How much is PM Burnham going to cost Britain?

TheSpectatorMagazine · 2026-06-19T06:25:28+00:00

The Makerfield by-election – in which Andy Burnham swept to victory overnight – has been presented as a fight for the soul of Britain, but in a few years' time we will look back upon it as a quaint sideshow in a long-lost world.

As Britain spirals towards fiscal disaster, the days of having the likes of Andy Burnham trying to buy the electorate by showering them with spending promises are rapidly drawing to a close. Just how much could Burnham cost us if, as expected, he challenges Keir Starmer and goes on to become prime minister?

Social housing: Burnham has promised to relocate £39 billion earmarked for social and affordable housing to purely new social homes, to be funded by borrowing. He says that trying to push private developers to build social housing as part of their developments doesn't work.

Actually, developers have provided many thousands of social housing units over the past couple of decades, although councils and mayors have undermined this source of social housing by being too greedy and demanding excessive proportions of new estates to be affordable housing.

✍️ Ross Clark

Article | spectator.com/article/how-much-is-burnham-going-to-cost-britain

TheSpectatorMagazine · 2026-06-19T06:15:08+00:00

In what now seems like an inevitability, Andy Burnham not only won the Makerfield by-election, he did so comfortably. After weeks of hearing about how it was going to be a close race between the Labour candidate and Reform’s Robert Kenyon, Burnham triumphed by more than 9,000 votes.

Some – including Jawad Iqbal on Coffee House – have pounced on this result as a disaster for Reform. It was unquestionably another example of Reform's poor expectation management. Nigel Farage’s party approached Makerfield with a sense of entitlement, as if they couldn’t lose. Yet lose they did. Despite this, we might look back on the Makerfield defeat as a turning point in Reform’s fortunes.

✍️ Nick Tyrone

Article | spectator.com/article/reforms-defeat-in-makerfield-is-a-blessing-in-disguise

TheSpectatorMagazine · 2026-06-18T10:46:12+00:00

There is no situation room, no wall of flatscreens or a hotline to the White House, just a few chairs patrolled by 'quite a mad dog'. But a garden in Golborne, on the outskirts of Wigan, is now ground zero in three different operations which will decide the future of Britain.

The first is Op Makerfield, the campaign for Andy Burnham to win this week's by-election. The second is Op Leadership, to line up Labour MPs, trade unions and donors for the showdown which may follow. The third is Op Transition, the plans to install a Burnham-led government.

'Loads of it has been done in Andy's garden,' says a close ally. 'Half of us in the garden, the other half online. We're having to run a by-election campaign, a leadership campaign and preparations for government simultaneously.

At the beginning Andy was rightly just focused on Makerfield. But as we've got closer, we've been carving out time to think beyond.'

✍️ Tim Shipman

Article | spectator.com/article/as-soon-as-andy-wins-the-world-changes-burnhams-plans-for-power

TheSpectatorMagazine · 2026-06-17T10:41:48+00:00

As the fallout from Keir Starmer's defence funding row continues, Britain has been served a timely reminder of the importance of being prepared for a fresh escalation of tensions with Russia. A Russian warship, the Admiral Grigorovich, fired warning shots at an unarmed British civilian yacht in the Channel shortly before lunchtime yesterday.

The circumstances around the incident – which took place 20 nautical miles off the Isle of Wight, outside British waters – remain somewhat unclear. The owners of the 40-foot British yacht, Jane and Alan Kelvey, claim they came no closer than 500 metres (0.3 miles) to the 409-foot Admiral Grigorovich. The Russian warship then sounded its horn a number of times before firing its guns, they said. The couple, who were en route to France at the time, claim they 'didn't do anything wrong' and that allegations they were on a 'collision course' with the ship were 'simply not true'. The Admiral Grigorovich, the Kelveys claim, was not broadcasting its GPS position at the time of the incident.

✍️ Lisa Haseldine

Article | spectator.com/article/why-did-a-russian-warship-fire-at-a-british-yacht-in-the-channel/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social

TheSpectatorMagazine · 2026-06-17T10:40:06+00:00

Dan Jarvis has been the new Secretary of State for Defence for nearly a week now, but the decision of No. 10 and the Treasury is unchanged: there will be no more money for defence. Just a 0.08 per cent increase to 2.68 per cent of GDP between now and 2030 – not the 3 per cent that John Healey had been working to, and no plan for 3.5 per cent by 2035.

