Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

Once again torn between my strong conviction that centralisation is a huge problem in Britain and the overwhelming evidence that local communities cannot be trusted with democratic power
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/may/30/bar-restaurant-licence-challenges-destroying-soho-reputation

Lewis Goodall who wanted to speak to them on his show:

Lewis Goodall
@lewis_goodall
The Soho Society is objecting to *every* new bar/restaurant licence in what is supposed to be the centre of London's nightlife. More planning/licensing insanity.

I asked them to come on my Sunday LBC show: "We will absolutely not be taking questions from journalists". Of course not.
"The Soho Society, a group of residents established in 1972 aimed at "preserving the character of Soho", voted in its AGM on Thursday for a new licensing mandate, meaning it will challenge all new applications for bars and restaurants in the area, including renewals of existing licences. It will also object to any venue that wishes to open beyond "core hours", which Westminster council decrees end at 11pm."

And we wonder why we have a youth unemployment problem.

I'd add the same group also successfully pushed for an end to the covid-era pedestrianisation This is, incidentally, the other side of NIMBYism in the UK - part over planning decisions decided locally but also over licensing decisions. God forbid we have a nightlife economy when we could just hae infinity vape shops and bookies

Edit: Incidentally this is one of the areas where I think the Mayor/Greater London should be able to step in and basically say x area will lean on the side of nightlife/hospitality or y area will take a positive view of office space because they serve from the perspective of Greater London not just for local residents or even the local borough.

[Josquius]

Preserving the character of soho... By blocking bar license renewals.
....
Right.

I've come to the conclusion that Local power is good but not too local.
Like the person who lives next to a field doesn't get special right to block housing there. For every objection raised the authorities should ask a few people elswhere in the county what they think about new housing being built.

[Sheilbh]

If they touch Ronnie Scott's license I will not be responsible for my actions

Also worth noting that even if they're not successfuly this sort of approach causes problems by massively increasing costs and delays. Eg from that article:

The society's methods came under question last year when it objected to a licence for a new gin bar and distillery, claiming it could be a fire hazard. It found an expert who said the gin distillery could cause explosions, but this was refuted by the London fire brigade at the hearing. Though the objection was overturned, the distillery had to shoulder thousands of pounds in legal fees and still has yet to open. The full legal costs to the distillery were £44,000. The Soho Society had to pay £27,000 because it argued it was in a precarious financial position.

I'd argue that if the Society is in a precarious financial position it shouldn't adopt a blanket position of trying to challenge every single license in Soho. And if that is the position they adopt they should suffer the consequences.

[Sheilbh]

I've come to the conclusion that Local power is good but not too local.
Like the person who lives next to a field doesn't get special right to block housing there. For every objection raised the authorities should ask a few people elswhere in the county what they think about new housing being built.

My view on planning applications - for every frivolous objection your area gets put into a ballot for the location of Britain's next small modular nuclear reactor instead

[HVC]

You get 4 rejections a year. Use them wisely.

[Sheilbh]

Latest from the Murrell scandal. He bought 108 loo rolls (using party funds) just hours before Nicola Sturgeon addressed the nation to warn against panic buying at the start of the pandemic

Also Sturgeon's line on the motor home is that she does not "consciously remember" seeing it.

[Tonitrus]

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uks-burnham-weighs-snap-election-if-he-becomes-pm-sun-reports-2026-05-30/

UK's Burnham weighs snap election if he becomes PM, The Sun reports

Wouldn't that be a pretty bad idea?

[Zanza]

My view on planning applications - for every frivolous objection your area gets put into a ballot for the location of Britain's next small modular nuclear reactor instead

That's cheap as this SMRs will never be built anyway.

[Sheilbh]

Maybe - I'm not sure and it's too soon to tell.

He will probably have some form of honeymoon and and just by visibly not being Starmer Labour will have a poll boost. I'd also expect Burnham from both his previous experience in government and role as Manchester Mayor having a few ideas of ways to symbolise "change". That will fade over time because that's the nature of politics but also I think there are underlying structural issues (high level of tax and spend, high deficit and high level of debt, relatively low growth/productivity) that make it very difficult to sustain political popularity because there's just not that much wiggle room.

