the judgment of Almighty God for our national sins? As it happens, the prophet Hosea says that God may stand aside and allow the elite to impose their favoured candidate rather than go to him for a God-fearing man:
Hos 8:4 They have set up kings, but not by me: they have made princes, and I knew it not:
And that imposition of a godless man will be the judgment of God on our nation. It’s the elites who impose both princes and policies, rulers and rules on the rest of us. But it’s on the people that the judgment falls.
God is looking for a God-fearing leader
That is why God is looking for a man who will be a true champion of the people. That man will need to proclaim Christ as King, which is no more than our Christian constitution demands. So he will need spiritual understanding. And when the backlash comes, which it will, he will need the power, the wisdom and the protection of the Holy Spirit.
So is Andy Burnham that man? The short answer is ‘No’. Mr Burnham, when elected as Labour leader and Prime Minister, will have even less of a mandate than Keir Starmer. A mere 20% of the population voted Labour in July 2024. Just 55% of one constituency plumped for Mr Burnham, 24,927 voters. Makerfield: full results. During his campaign, Mr Burnham failed to submit any concrete policy proposals for the people to mull over.
The rules of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) say Labour Members of Parliament may nominate themselves or one other member of the PLP between 9th and 15th July 2026. Candidates would need the written support of 20% of the 403 PLP members to stand.
A day after the ballot opened, the party bosses announced that 322 MPs were already supporting the so-called King of the North. That leaves eighty-one who aren’t, which is the 20%, when you do parliamentary maths. But they would all have to support one candidate.
That one candidate would not be elected, but would force the Andy to disclose his policies in a mini-manifesto. If there still remains only one candidate validly nominated on 15th July, the rules say a ‘leadership special conference’ would be held on 17th July.
Possible other candidates
One possible rival candidate to Mr Burnham was Darren Jones MP, the chief secretary to the Prime Minister. However, he ruled himself out of a contest. That left Al Carns MP, if he could find 80 more colleagues not enamoured with Mr Burnham. The former armed forces minister resigned over what he saw as inadequate defence spending on 11th June. A couple of weeks ago he was calling for the former Manchester mayor to outline his ‘vision’ for Britain. ‘I’ve got to see the plan,’ he said.
But now, as the BBC reports, Mr Carns met with Mr Burnham on Tuesday 7th and concluded the Makerfield MP would ‘make the right decisions and move the country forward’.
He told Sky News a leadership contest was ‘not the best use of Labour’s time’ and in his view ‘we need to get on board’ with Burnham. Well, good for you, Al Carns, to be admitted to the mind of Andy, but is there any chance the rest of us might see ‘the plan’, if one actually exists?
Addressing the problems
No-one yet knows how Andy Burnham will address the problems faced by the United Kingdom, or if he even views them as problems at all.
He is just as wedded to multiculturalism as is Keir Starmer and all the godless elite, viewing the arrival of mainly Muslim young men on our shores as benign. Mr Burnham was one of those covering up the extent of the Muslim rape gangs scandal in his domain of Manchester.
The majority of the public who believe British identity is disappearing as a result of diversity will be disappointed if they thought it was only two-tier Keir to blame. The Telegraph reports on research ‘by Dame Sara Khan, a former government adviser on extremism’. Dame Sara ‘found that 55 per cent of the population felt national identity was disappearing because of diversity rather than being strengthened by it. … An even larger majority – 61 per cent – believed that the contract between government and its citizens was broken.’
government of the elite, by the elite, for the elite
People are beginning to see how much contempt the elite have for them. It stems, of course, from their lack of respect for the Lord. Remember what the Lord said:
Luke 18:2 Saying, There was in a city a judge, which feared not God, neither regarded man:
That helps to explain why the elite view ‘populism’ as a problem. They neither fear God nor regard man. For them, government of the people, by the people, for the people, is replaced by government of the elite, by the elite, for the elite. And that sums up Andy Burnham.
Contrary to all the ‘King of the North’ flannel, it now seems that Manchester suffered the steepest fall in living standards in England during Mr Burnham’s time as mayor.
Also in Manchester, his pledge to end rough sleeping in the city through a scheme called ‘A Bed Every Night’ actually saw the number of rough sleepers across Greater Manchester almost doubling between 2022 and 2026. We learn from this that he is a supporter of welfarism.
The Welfare Bill
In the 2025/26 financial year, the UK government’s total welfare bill sat at approximately £333 billion, while income tax receipts generated around £331 billion.
The welfare bill broke down as follows: Pensioner benefits were around £177.7bn, although the actual state pension was £146.1bn. The remaining £33.6bn was benefit top-ups. Benefits to disabled people and a spectrum of real or imagined health conditions was £77.1 billion, benefits for those of working age & their children (including Universal Credit) was £145 billion and housing benefits totalled £37.3 billion.
