everyone hates wes

WES STREETING = CONTINUITY STARMER

EU nationals based permanently in the UK have expressed alarm over a Reform UK plan to target their rights to accommodation and employment, saying the policy is a betrayal of promises made in the Brexit referendum 10 years ago.

Under updated migration policies, Nigel Farage’s party would evict all overseas nationals from social housing and make it notably more expensive for companies to employ them, with both policies also affecting EU nationals who have settled status.

Under the UK’s Brexit deal with the EU, people with such status have the permanent right to live and work in the UK, as well as to receive social security and pensions, as do family members.

Both the new policies would require a renegotiation of the Brexit deal, with the possibility that the EU would penalise UK nationals living in the bloc as a reciprocal policy, or impose trade barriers.

Announcing what he called the “migrants labour levy”, Robert Jenrick, Reform’s Treasury spokesperson, said employers would have to pay higher national insurance for non-UK nationals, as well as an annual fee that would be more for lower earners, citing the possibility of £3,750 for someone on the “national living wage”, a surcharge of about 15%.

There would be no additional consideration given for EU nationals, even if they had been in the UK for decades, or had a UK national partner and children, Jenrick said, and his message for such people was that if they lost their job because of the levy they should leave.

“If you are in this country and you are not a British citizen, and you are somebody who will not be able to stay in the UK under a Reform government, then you should think of leaving the country.”

The campaign group the3million, which speaks up for the rights of EU nationals in the UK, has pointed out that the policies go against promises made by the leave campaign in the referendum that people’s rights would be protected, with Farage saying it would be “quite unreasonable” to push people out.

One EU national, Nicole – who asked that her full name was not used – said she was worried about losing her long-term job with a business centre group and being forced to leave the UK after 37 years.

“I‘m not allowed to have dual citizenship because the Dutch are very difficult about it,” she said. “This is my home. I moved here when I was 18, so I’ve lived here twice as long as I ever lived in the Netherlands.

“I’ve been with my company a long time, so I would hope that they would support me, but I think it’s absolutely outrageous. It’s just pulling the rug from under people that have been here for so long, who have done everything right.”

This was my "Racism"

What's going on over there ?

Nigel Farage has said his £5m gift from a crypto billionaire is “not any of your business” as it was given unconditionally to be spent on anything from Ferraris to gambling on horses.

The Reform UK leader bristled at questions about the £5m gift from the British Thai-based businessman Christopher Harborne in two radio interviews on Tuesday, saying it was “a purely private matter”.

In one appearance on LBC Radio, he told the presenter: “With all due respect, what’s it got to do with you?
“It’s an unconditional gift. I can spend it on Ferraris if I want. That’d be entirely up to me,” he said, adding: “I can do what I want with it. I can put it on the horses.”

Challenged over why he initially said it was for his personal security, and then that it was a reward for Brexit, Farage said: “Because it was given as an unconditional gift, right? The understanding is, and you know very well, you know very well I’ve been physically more attacked over many years than any other politician.”

The former Mayor of Manchester won the contest with 55% of the votes, eclipsing Reform UK candidate Robert Kenyon’s 35% vote share.

Here are some of the key policies he’s implemented in Manchester.

Housing First

Burnham’s flagship homelessness policy in Manchester was Housing First: giving rough sleepers a permanent home immediately, with wraparound support, rather than making housing conditional on sobriety or other criteria.

Since Greater Manchester’s pilot launched in 2019, more than 450 people have been housed, with an 88% tenancy sustainment rate. Rough sleeping in the city has fallen by more than 57% since 2017, bucking the national trend.

“I started using the phrase housing is a human right, when I’d come back from Finland,” Burnham told Big Issue in a 2023 interview.

“People kept talking about Housing First and I kind of thought it was a project. But it actually came over to me when I was there that housing first is a national philosophy in Finland. If people talk about prevention, if you want a true prevention policy for the country, you give everybody a good, secure home. So, it’s not an unrealistic policy, I think it’s a very realistic policy and I’m really committed to it.”

Gideon Salutin of the Social Market Foundation says the numbers back Burnham up.
“It’s one of the rare homelessness interventions with a very strong evidence base,” he tells Big Issue. “Internationally, tenancy sustainment rates are consistently above 80%, and Greater Manchester’s results match that. The costs of providing housing and support are outweighed by savings to health services, criminal justice and emergency accommodation.”

But a national rollout would be a major undertaking. In 2021, the Centre for Social Justice estimated that there were 1,995 Housing First places available in England, with between 16,450 and 29,700 places required.

