Politics: the arrogance of men

By Richard North - June 25, 2026

Climate change or just weather, there is no disputing the fact that it’s been hot. The worst of it is that the heat has an enervating effect where even the smallest task becomes a trial, and intellectual endeavour becomes almost impossible.

Inevitably, there is a huge impact on the media, as the soaring temperature dominates the headlines. For the moment, as the UK registers its hottest evah June day, the Guardian has given up on politics.

Instead, it has devoted its whole front page to the lurid depiction of an overheating Europe with the headline “The new normal?”.

However, the appalling conduct of the Nottingham maternity unit is given a considerable amount of coverage in most papers, and rightly so as the neglect and “toxic” culture has been responsible for harming or killing 500 mothers and babies.

One wonders how such a state of affairs can exist in Britain but perhaps the Mail headline on its front page provides the explanation.

“Arrogance of the men who wouldn’t listen”, the banner reads, with the strap telling us: “NHS bosses ignored women’s warnings as 500 mothers and babies died or were harmed at toxic hospital trust”.

Broaden the banner headline to include women – especially of the lanyard class – and you could well be describing the cause of failure in multifarious institutions, ranging from the higher echelons of government and the civil service to the whole range of corporate bodies, from water and energy utilities, and any number of ossified commercial enterprises.

At the heart of the problem is the famous line from Cool Hand Luke – “what we have here is a failure to communicate”. More specifically, the corporate mind, imbued with the conviction that it is superior to mere mortals, shuts down all available routes of feedback and goes exclusively into transmit mode.

The rationale for this is brutally logical. The superior mind works on the premise that it is perfection – so much so that it can never be wrong. Since the function of feedback is invariably to dispute this premise, it must necessarily by definition be wrong and since it is wrong there is no need to pay any attention to it.

Such minds build elaborate systems to insulate themselves from such intrusions, turning formal complaints procedures into a complex series of hurdles and barriers which absorb massive amounts of time and energy in having to deal with their obfuscation.

The objective is to wear complainants down to such an extent that they eventually give up the unequal effort, abandoning their attempts to communicate with the system.

To achieve this effect, the corporate mind uses what is often called “administrative exhaustion” – bombarding complainants and critics with dense, pseudo-legal jargon.

This shifts the bureaucratic burden onto the recipient who must then devote their energies to penetrating the morass, only for the superior mind to rinse and repeat ad infinitum, knowing that most people will simply give up out of fatigue.

I can’t help but think that this is the game that Andy Burnham is playing. As heir apparent to the soon-to-be-vacated post of prime minister, The Replacement has over the last few days been leaking plans for his new government, heedless of the fact that he has neither mandate nor democratic legitimacy.

Displaying a tone-deafness that rather confirms my thesis, The Replacement is said to be weighing up plans either to abandon or water down Mahmood’s retrospective reforms to Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR).

The reforms are intended to apply especially to the estimated 4.2 million migrants who arrived in the UK during the period known as the “Boriswave” between 2021 and 2024.

Awarding ILR to migrants is an important step in their becoming citizens and has significant economic implications as it opens up access to the welfare system and the benefits that come with it.

Mahmood’s plan – itself a weak compromise, when the hard-liners would wish to see the migrants deported – was to increase the time needed to be eligible for ILR from five years to ten, kicking the problem into the long grass.

Now, Burnham – previously known as “open-borders Andy” – has been expressing doubt about the retrospective nature of the changes, bowing to pressure from Labour backbenchers who have been complaining that they are “unfair” to the thousands of families which have planned their lives around current rules.

Although, a month ago, the Guardian was reassuring us that Burnham would back Mahmood’s changes, he now seems to be wobbling on this issue.

For the Telegraph, Guy Dampier asserts that “Andy Burnham may be about to make his first big immigration blunder”, noting that every government elected in the past few decades has either promised to reduce or strongly control migration.

Instead, he writes, many have increased it, with the “Boriswave” being a prime example, to which he then questions why it appears to be more acceptable to disappoint and mislead British voters than to change the rules for foreign nationals.

Holding the line on ILR should, Dampier says, be a red line for Burnham, if he does become the next prime minister. Starmer saw a collapse in his poll ratings because the British people lost their trust in him, he asserts, adding: “If Burnham chooses to focus on fairness for migrants over fairness for the British, then he too will risk a loss of trust, with all the consequences that come with that”.

So far, Burnham has said nothing that suggests he has a plan for how to stop the small boats crossing the English Channel. Thus, abandoning the reforms to ILR will mean he has nothing to offer voters worried about our still historically high levels of mass migration. That, Dampier concludes, would be a mistake for him and for the country.

But therein lies the point. Despite the sensitivity of this issue, and the concern felt by so many people – including, doubtless, some of those who voted for Burnham at Makerfield – the British public are not part of this conversation.

Fully on broadcast mode, The Replacement will decide what is good for the British people and we will be notified accordingly. Our opinions are neither solicited nor wanted. We are back to the “arrogance of the men who wouldn’t listen”.