It can be hard sometimes to understand the progressive mind. The new Prime Minister’s first speech yesterday was intended to show that he is going to ‘do politics differently’. The first sign of this was his dispensing with the lectern used on such occasions for the last few years. Was this innocent object really the problem with his string of short-lived predecessors? I can’t imagine Liz Truss sat watching at home kicking herself, muttering ‘of course! If only I’d junked that lectern’.
We hear a lot today about how people live in political echo chambers. But it is better to live with echoes of reality than echoes of fantasy
The problem for Andy Burnham is bigger than that. This is, after all, a man who can look at Britain in 2026 – overtaxed, crippled with debt, riven by uncontrolled mass immigration – and diagnose that its key problem is… Mrs Thatcher. This is more of a psychosis than an opinion.
Progressives like Andy and his (retained) Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy regularly accuse their detractors of being the victims of online misinformation. The thinking goes that if only the poor, benighted impressionable souls knew the truth about how wonderful Labour are, they’d be brimming over with glee and gratitude. Large sections of the public, they claim, are being misled by wicked villains like Elon Musk stirring up ‘divisive’ lies about ‘our communities’.