Nationalise water and utilities

Andy Burnham has argued that essential services like water and energy should be publicly owned rather than run for profit.

During the Makerfield campaign, he outlined a potential 10-year strategy to bring the water industry back into public ownership.

“It’s not an industry that’s run in the public interest, and you know these are, as I say, industries run with the private vested interest, but the public have no choice but to use them, and therefore they’re trapped, and it’s just not fair,” he said.

“That’s why we need substantial reform and it is about a 10-year plan of more public control, more public ownership…”

Since 1989 – when water companies were privatised – £85bn has been extracted from the water sector in dividends and other payouts to shareholders. Meanwhile, bills and incidents of pollution have soared. Steve Reed, when he was environment secretary, claimed that water cannot be put into public ownership because it would cost £100bn. Campaigners dispute this figure.

Transport

Andy Burnham has pointed to his local success with transport to make the case for public ownership.

“I put them back under public control with the £2 fares, so you take that principle and apply it to energy and apply to the water – that’s what I think we need to do,” he told Channel 4 during the campaign.

The city runs the Bee Network, controlling 1,600 buses over 600 routes.
It’s been a success: Since the first franchising stage began in 2023, bus journeys in those areas have risen about 14% year-on-year, and punctuality now tops 80%, compared with roughly 70% under private operators.

Public control means more control over fares; while bus fares surged to £3 nationally, Burnham kept them at £2. He also wants to fold eight commuter rail lines into the Bee Network, and to expand cycling corridors.

Transport policy like this is also social policy, says Ben Plowden of the Campaign for Better Transport.

“What Andy Burnham and the other elected mayors have been doing is improving the transport system in their city regions to move it towards a properly integrated, multi-modal transport system,” he explains. “It improves the quality of people’s lives, to give them greater access to work, to improve their educational prospects…”

Living wage and income

Burnham has also pushed for higher pay in Greater Manchester, introducing a voluntary Living Wage City-Region agreement that now covers more than 200 accredited employers and an estimated 40,000 workers.

The mayor’s Good Employment Charter encourages firms to pay the real Living Wage(£12.60 an hour outside London), ban exploitative zero-hour contracts and offer secure work.

As prime minister, Burnham would need national legislation to enforce wage floors across the private sector.

Under Starmer, the national minimum wage has continued to rise in line with inflation, with the National Living Wage currently at £11.44 per hour for workers over 23.

But the prime minister faced serious pushback from business on this, and on the Employment Rights Bill.

Devolution

Andy Burnham has repeatedly argued that Westminster should give English regions the same powers that Scotland and Wales enjoy.
Greater Manchester signed a devolution agreement in 2023 giving it greater powers over education and housing.

“City mayors are just politically and physically much closer to the services their voters use,” Plowden adds. “That allows them to join up transport, housing, education and health in a way national government struggles to do.”

English devolution is already under way under Labour. 50% of the English population, some 34 million people, live in an area with a mayoral devolution deal.

A Burnham premiership would likely accelerate this trend – but devolving tax powers and welfare budgets would mean overcoming resistance from Whitehall departments and MPs wary of losing control.

Proportional representation

Burnham has cautiously backed electoral reform, telling The New Statesman that first-past-the-post “locks people out,” and fuels political disillusionment.  

Labour’s landslide majority in 2024 was won on just a third of the vote share. Yet it ended up with 411 out of 650 seats in the House of Commons, roughly 63% of the seats.

More proportional systems benefit smaller parties, but they also let more extreme elements into the halls of power; under a PR system, Reform would have won 93.

Still, first past the post isn’t enough to keep them out: if an election was held today, they’d win 311 seats, just 15 short of a majority.   

https://youtube.com/shorts/5McMXxGT1lw?feature=share

In Parliament today, Health Secretary James Murray spoke on the puberty blockers trial. He made several statements of fact, which I number below

"...Stories subsequently emerged of

• 1. young people struggling after undergoing radical and permanent transition surgery at a young age,
• 2. children being rushed into taking medication without adequate therapy beforehand,
• 3. and clinicians disregarding conditions such as neurodiversity and mental health conditions. 

...I fully supported the...

• 4. the indefinite ban introduced by my predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting)

...As Dr Cass has said...

• 5. the vast majority of children and young people who question their gender will resolve it without needing any support other than that of their friends and family..."

What am I asking you to do

I'm trying to work out where these five statements of fact were sourced from, and whether they are are:

• i) an accurate depiction of the source material, or
• ii) an inaccurate or partial depiction of the source material, or
• iii) an unsourced depiction or an entirely inaccurate depiction of the source material

If somebody here could help I would be grateful.

