ANDY BURNHAM: THE PM NOBODY VOTED FOR

Andy Burnham is the new UK Prime Minister. Number seven in ten years. Nobody voted. Obviously.

Keir Starmer is out, the King of the North is in, and Britain's revolving door gets another spin.

His opening offer: 20 percent off your pint, a vague gesture at North Sea oil, and working from Manchester one day a week, which is apparently what levelling up looks like now. 

The money for all of it is coming from you, because the British public "can handle a bit more tax", says a man whose electorate currently numbers zero. 

We run the numbers on how many recent PMs actually won an election (two), why taxing the rich just buys them a one-way ticket out, and why Count Binface remains the only candidate with a mandate.

Chapters
 00:00 Who voted for you? Nobody
 01:21 20 percent off the pub
 03:38 A coronation, not an election
 05:38 The Manchester office ploy
 07:58 Oil, gas and buzzwords
 09:38 Where's the money coming from?
 12:18 Britain's brain drain
 14:02 Count Binface for PM

#AndyBurnham #UKPolitics #BritishComedy

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Transcript

0:00

So we've got big changes in the leadership of the Democratic Republic of Great Britain. Another new prime minister, I think it's the sixth one in about five years. Andy Burnham is in, and, uh, is he gonna last as long as Liz Truss did with that long three-month- Yeah … premiership that, that she had? Well, yeah, maybe he can actually outlive Th lettuce. Could break a, a new record in, in many ways. He's making waves already, so just to break down, already a 20% off pubs and clubs, which we'll dig into in terms of their tax. Already keeping prisoners in jail instead of letting those out. He's already moved- Yeah … himself up north to Manchester, which, uh, for one day a week, um, I'm assuming he's going by train 'cause don't wanna be flying and- Yeah. Yeah … that would, that could be a PR nightmare. Uh, and, and yeah, he's, he's a northern prime minister, which we've not had for a long time. Down-to-earth bloke, looks a bit like us, goes for a run- Wears a T-shirt … et cetera, et cetera. You know, you know, where could it go wrong? So yeah, I mean, starting out, the pubs and clubs is an easy one to, to jump into. That's like a quick win for northerners, isn't it? Oh yeah, without a doubt. I mean, that's, uh- Oh yeah, pub and club 20% cheaper. You know, I can imagine like a Peter Kay-type Phoenix Nights going, "Hey, Brian, look, they've reduced tax by 20%." Lovely. Exactly like that. Um, but yes, I, I guess it's, it makes it easier for people to run, uh, venues and pubs and things like that, which is a really good thing, I think, 'cause i- it's quite a British tradition, the kind of local pub that everyone goes to, talks about the state of our lives and the world and things, and I think it's like an institution that has been dwindling, and we should kind of preserve if we can. I agree. There's this, there's this smell that always takes me back to English pubs, which is like a mix of urinal cakes, chip fat, and cigarette smoke. You know, it's like this- And some scampi fries. Ooh, and a nice pack of scampi fries. It's, yeah, the, the… I was gonna make a terrible joke there, but I'll leave it. I'll leave that on the table and, and ladies and gentlemen at home, you can use your imagination to think about what joke I was gonna tell about eating a packet of scampi fries. But yeah, I, I think that's good. I think it sh- it could have also been extended to the hospitality industry in general. Like, there's a… Restaurants are closing like crazy. You know, prices everywhere in sort of even down to fish and chip shops. He could have got himself a massive, like, tick in the box if he brought chips and blue drinks down A few percentage points Big in Hull. Um A- a- ac- across, you know, his potential future voters. But, but yeah, a- and, and the other argument that comes out of all of this is with making such drastic changes and big changes and going for, like, a lot of devolution, right?'Cause the Manchester office thing's about taking power away from Westminster and putting it back into the areas. There's an argument that he doesn't have a mandate for any of this stuff, and really should only be operating under the mandate of, of Starmer, right? Or inside that mandate at least. Well, I mean, this is, in my mind, the biggest part of the problem. It's, it's just completely undemocratic, you know, 'cause there was an election, people voted for Labour, and they voted for Starmer, and for all the promises and pledges that he made in the run-up to that election. And then all of a sudden someone else just gets in and goes in different directions to what the previous prime minister did, and nobody voted for this. It, it was… I- it's just really, it's really dodgy, you know? And it's sort of like Banana Republic levels of deception in a way, 'cause it, it can't be… He can't really go on TV at any point in the future and claim that Britain's democratic because someone's just gonna say, "Oh, interesting. So who, who voted for you?" You know? Yeah. Nobody. Yeah. Yeah, there's no mandate. I guess Starmer will probably be having d- different types of mandates now he's out. But, um, yeah, s- like if you look at Burnham, he hasn't been elected, but how many of the last leaders of the United Kingdom have actually been elected? I think we had Boris Johnson, right? He was elected by the people. We had Keir Starmer. Uh, is that the, is