In 2024/25 the National Audit Office reported the UK government spent £4.53 billion on asylum support, resettlement and accommodation (£2.1 billion of which was on hotels). The total of Home Office operational procedures for asylum, border, visa and passport functions was an estimated £6.4 billion. Bridget Anderson, Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship at the University of Bristol, who researched the figures, commented: ‘The scale of spending is extraordinary and disproportionate, and the reasons reach far beyond asylum policy and asylum seekers.’
And now Bridget Phillipson, His Majesty’s Secretary of State for Education, has proposed the taxpayer should fund child care for those out of work. Yes, I know, but there is more to this than meets the eye. ‘Childcare’, and ‘early years education’ used to be what mothers did. But from what that Bridget said in her speech, parents are no longer good enough at it for the godless left.
No money for defence
Of course income tax is only part of state income and welfare is only a proportion of expenditure. Total UK government income comes out at a colossal £1,232bn. Total UK government spending, is more, approximately £1,370 billion for the 2025–26 financial year. Debt interest alone is £81.4 bn.
On defence, the cause of the resignation of Mr Carns together with that of his boss, Secretary of State John Healey, the UK spent £60.2 billion on defence in the 2024/25 financial year, accounting for approximately 2.3% of the UK’s GDP. For 2025/26 planned core military spending is set to rise to £61.7 billion, still less than 2.5% of GDP, let alone the 3.5% promised by Keir Starmer. The latter would cost £30bn a year. Messrs Healey and Carns demanded £4.5bn extra this year. Chancellor Rachel Reeves came short with £3.5bn per annum. The Telegraph reports a minister admitting the Treasury has no idea how to find £40bn more for defence,
Politics Home says: ‘for many Labour MPs the real struggle now concerns not who occupies No 10, but who controls economic policy from No 11. Concerns about the possibility of (Ed) Miliband becoming chancellor is a key concern among many of (Darren) Jones’ former supporters. When Jones ruled out a leadership bid earlier this week, he said it was in part because he had received assurances from Burnham, particularly on economic policy.’
Once again, good for you Mr Jones, but when will the rest of us ‘receive assurances’?
Government waste supports the elite
The Government may not be able to find money for defence, but there is plenty of money for a host of their pet ideological projects.
On Net Zero, the UK government has committed up to £21.7 billion over 25 years to support carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects. The overall cost to the taxpayer of Net Zero is colossal, but almost impossible to find out. Even David Turver at the Institute for Economic Affairs finds ‘The Cost of Net Zero’ to be deliberately opaque.
Elsewhere, the UK government has just announced a £4.5 billion ‘active travel investment plan’ to build 5,000 new walking, wheeling, and cycling routes over the next five years. In England, funding will be primarily managed by Active Travel England, ‘to help local authorities develop infrastructure and deliver cycle training’. Active Travel England is a quango chaired by former racing cyclist Chris Boardman.
Walking, wheeling and cycling obviously fit in with the godless left’s war on the motorist, while Arts Council England disburses money to a host of woke, privileged, often antichristian and where possible anti-Jewish projects. The quango’s annual income was £842.3 million in the 2024/25 financial year. Central government splashed out £578 million while the National Lottery chipped in with £261.4 million. And that is just one quango out of over 600.
The Taxpayers’ Alliance has calculated that in 2023-24, quangos accounted for £391 billion in public expenditure. Out of that, NHS England’s budget is approximately £175 billion, while internal staff and administration cost another £2 billion. Which leaves £216 billion providing a comfortable living for a host of non-NHS quangocrats whose faces also fit in the corridors of power.
More jobs for the boys and girls
We should not expect Andy Burnham to take a putty knife, let alone an axe, to all this profligacy. Indeed, he says he wants to devolve government to the English regions. That will mean more power going, not to ordinary people, but to yet another layer of the political class.
What else do we know? Mr Burnham now says he wants ’even closer ties’ with the EU. He has ’apologised’ for Keir Starmer’s ‘actions on Israel’. No, not for the antisemitic recognition of fictitious ‘Palestine’, but for Sir Keir’s failure to impose further sanctions on Israel and consider trade bans. Andy Burnham should reflect on Balaam’s prophecy on Israel:
Numb 24:9 He couched, he lay down as a lion, and as a great lion: who shall stir him up? Blessed is he that blesseth thee, and cursed is he that curseth thee.
Not content with inheritance tax, Andy Burnham is thought to be planning a capital gains tax raid on top. City AM reports ‘Families face a huge capital gains death tax under Burnham.’ The Telegraph says Business confidence has plunged to an 18-month low over fears Andy Burnham could launch a capital gains tax raid.