The case for is that he needs to take advantage of that and not let it pass (as Gordon Brown did, destroying his premiership). It would give him a further five years. But also I think most importantly if he comes into office now he's a legitimate PM but he does not have a democratic mandate which matters if he wants to do anything big or controversial. Because the rule is the House of Lords will not/cannot block manifesto commitments (things a party took to the public and won an election on) but they can and sometimes will block things that weren't in a manifesto because the governing party didn't run on it/does not have a democratic mandate for that. Starmer's manifesto was deliberately fairly vague so there's stuff Burnham would be able to do - but if he has big plans, for examle, reforming the electoral system then I think there's a fairly strong argument that he needs a mandate for that - or it would very significantly strengthen his hand. It would also let him escape some of Labour's stupid fiscal commitments at the last election, for example ruling out certain forms of tax rises (although we are already at the highest rate of taxation as a share of GDP since the war and this government has increased taxes by £10s of billions). Similarly if he becomes leader this autumn and has big ambitions - he's got less than three years.

Flipside is obviously that the current polls don't look good (doing this would very much depend on Burnham getting a honeymoon/polling boost). Even talking about it might make the Parliamentary Labour Party skittish about a Burnham leadership again because a lot of them have very narrow margins because Starmer won a massive landslide with a record low number of votes - so those MPs will be very aware that it wouldn't take much for them to lose their seats and turkeys aren't generally pro-Christmas. But also even if the polls are good and there is a honeymoon a democratic event is a risk - you are throwing it to the people who may not reply as you'd hope/expect. Generally 99% of campaigns do not matter. The result on election day broadly reflects the polling prior to the election campaign and is more confirmatory of underlying trends than anything else. But there are exceptions - the one that springs to mind in the recent past is 2017 when the pre-campaign polls indicated a May landslide and Labour wipeout and the result was surprisingly good for Labour (though also an increase in the Tory vote that laid the groundwork for Johnson's landslide in the Red Wall). In part that's because May expected a landslide so went big on policy commitments that were really unpopular: she wanted to decriminalise fox hunting, introduce a new tax to fund social care (immediately branded a "dementia tax" by Labour - but actually good policy) and cutting winter fuel allowance, free school meals and the triple lock pension guarantee.  There were other weird aspects of that campaign from her but that's one of the only recent manifestoes and campaigns that I think genuinely mattered.

[Sheilbh]

That's cheap as this SMRs will never be built anyway.

We're low-key fucked if that's the case.

We don't have enough locations for hydro, the storage tech isn't there yet (and unclear when it will be) and we're not in a good location for renewables (basically good-ish for wind but it's the most expensive and costs are not declining/no economy of scale, but even solar at scale is fairly marginal given our location without largescale storage which doesn't yet exist).

If nuclear's not the option for our steady baseload power then it means either we turn back on coal power or gas which just deepens our exposure to global markets and inflation (which the UK is already unusually exposed to because we already shut down coal by turning to gas). Obviously interconnectors are part of it but that just exposes us again to subsea sabotage (which seems a risk given the state of the Royal Navy) and is already quite problematic as we import a lot to such an extent that I believe our energy imports have an impact on prices in Norway and France already.

I think because it has to work it will be made to work. If nuclear can't be made to work then I think the best option may actually be coal again which is not great.

[garbon]

I think Burnham will have mistaken himself for the actual Messiah if he calls a snap election.

[Zanza]

On- and offshore wind are significantly cheaper than nuclear and storage technology actually works and is built at scale (see Australia, California or China).

SMRs have existed in ships for decades, but they are not commercially viable.

https://www.iea.org/commentaries/battery-storage-is-scaling-up-and-taking-on-a-larger-system-role

[Sheilbh]

On- and offshore wind are significantly cheaper than nuclear and storage technology actually works and is built at scale (see Australia, California or China).

