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All eyes have been on Davos. Starmer, who is known for preferring Davos to Westminster, was conspicuous by absence. On Tuesday, Trump condemned the Chagos deal as an act of ‘total weakness’, having previously lent support for the deal last May. Starmer refused Trump’s invitation to sit on the Board of Peace because of the inclusion of Putin – although Tony Blair has remained an executive member. Meanwhile, Farage was prominent: he was interviewed by Bloomberg about his intentions for the UK and at another event about his stance on Greenland.
On Sunday, the Conservative MP Andrew Rosindell defected to Reform over the Chagos Islands negotiations. Badenoch called a meeting of the 1922 Committee to reaffirm that the Conservative party is ‘the party of the right’. This comes after Tory Remainers have hailed the defections of Zahawi, Jenrick and Rosindell as an opportunity to drag the party leftwards.
On Thursday, the Labour MP Andrew Gwynne announced his resignation to trigger a by-election in Gorton and Denton (in Greater Manchester). After much speculation, Burnham announced on Saturday that he has sought permission from the Labour party NEC to run as its candidate. Members of the NEC are divided on allowing Burnham to run, for fear of undermining Starmer. Burnham has been the subject of much adoration by the Guardian and the New Statesman as a reanimator, like Zack Polanski, of Corbynism.
Lastly, Starmer’s government is pushing hard to pass a bill that would ban children under 16 from social media. The Lords voted 261-150 in favour of the bill with an amendment to ban under-18s from using VPNs. In imitation of the Australian government, tech companies will be given a year to remove under-16 users. The legislation has crossbench support and follows the logic of the Conservative government’s Online Safety Bill.
Blog
The EU Reset will not increase UK agrifood exports by Catherine McBride
The EU Reset would not increase UK agrifood exports, but it would drive up UK beef prices, reduce UK beef herds and force UK farmers to follow EU regulations whether they export to the EU or not. The EU has no interest in importing food from anywhere – even from the world’s most efficient producers. Despite wasting 25 years negotiating a trade agreement with them. However, EU companies do control key UK food supply chains.
The great ‘Reset’ con by Robert Tombs
Brexit-bashing is in vogue. For a government whose response to every failure is a variant on ‘It wasn’t me, Miss’, Brexit is the irresistible scapegoat. Perhaps it is just another example of Labour’s rather infantile resort to fibbing. Or, even more worrying, they might really believe the rhetoric: that Brexit really is the cause of our economic sluggishness and that aligning with the equally sluggish EU will miraculously shower us with wealth.
Media
Mary Wakefield in The Spectator: The poisonous truth about British universities
Charles Moore in The Telegraph: Starmer has no answer to Trump’s avarice
Key Points
‘The law of unintended consequences’
This, Niall Ferguson has said, is the ‘iron law’ of history. The government’s ‘Children’s Wellbeing and Schools’ bill will be subject to the same law. There is a sense that children will be able to find a way round the law, as has been the case in Australia. And as this happens, the state will come down harder, requiring all users of social media to verify their identity, as the Online Safety Act requires. Could digital ID enter through the backdoor? There is a particular emotional thrust behind the prohibition of social media from children. It is the same sentiment which characterised the Netflix series ‘Adolescence’, idolised by Starmer who made it state policy to have shown in British schools.
Furthermore, when historians search for the origins of such legislation what will they point at? It could be framed as the unintended consequence of the lockdowns and closures of schools. Indeed, much of recent domestic policy since the lockdowns can be framed in terms of an expanding but incompetent state.
The Significance of Andy Burnham
Will he be allowed to run as the Labour party candidate or won’t he? In some respects it doesn’t matter. The significance of the speculative frenzy over Burnham and the Gorton and Denton by-election is ideological.
Something of a nostalgic support for Burnham has been a theme of the New Statesman recently. He has even been dignified with a label – Manchesterism (no, not the Manchesterism of yore). Manchesterism is rooted in a certain interpretation of the past: ‘After the deindustrialisation of the 1980s, Thatcher’s deregulation and privatisation created a race to the bottom… [which] are the root cause of today’s cost-of-living crisis.’ To deal with these conditions, Manchesterism is offered up as ‘a modern and functional response to the high-inequality, low-growth trap that came from the 1980s drive to privatise economic power and overcentralise [sic] political power in the Treasury.’ To be sure, Burnham’s thought – despite having read English at Cambridge – is purely economic.
Like Zack Polanski, the economic logic of Burnham’s opinions is facile. In late September 2025, Burnham was interviewed by the New Statesman where he criticised the government’s being ‘in hock’ to the bond markets. Burnham’s description is as though this were a state of being which the government just needs to snap out of, rather than any sense that the UK is borrowing 93 per cent of its GDP due to statist policies.
The significance of Burnham is that he represents the antithesis to Reform. Both espouse doctrines that point a gun at elite failure – Reform at Blairism, Burnham at Thatcherism. As the liberal Toryism and robotic Blairism are being edged out of British political life, might we ponder whether the future ideological conflict will be between two populisms, Left and Right?