The wrong way round
The problem is that the government have their priorities the wrong way round. Even a Government minister revealed this in an unguarded email exchange with Peter Mandelson.
It was Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden MP who let the cat out of the bag following the leak of private messages to Lord Mandelson. In the 2025 exchanges, Mr McFadden complained to ‘Mandy’ about the government’s approach. He said: ‘Every meeting I have is “who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others”? They’re asking the wrong questions.’
The right way round would be to seek the Lord for what they can legitimately raise in taxation, and then decide how it should be spent. But that demands humility, which is merely one among all the scriptural virtues for leadership they do not have:
Exod 18:21 Moreover thou shalt provide out of all the people able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness; and place such over them, to be rulers of thousands, and rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens.
The Court of King Andy
On economic policy, two hard-left individuals have the ear of Mr Burnham.
City AM analyses the impact of Miatta Fahnbulleh in the court of king Andy. We have reported on this hard-left MP, chief executive of the Soros-funded New Economics Foundation and its training networks, before. Read our article above or watch our video:
According to City AM, Mattia Fahnbulleh praised Jeremy Corbyn’s election manifesto to Guardian readers in 2019. “… the one thing it got right in this election” was to “grasp the scale of the economic and environmental challenge the country faces”. That meant ‘free broadband for everyone, nationalising the country’s utilities and railways, free bus travel for under-25s and juicing government spending by £135bn.’
It’s yet more unscriptural tax and spend. City AM goes on: ‘The electorate had deemed it profligate and unworkable. To Fahnbulleh, it “would have undoubtedly begun the process of transforming our economy”.’ Yes, into a basket-case. There is more: ‘Fahnbulleh supports a wealth tax, equalising capital gains tax with income tax and a increasing the top rates of income and corporation taxes.’
‘Common ownership’
Even that will not be enough. Miatta proposes a ‘Green New Deal: “a massive mobilisation of resources to decarbonise and at the same time create millions of jobs and lift living standards”.’ Increased investment in “high-quality healthcare and education” is also on the agenda, after being “weakened under neoliberal governments”. She proposes “universal access to childcare [and] public transportation”.
City AM: ‘The cross-party Institute for Public Policy think tank puts the cost of universal childcare at £17.8bn year, considerably more than the Ministry of Justice’s annual budget. Meanwhile, making all public transport entirely free at the point of use – a considerable expansion on Corbyn’s election-losing promise to make bus fares free for under 25s, is estimated to cost roughly £30bn a year – half the current defence budget.’
‘Ms Fahnbulleh has also called for the introduction of what the New Economics Foundation has called ‘Living Income‘, … an ‘income floor’ – “an amount of money no one can fall below whether they are in or out of work”.’ She proposes “common ownership of public goods and essential infrastructure” and forcing employers to give ‘staff a compulsory share in their company – those shares would come with “voting rights, enabling employees to become the dominant shareholders over time”.’
Communism, also known as theft
‘Along with forcing the Bank of England to drive the transition agenda through credit guidance policies, forcing businesses to pay workers ‘fairly’, and making landowners place their property into community-owned trusts, enforcing the multifaceted and radical agenda would require patience, the woman the New Statesman has referred to as ‘Burnham’s brains’ concluded. “But,” she added, “such patience must also have a limit: when it comes to fixing the damage that neoliberalism has done, time is running out”.’
It’s a communist programme, otherwise known as theft. No wonder ‘Fahnbulleh and Burnham did not respond to request for comment.’
It is not just Miatta Fahnbulleh. Another key ally of Andy Burnham is the hard-left Matthew Lawrence. He works with Labour Mainstream, and has just published a ‘Productive State policy paper’ which ‘envisages state regaining control of basics to make life affordable.’ The Guardian further reports that his paper proposes ‘a state that owns, invests and provides to make life affordable. A politics that takes back control of the foundations of a decent life: clean water, cheap energy, warm homes, reliable transport, built and run by institutions that answer to the public.’ Which actually means ‘run by quangos which answer to the politicians’.
The Lawrence paper is an endorsement of Miatta’s position. No wonder not just Labour MPs but the City of London are taking heed to who will be Andy Burnham’s Chancellor of the Exchequer. Whether that post will go to Ed Miliband, or even if Mr Miliband stays as Secretary of State for (ie ‘against’) Energy Security and (for) Net Zero, it will mark a radical departure from what the 20% voted for two years ago.
It could all go pear-shaped very quickly. The British state could easily run out of money. The demands for a general election will grow stronger. Sir Keir Starmer will shortly become Labour’s shortest-ever serving prime minister. Is that distinction about to pass to Andy Burnham? There is a lot to pray for.
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