Sure this is slightly different point. I'm meaning in relation to renewables there is an economy of scale for solar and the prices are falling for solar in a way that is not happening for wind. So in terms of renewables by far the best and most viable solution is solar and it's not really plausible for us.

Wind is more expensive than solar, there is no economy of scale and the prices don't seem to be falling (not least because there's more maintenance required, turbines increase in size etc). We have a lot of wind generation - a lot of it actually goes to waste because it's coming at the wrong time or the grid isn't sufficient.

I'm not arguing against wind. My point is that we still need a baseload form of power that is not renewable and we also need massive changes to the grid because of intermittency (as I say we currently are often paying wind farms to not generate electricity because the grid cannot handle it).

So my argument argument is not nuclear or renewables, but about the baseload where I think the decision is nuclear or fossil fuels. And if you go for fossil fuels its gas with all the geopolitical problems associated with that (plus a big chunk of demand coming from electricity increasing costs for households, industry and agriculture) or coal which would be environmentally disastrous.

SMRs have existed in ships for decades, but they are not commercially viable.

https://www.iea.org/commentaries/battery-storage-is-scaling-up-and-taking-on-a-larger-system-role

If there's one lesson we should be taking from the energy transition so far it is that we cannot allow ourselves to be constrained by what is "commercially" viable.

The projet here is enormous. We are trying to simultaneously fundamentally shift the energy basis of our society from fossil fuels to electricity, which will massively, massively increase demand for electricity from 20% of the energy mix to 100% requiring a transformation of our grid and shift that electricity generation to low to no carbon sources. Doing one of those is big and difficult, doing all three at once is huge and I don't think it is plausible at the scale of "commercially" viability. I also think the lesson, particularly from China, is that the better model is a state-led, coordinated and backed project. I don't think there is a commercially viable energy transition.

On the batteries from everything I've read - the technology for large-scale storage of the type required for current electricity usage (far less the increased demand from shifting, eg from internal combustion to EVs) does not exist. Broadly speaking the electricity storage we have works in the context of hours and within days - we need solutions that days, weeks, months and seasons. So we're there for intermittency within a day but not on a longer timeframe - which is what we experience at the UK's latitude. A huge part of what you do basically depends on how soon you think that technology will arrive - if it's in the next 5 years then that's a fundamentally different picture from if it's 50 years away. From what I've read there are very different views on when we will have that technological solution.

Given that I think proceeding as if we know large-scale storage technology is around the corner is as reckless as proceeding as if we know fusion, or green hydrogen, or carbon capture technologies are imminent. All of them would be transformative and would cause a change in approach. But I don't think we can base solutions on technology that does not yet exist - I think the need for energy transition is too urgent.

Although I'd add the one renewable tech I think we should explore (as well as wind) is maybe tidal. My understanding there is that lots of the world's coasts don't really have the right conditions for tidal in that you basically need either a very powerful tidal streams or big tidal variation within a bay area. So the Med, the Caribbean, much of the Indian Ocean for example don't really have many areas with good conditions. From what I've read basically the entire UK coast has pretty good conditions (either really good tidal stream like the Pentland Firth where the Atlantic meets the North Sea, or big tidal variation within controlled areas). It's estimated tidal could meet about 10-20% of UK's (current) electricity needs. And it would be, unlike other renewables, predictable, steady and less likely to rely on storage. Again not commercially viable and would need a big state commitment (seems ideal for me for the new publicly owned Great British Energy).

Edit: I'd also add that on renewables - 20 years ago none of them were really commercially viable. The reason they are now is because of decades of various subsidies but also, crucially, Chinese industrial policy and strategy (until 2010 Europe had the lead - then we did austerity to ourselves). I think that applies for other forms of low or no carbon energy. If it was just a case of adopting what is already viable and it all was this wouldn't be a difficult public policy issue - it'd be really easy and the market would do it for us.

I think the same will apply for any of those new technologies whether it's fusion, carbon capture, or large-scale storage - none of them at the start will be particularly viable and it will require state planning and industrial policy to get them to the point where they are. My hope is that it's at least some Western states doing that and we aren't just relying again on China.

