Andy Burnham is right. The cost of living is foremost in people’s minds just now. Naturally his electricity bill VAT holiday and freeze of bus fares find agreement in television news vox pops and focus groups. But he offers no explanation for the causes and concentrates only on the symptoms. Obviously, the removal of the 5 per cent VAT will be nice for consumers. But underlying inflation today relates to government debauchery of money and disruptions of supply caused by Trump’s tariffs and his short war, by Putin’s long war and Ed Miliband’s net-zero trap, which makes us pay expensive green levies and bans new domestic fossil fuel production. The remedy does not lie in the 1970s-style pretence that things can be made cheaper by fiat.
Is it just because I am a soft southerner, or am I am right to be shocked that the Burnham cabinet contains (so far as one knows) 33.333 per cent fewer gay men than the Starmer one? Out go Steve Reed from south London, to whom Lord Alli gave a pair of wellington boots worth more than £400 to help him be Defra secretary, and Peter Kyle from Brighton, friend of Peter Mandelson. The only pink cabinet survivor in this red regime is Wes Streeting (east London). He has been sent to the Ministry of Defence, perhaps on the northern, borderline ‘homophobic’ assumption that a sergeant-major can make a man of him. Possibly on a similar principle, Sir Chris Bryant has been promoted to Northern Ireland.