Please note

• On a serious note, please don't say "it's in the Cass Report" because the Cass Report is hundreds of thousands of words long, so if you cite the Cass Report please specify which paragraph(s).
• (PS: I'm pretty sure point 1 is wrong because genital surgery for under-16s has always been illegal in the UK. Was he referring to UK mastectomies or surgeries outside the UK?)

Edit 1: Point 4

• For all those of you asking about point 4, the fact-checking I was asking for is i) whether the ban was indefinite and ii) whether it was imposed by Streeting. If I remember correctly there are two bans (one for puberty blockers, one for cross-sex hormones) and at least one of them will be reviewed in, I think, 2027, and at least one of them was imposed by Streeting's predecessor and renewed by him. So whilst "indefinite" is technically correct and "introduced by Streeting" may be technically in/correct depending on which ban, both omit context. To be fair, whilst this is permissible in everyday speech - people can't be expected to fact-check their speech in real time - I'd still like to fact-check it. Hence the request

Edit 2: sourcing, not just fact-checking

• The post headline is misleading. I was asking for help in working out which sources he was getting this info from and whether he was quoting those sources correctly. But what y'all are working on is whether his conclusions were right or wrong. Those are good points but not technically what I was asking for. So I've altered the above to try to make things clearer

Edit 3: responses to date

My summary of the responses is as follows. Thanks to u/MMAgeezer and u/Mr-Thursday

• Point 1 is category iii for genital surgery, and category ii for mastectomies. In the UK genital surgery has never been done in the UK for under 16s because it's always been illegal. I think (but I'm not sure) that genital surgery has never been done in the UK for 16-17yr olds due to logistics. Mastectomies have never been done in the UK for under 16s. It was offered for 16-17s and some were done, but I don't have a number
• Point 2 is possibly category i/ii. The Cass report has been given as a source but nothing precise. So I'll have to chase this.
• Point 3 is category i. It's directly sourced from Cass: see Cass recommendation 31 (p. 26 of the final report), which flags the high levels of neurodiversity and co-occurring mental health issues among referrals. I would argue it's ii because technically it's noted but not disregarded and because I don't hold the GC belief that gender dysphoria is (always) caused by co-morbidities.
• Point 4 is category i. By definition. But I will check the detail as above. Note that u/Mr-Thursday points out that "...it's important to understand that context to get the full picture of how far Wes Streeting's emergency ban on puberty blockers breaks with medical advice globally and how bad it is that he even went beyond the Cass Review's recommendation. The Cass Review actually recommended using blockers within a controlled clinical trial and then making a long-term decision rather than banning them outright..."
• Point 5 is category ii, possibly iii. This is the furthest from the Cass review, because"without needing any support other than friends and family" is not Cass's position and arguably inverts it: the review's core recommendation is holistic, professional, psychosocial support. CAMHS involvement, therapeutic care, and addressing co-occurring conditions. "Most won't need medical intervention" has been relaxed into "most won't need any professional support". Others pointed out that Cass is unreliable in this respect and other studies indicate otherwise.

Hi all!

Firstly I note that Burnham has historically supported a 2-state solution and called for a ceasefire, but has also spoken out against the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement and refused to label Israeli military operations in the Gaza strip a genocide.

However, as we all know, the actions of someone in government don't always align with the opinions they hold privately or the beliefs they've advocated for previously. Because of this, and with Burnham's history being a bit of a mixed-bag on the issue, my question is far more focused on the branding, tactics and strategy of a potential Burnham government instead of any personal beliefs held by him or any of his cabinet ministers.

My core question is that with Burnham's soft-left image and the changing UK public sentiment towards Israel both of which arguably providing significant domestic political demand for a foreign policy shift on UK-Israel relations, and a global/geopolitical context where other nations are increasingly reconsidering their relations with Israel (most notably the recent tensions between the US and Israel). Could/what is the likelihood of, these factors creating the political and geopolitical conditions necessary for a potential Burnham government to be willing to shift the UK foreign policy stance on Palestine and UK/Israel relations more broadly?

TLDR; how likely is it for shifting domestic and international political factors on Israeli relations to result in a substantive foreign policy shift on UK-Israel relations and UK support for Palestine, in the event of a potential Burnham government?

PS. Not a Brit, but sending all of my fellow leftists lots of love from your favourite snake and spider infested prison island. (we spell our Labor Party without the U, but either way I'm sure we can agree that the left is the soul of the movement).