[Sheilbh]

Further tranche of Mandelson documents to be released this afternoon.

Apparently includes lots of requests from Mandelson for the numbers of new intake MPs and then arranging dinners with them (Lord Schmooze of Georgetown) - although this seems to focus on male MPS. Which isn't really a shock. There's always been a bit of a streak of mysogyny with Mandelson and the response to him (see Harriet Harman, for example).

But also lots of exchanges with ministers from the sounds of it with them basically showing off for Mandelson.

Apparently the government is preparing for the release to be "excruciating". Again why I think it's delusional for Starmer or any of his ultras to think he can just carry on regardless of what happens in Makerfield. You'll have these tranche and I think there may be some others, there's the ongoing police investigation. It's going to be a drip-drip-drip for a few years. Even if Starmer's operation was competent and he recovered for a period, it would be undermined within months by the latest Mandelson revelations.

The irony of all this is that both Starmer's most likely replacements are probably genuinely closer to Mandelson and know Mandelson better than Starmer does. Burnham was a minister in cabinet with Mandelson - and before that a young SpAd for a Blairite minister and then a protege for David Blunkett who was also a Blairite. They may not have been close but it seems very unlikely they'd not have worked together. And Streeting we know. But neither of them appointed him to b US Ambassador.

[Sheilbh]

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uks-burnham-weighs-snap-election-if-he-becomes-pm-sun-reports-2026-05-30/

UK's Burnham weighs snap election if he becomes PM, The Sun reports

Wouldn't that be a pretty bad idea?

I just want to come back to this because there's something I think is genuinely problematic going on in the coverage of Burnham, which is Bloomberg - and in particular their UK Political Editor Alex Wickham.

Wickham is an alumni of Guido Fawkes which is a right-wing (broadly Reform-friendly) political blog that is basically a bit like a TMZ for politics. It does break stories some of which are big and does that on both sides but has a politics. He was also at Buzzfeed and went to Politico before moving to Bloomberg. He is mates and form colleagues with Christian Calgie who is political editor for the Daily Express (who did the "Angry Burnham" thing) and Harry Cole who is now in the US for The Sun but hosts their political podcasts as well. I mention that because all three of them seem to be running relatively similar stories with slightly different angles - often Wickham credibility washing an issue that then gets picked up in the tabloids. My read is that given their politics they are worried about Burnham but I could be wrong.

The reason I quoted that post is this is the latest issue it's come up with. In this case from The Sun and Guido Fawkes speculating to Bloomberg reporting Burnham "opens door to UK General Election". Worth noting one reason he suggests Burnham may do that is to free himself from the constraints on "tax/Europe":

NEW: Andy Burnham has opened up the possibility of a snap election if he becomes PM

Notably - and remarkably - his team is not ruling it out or disputing the idea. They are declining to comment at all on the speculation. It comes after @kateferguson4 and @guidofawkes reported they're considering an early election. An ally says he's focusing on the by-election.

Europe and taxes are issues where we've seen something similar. On tax Wickham had this:

EXCLUSIVE: Andy Burnham won't commit to keeping Labour's manifesto promises on tax and has opened the door to new tax rises if he becomes PM.

His decision to back the current fiscal rules wins him a reprieve from markets, but it limits his options to fund policies like council house-building. It raises the prospect of tax hikes.

Asked by Bloomberg if he is committed to Labour's election manifesto pledges not to raise income tax, national insurance, VAT or corporation tax, his campaign declined to say so.

They also didn't rule out new taxes on wealth.

Burnham's spokesperson says he doesn't want talk about tax policy during this by-election:

"Andy is fully focused on working hard for every vote in Makerfield so he can represent them in Parliament. Andy is not standing on a national manifesto at this election; he is standing to make a difference for the people of Makerfield and to bring the change he has delivered in Greater Manchester to the national stage."

Burnham has recently called for the top rate of tax to be hiked to 50p and a council tax reevaluation to target the wealthy. "We have overtaxed labour and undertaxed wealth," he said last year.

