Politics: give rancour a chance

By Richard North - July 21, 2026

I hadn’t realised that Crash and Burn’em was an aviation buff. But, alas, he’s far too late to bring back Hope, which he wants to do. That airframe (Gloster Sea Gladiator) was destroyed on the ground during an axis air raid at RAF Hal Far in February 1941.

He could try Faith, which is preserved wingless at the National War Museum at Fort St Elmo in Valetta, although the Maltese are rather attached to it and might object.

That leaves Charity, which was shot down into the sea on 31 July 1940, parts of which have since been recovered, prompting a restoration project which is planned to deliver the only airworthy example of the type left in the world.

Again, I don’t think that the Malta Aviation Museum Foundation would be too happy with Mr Burn’em horning in on their efforts.

Bluntly, though, this buffoon of a man would be better off trying to do something useful with his life – like restoring an antique aircraft – than making a vacuous statement which, although sounding profound, is completely meaningless.

For those who are interested in the detail, the text of the Burn’em speech is available on the No 10 website, delivered without notes and not, as I expected, read from a prepared script.

Nevertheless, it had obviously been rehearsed as much of the text conformed with what the media had forecast the day before, although he did add the observation that “people at home are fed up with politics”.

Actually, we’re not fed up with politics. They are the essence of life. We’re fed up with shallow politicians feeding on a diet of meaningless soundbites – of the type in which Burn’em seems to be a specialist. Thus, while the man says “I hear your”, he is not hearing the thing the general public are saying. He hears “politics” – we’re saying “politicians”.

For all that, he does say that the churn rate for prime ministers requires his generation of politicians “to raise our game, and rise to the new challenge”, but then he uses that as a launchpad to assert that he wants to make his appointment “a circuit breaker for Britain”.

This means, he says, “bringing forward the biggest changes in the last forty years”, which embraces the creation of “a new political model and a new economic model”.

Here, as has been flagged up by sundry commentators, he is alluding to the Thatcher years, telling us that “In the 1980s, Britain took some wrong turns”. Political power, he says, was centralised, economic power privatised, large parts of the country de-industrialised, and they still haven’t recovered.

Somewhere, between the eighties and the turn of the century is a gap in Burn’em’s consciousness, as he ignores the brief renaissance which came with the Thatcher regime. This enables him to link the current decline directly with those years, ignoring the intervening years.

“Many feel as though they’re still in decline”, he asserts, “and they don’t have the ability to turn things around”, for which his remedy is to change politics, making it “more collaborative, more about problem solving than point scoring”.

Never far away at any point, this is where we get another layer of vacuous soundbites. “We will take power out of here and carry it into every postcode in the land so that they can do more”. Just what does that even mean?

But very quickly, we see the real agenda. Burn’em plans to “build a new economy where we put life’s essentials back under stronger public control to make them affordable to you again”. This isn’t 70s thinking, of which Burn’em is often accused. It takes us back to 1945 and Labour’s Attlee government, where nationalisation was on top of the agenda.

He talks glibly of re-industrialising Britain, using public procurement to back British industry, seemingly unaware that industry, under the scourge of net-zero is deserting the UK, unable to afford the highest electricity prices in the world, which is making Britain uncompetitive.

Worse still, he has appointed for his energy secretary, a first generation Liberian immigrant Miatta Fahnbulleh, a net-zero zealot who, according to David Turver, is perhaps the only person who could possibly be worse than Miliband as Energy Secretary.

This is a woman who wants to “flood the energy market with cheaper renewables, sold by publicly-owned cooperatives, introducing basic free energy by 2030 facilitated by ditching fossil fuels at any cost. This is Burn’em’s idea of “a new political model and a new economic model”, even if it sounds suspiciously like more of the same.

But it’s even worse than that. Miatta Fahnbulleh, for reasons unknown, is Burn’em’s “economic architect”. Frequently on TV and in the press, among other things she has recommended are a wealth tax and yet another windfall tax on oil and gas, alongside mass nationalisation of land, transport, and energy and extending national insurance to investment income.

She wants a cap on interest rates and charges on every form of consumer credit, would hike capital gains tax to income tax levels, abolish the upper earnings limit for national insurance, and advocates a huge expansion of the benefits system including a “minimum income guarantee” paid to everyone apart from the rich.

With much other madness too numerous to mention, this is what is driving the Burn’em agenda. And yet, the hubris is still there – untarnished. “Later this year”, he says, “I will bring forward a new plan for Britain, a 10-year plan, laying out a path from where we are now to where I believe we all want Britain to be, wherever we’re coming from, whatever party we support”.

This is beyond fantasy, away with the fayries, so far from reality that Blackadder couldn’t do better. Does he seriously believe there is a single path, attracting cross-party support, behind which everyone can unite? Yet, that’s what he’s proposing.

For now though – subject to an announcement today – he is going to “do something to give people some breathing space now, some help with the cost of living”. What that might be we have to wait and see, but “Andy” will set out some measures, including how we pay for them.

Mercifully, there’s not much more to the speech. Burn’em is to help more young people into work by changing the education system and giving them more support, more mental health support. And, of course, “we will build more council homes”.

This, for reasons that escape me, our new prime minister suggests “is the fair and sustainable way to bring the welfare bill down, to meet our fiscal rules, and to honour our commitments on defence to our international partners”. Really?

As so to the peroration: “We will help people to live well, building a more preventative state, investing in people’s success, rather than paying for failure”. And said Andy, “that work starts now”, poised as he was to issue his first instruction – “to end rough sleeping in our country”.

This was about “putting the right values and the right standards at the heart of government”, with Burn’em pledging to “put the care of people at the heart of everything I do”.

You will be pleased to learn that he will “give this my all” and all he asks is that “you all to pull with me”, as he pleads: “Let’s build a new national sense of unity, of common purpose and positivity. Let us make this the moment when Britain starts to believe again”.

This is the moment when he wants to bring back his Gloster Gladiator. But that bird has flown. Faced with what Liam Halligan describes as an economy locked in a high-debt, high-tax, low-growth doom loop, spelling economic ruin, let’s give rancour a chance.