that, that's the only two, right? That- Out of all of them … I think so out of… Yeah. We had what? Rishi Sunak, we had Liz Truss, we had- Theresa May Yeah. Theresa May. Was she the, she was before, right? But she wasn't voted in either, I don't think. I don't think so. So I don't think she won an election. I can't see that happening. Um, so yeah, it is, it's bizarre. But, but then some of these other changes that he's looking to make, like moving his office up to Manchester once a week, it just feels like a bit of a ploy. It's just optics, isn't it? And see, the thing is, it's, um, they know about the demographics of voters and they know who's kind of the most angry about what's going on in the country and whose lives have been more affected. And as someone who comes from the northeast of England, uh, yeah, northern parts of the UK have just declined massively over the years, and there's just, there's no investment compared to anything… Once you get that bit further south, it seems like everything's better, including hospitals and education and just all-round investment in infrastructure and business and everything. But in the north, it's just been, just been neglected for, I don't know, 20, 30 years. So I think in some ways he's kind of bringing hope to people. And I don't really see how him traveling to Manchester once a week is gonna reinvigorate that, that whole area of the UK, but maybe it gives people a bit of hope, or at, at least it looks good. Yeah. He's popping back for a hot pot or something. Although that being said, one of the benefits for the north is you can go to get, get a portion of fish and chips for less than a tenner still. You're not having that anywhere south of like- Which … the, the, the, you know, the bottom end of the M1. Once you get into sort of Buckinghamshire and onwards, you're definitely gonna be 12 quid for fish and chips, which is, you know, outrageous. It, it really is. But he's, he's good at hitting the buzzword. So I saw Donald Trump posted on Truth Social, which we will be talking a bit more about Mr. Trump, uh, in our next episode. But he was saying, "Oh yeah, the people in Aberdeen are gonna be celebrating today because Burnham's talking about oil and drilling and gas and all of this stuff." But he is only talking about it, right? He's not, he's not actually done anything yet. I mean, he's not been in very long, granted, but he's not said, "We are gonna start drilling our own oil again." He's not said, "We're gonna start taking advantage of our massive gas reserves again." He's just using the buzzword to kind of put it in the media that, oh, we're looking at potentially oil and gas again. But we're tied into all of these green things that we've ridiculously put ourselves into. Mm-hmm. So, like, he's not gonna go and suddenly alienate all of those voters that he's got, right? Um, because then obviously the risk is they all get… And I think this is the biggest risk of it all, is like you, by trying to go more central and maybe get some more of the north, northern right wing or more right wing or right-leaning re- re- um, Restore and, and whatever Farage followers back on side, he's gonna alienate his green left wing arm. And what's probably then gonna happen is he's gonna flip-flop and U-turn- Mm-hmm … and go back and forward between the two things, and just push more voters to the greens and more voters into Reform and Restore, right? It could well do, yeah, 'cause you, you have so many different extremes of opinion, you can't please all of those people. all of the time. It's like, uh, it's like the Thomas Sowell thing. There's no solutions, only trade-offs. And it, it's a little bit like that, you're playing this constant game. And also, the thing is, he's, he has said a lot of things, and so it's,"Okay, well, we'll, we'll knock 20% off rates here, and we'll do this over here. And oh, we'll o- open up the North Sea for, for drilling." And go, "Okay, cool. That's, that sounds kind of expensive. Where's the money coming from?" You know? It's like, it's like me saying, "I could do with a, a new mode of transportation. The new Range Rover looks pretty nice. Um, let, let me just check, uh, let me just check my bank account. Ah, it looks like I can maybe get some flip-flops if I go to the secondhand shop," you know? And I think Britain- Yeah … is in a, a similar place right now. The, the money's just running dry, and all they've been doing for so long is just borrowing more money to then pay benefits or pay other things, or to, to service other debt. And so it's a, all of his plans, and th- there's a lot of really amazing, impressive ones where you go, "Wow, wow, that'd make things better. How? How are you gonna finance all of this other than getting into more debt?" And then we even have a, a worse debt to GDP ratio, which is already looking really, really bad, so. Yeah. Yeah, and he's already, he's already alluded to it, is, is taxation increases. He's already alluded and mentioned a couple of things and said, you know, British public can handle a bit more taxes. Like, it's… So that, that's his plan, is to tax people, and I think it just shows how far removed the people running our country are from the reality on, on the ground day to day. And I know that's hard for us to say where we live so far away, but obviously we, we, we're in it, we read it, we see it, w- like we've, we've got that objective view from the outside. But I feel like most people now, they, they're not, they can't handle any more