But former Jeremy Hunt SpAd Adam Smith says wealth taxes don't raise sufficient revenue and it is inevitable Burnham will have to look at the big taxes if he is going to implement bolder policies.

Now it's an unusual by-election, but also absolutely standard in leadership elections or even just generally as PM to basically refuse to comment on these sort of questions because they don't want to write a budget before it's given. But there's a lot of spin going on here which was then picked up by The Sun and the Express (and others).

On Europe I think it was even wilder. This was, again, from a Bloomberg reporter:

Andy Burnham's position on rejoining the EU now risks dominating his by-election fight

Only 7 months ago he explicitly told Labour conference "I want to rejoin the EU"

Tonight he tells ITV he wants to rejoin the EU in the future but that he doesn't want to "advocate" it at this by-election

That risks appearing inauthentic 

He seems to be trying to avoid the subject because the working class and Reform-leaning Makerfield constituency he's running in voted heavily Leave in the Brexit referendum

Reform say they will put Burnham's words about rejoining on their leaflets in Makerfield

Wes Streeting said explicitly today that he wants the UK to rejoin the EU

All signs tonight point to Labour under Burnham seeking to rejoin the EU presumably in their manifesto at the next election - a huge moment for British politics

As he noted this then led lots of papers helped by Streeting's comments. The problem is that Burnham's actual line was from last year's Labour conference - the full answer was "I think that Brexit has gone wrong. I don't think there's any prospect of rejoining anytime soon, but I do still think you call out what's put the country in this position. You be honest with people [...] I'm going to be honest. I'm going to say it: I want to rejoin. I hope, in my lifetime, I see this country rejoin the European Union". I think the Bloomberg spin is a lot more comprehensive than not thinking there's any pospect "anytime soon" and that he "hopes" to see it "in my lifetime".

Bloomberg pushed on that "the big question of the week ahead: will Andy Burnham double down on his pledge to rejoin the EU, or will he u-turn under pressure from Reform and Wes Streeting and rule it out? The first 48 hours of his by-election campaign have been disrupted by Brexit splashing all papers." Burnham clarified that he's not proposing rejoining and that the last thing "we should do now is re-run those arguments" was framed by Bloomberg as "a major u-turn under pressure from Reform. It may be the right short-term decision politically but the risk is it looks like he has ditched a principled view to try to win a Leave-voting seat." To me it looks like he re-iterated what he'd said that had been taken out of context. But this is a theme where basically Bloomberg whip something up like that or tax and then frame Burnham basically repeating what he's perviously said as a "u-turn".

I'd then add that there is a regular refrain on gilts. First of all most of the changes are broadly typical changes you see day-to-day but always framed (when they go up) as markets reacting to Burnham. Secondly they are without any context - so on the days when they did spike there were similar movements in bonds across Europe and Treasuries. I like Burnham, I don't think he's that powerful. Every single thing is framed around Burnham: "*POUND FALLS TO ONE-MONTH LOW ON BURNHAM RUN FOR PARLIAMENT"  or the IMF's UK update as a clear warning to Burnham.

This is stuff that always goes on in the right-wing media and is basically how they operate but I think it's really extraordinary to see it so openly (I wonder if this is because not many people have Bloomberg subscriptions so Wickham puts a lot on Twitter and when you condense it you really see the spin) - or you just see Bloomberg being the origin of stories in the Express and Sun v the FT, which is odd. But also it's extraordinary because it is coming from/being laundered by someone at Bloomberg given their reputation. It might not matter and this might be the stuff that people in the City and Wall Street are reading with no knowledge but I think I'd handle stuff from Bloomberg's UK team with a fair bit of care (I'm not sure if it's related but the fantastic Ailbhe Rea has moved from Bloomberg to the New Statesman).

Edit: Also this whole things makes sense if he was working at the Telegraph or the Spectator - that's their role in the right wing media ecosystem. But not places like Bloomberg - or other specialist or highly reputable US agencies.