taxation increases. And you could even say, "Oh, well, you know, tax the rich," but we live in a global economy now. Like, if we try and tax the rich any more than we already are, they're just gonna leave. And the thing is when they leave- Yeah … it leaves an even bigger hole, because even getting the, the bit of tax that they've been unable to dodge out of them is still a massive more amount than like, you know, Gary who works in Tesco paying his, like, contributions. Well, the, the thing with that as well is that for top 10%, uh, the top 10% high earners in the UK pay 60% of the tax. So yeah, yeah, you can, you can tax them more, cool. But if I'm a, a multimillionaire that has businesses and various things in the UK, and then all of a sudden I'm paying even more tax on top of what's already a huge percentage of tax, I'm just gonna leave. And then, well, what does that mean? Well, then when people do that en masse, you're gonna have less, less tax being paid overall. You're gonna have less businesses. You're also getting rid of like the, the smartest entrepreneurial genius type people, and they're just going and setting up shop somewhere else. And it is a massive issue, and it's probably something we could dig into when news comes up around it. But like brain drain is now a thing in the UK. You know, you … This thing they used to talk about brain drain, so people, they go through like all the resources in their developing country or wherever they come from to become a doctor or an engineer or any of these really high value to the society jobs and, and vocations. And then they come and live in England and, or Britain and, and they, they use the, the, the spending from the country they came from, probably paid for it, but still, you know what I mean, it's always investment- Mm-hmm … in education. And then they come and give that value to a, a developed country because they're seeking a better life. Now, now that's happening the other way. Boris Johnson was talking about this the other day, um, where people are, are leaving. So they've … We've got a massive brain drain problem because the smartest people are like, "I don't wanna stay here. I'm getting out." Yeah. So there's, there's, there's so many problems to solve, and I feel like there probably does Not that I have any hope of anyone fixing it, but the, the answer probably is a general election to give the public a chance to decide who they want. You know? Who do they want to lead them? I think whenever this happens when, when a, a prime minister resigns or gets fired effectively, whatever you wanna call it, I think there should be a snap general election at that point for the new one. Because it, it just makes no sense. To y- you just instead have someone there that nobody voted for. I mean, yeah, okay, maybe there's not a huge difference between Starmer and Burnham, but there is a difference, and, and that counts. Yeah. Yeah, well, I'll be postal voting in for Count Binface when the time comes. Right. I think we all will. Who, who knows? I mean, we'll see how crazy politics gets in the UK, but you could e- end up seeing Count Binface beating Farage, then later becoming PM at some point in the more distant future, and that would be- Yeah … a perfect, a perfect picture. Despite the fact he is an extreme left liberal, but yeah, some of his policies are, you know, fair enough. Maybe we can find a mid-ground, uh, vote in someone. Let… Maybe we should just get, like, David Beckham in there or something, you know? Um, and just get him to run things. Um- Yeah, why not? That might be a brighter future for us. Or Gordon Ramsay or something. Um- So we can go back to being, like, a third place nation. Like, that's how we… We're comfortable there. You know? Anyway. Well, it's true, but unfortunately, that's, that's kind of how it, it goes in the UK, you know? And things are gradually, gradually declining, and, and they have done for a really long time. Before, before the Second World War or around the start of it, Britain had the largest navy in the world. It had control over, like, huge amounts of the planet. It had all these resources and wealth and everything else, and it's like, yeah, pe- politicians talk like, "Oh, Britain's gonna reach new heights." Ah, you're not really gonna get higher than that. You No Are you gonna, are you gonna retake India or you know, but there, there's just no hope. And now you've got-- It's now in this, like, debt cycle where there's just, there's no escape from that without something really, really major. Um- Yeah. Like in, you know, inventing how to travel by black hole to some other universe where Britain is still prosper- prosperous and didn't partake in World War II. It just sort of sat back and- Probably … kept its stiff. Um, but- Or didn't have wacky economic policies for decades that absolutely crippled it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to be fair, and it's a whole other episode, and we'll, we'll wrap it up here 'cause I'm sure there's gonna be plenty about Burnham and the government over the coming weeks, but it w- World War II gutted the UK. Like before that it was the, you know, that was the, the, the nail in the coffin. World War I wasn't great, but World War II just totally gutted us in terms of resources and everything else and, and there really- Yeah … is no way back from that. So anyway, on that happy note, ladies and gentlemen, if you've enjoyed it, give us a like, subscribe, and we will be here for the next piece of news.