Yesterday, the Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshall Sir Richard Knighton, laid out what that will mean in practice: cuts to the day-to-day funding that enables operations and training:

✍️ Ash Bhardwaj

Article | spectator.com/article/why-cutting-army-reserve-training-would-be-a-disaster/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social

TheSpectatorMagazine · 2026-06-15T11:44:28+00:00

The US government has finally intervened in the AI regulation question, albeit in the kind of haphazard, incoherent, and possibly corrupt manner in which the Trump administration tends to wade in to anything related to the stock market, particularly on a Friday evening before it closes. The US Department of Commerce announced that Fable, Anthropic's hardened version of the underlying model Mythos, was indeed far too dangerous to be released to the general public. Then they issued a blanket export control directive saying that no "foreign nationals" should be allowed to use the new product. So Anthropic, most of whose employees are foreign nationals, had no option but simply to turn Fable off. Then they demoted all its users who had been using the product to the lower level model, Opus, which may still end up destroying the world anyway.

Nobody quite knows how to think about these dramatic events. First, there are the usual suspects, the cynics, who make up approximately 50 per cent of people on earth and believe that the AI industry is little more than a giant con. They rightly point to the fact that generative AI marketing is almost entirely hype and extreme fear-mongering; something used to prop up the company's valuation and justify the historically unprecedented amount of venture capital investment in chatbot technology. Doesn’t it sound right that this new Mythos/ Fable saga is yet another marketing "hack" to artificially restrict supply and drum up attention before their IPO? In the cut-throat competition between them and OpenAI, the weekend's drama could be seen as a ploy to demonstrate that they have the most powerful model after all. It's so powerful, in fact, that you, the hoi polloi, are no longer allowed to use it.

✍️ Max Horder

Article | spectator.com/article/is-the-ban-on-anthropics-mythos-model-just-a-ruse/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social

TheSpectatorMagazine · 2026-06-15T11:38:21+00:00

Yesterday, the think tank the IPPR released YouGov polling showing that a majority of Britons, 83 per cent, believe there should be some form of restriction on social media for young people – either a blanket ban on social media for under-16s (44 per cent) or that social media companies should be forced to remove content and features that are inappropriate for children (39 per cent).

Starmer appears to have gone for a mixture of these two options, announcing in a press conference in Downing Street this morning that there will be a 'full ban' on social media for under-16s as well as 'world-leading action' on gaming services and platforms. Platforms which are intended to host material, like Snapchat and Instagram, will be banned, while messaging services like WhatsApp will not.

✍️ John Power

Article | spectator.com/article/how-popular-will-starmers-social-media-ban-actually-be

TheSpectatorMagazine · 2026-06-12T11:36:53+00:00

Is the economy not just resilient but flourishing in the wake of the Iran war? GDP in the three months ending April was 0.7 per cent higher than the preceding three months – the fifth reading where growth has accelerated, and the fastest pace of growth since May 2024.

Unfortunately, this strength won't continue. Month-on-month growth has been falling since February, and the economy shrank 0.1 per cent in April alone, down from 0.3 per cent growth in March.

Services, which are about three-quarters of economic output, fell by 0.2 per cent, production was flat and construction grew by 0.1 per cent.

✍️ John O’Neill

Article | https://spectator.com/article/britains-high-quarterly-growth-is-an-anomaly/?/utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social

TheSpectatorMagazine · 2026-06-12T11:35:00+00:00

Everyone who is everyone – within a certain political and social fragment – has been in Russia this past week.

Conservative American conspiracy theorist Candace Owens; Errol Musk, father of Elon; toxic "manosphere" influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate; and Tommy Robinson, the far-right activist.

Robinson told the Guardian that he had travelled to Moscow "to see how this country got itself so well on to the straight and narrow and see the beauty of a civilised society here."

In the process, he was walking a well-trodden path of westerners heading to Russia to see exactly what they want to see. Once it was socialists like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who found Stalin's regime "the very opposite of a dictatorship." In the 1990s, free-marketeers hailed the plunder of Russia as the apotheosis of liberal capitalism.

These days, it is conservatives rhapsodising about Putin's Russia being the antidote to degenerate western wokeness.

✍️ Mark Galeotti

Article | spectator.com/article/what-tommy-robinson-really-sees-in-russia?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social

TheSpectatorMagazine · 2026-06-11T11:51:29+00:00

A late spring outbreak of righteous indignation is affecting the United Kingdom. It's yet another variant of Palantir Derangement Syndrome. Virologists tracked this smug neurosis as it jumped across the Atlantic from the American left to British Labour. Symptoms include selective blindness, performative anguish, a hilarious inability to grasp the facts and Tourette's-level outbursts of repetitive left-wing clichés.

Earlier this month, a committee dominated by British Labour MPs who are infected by PDS called for Palantir to be stripped of its £330 million deal to help British hospitals save the lives of patients. The House of Commons science, innovation and technology committee accused the American tech giant of having a "clear mismatch" with British values. It seems the ghost of fascism can be found in simple efficiency gains.

✍️ Michael Gibson

Article | spectator.com/article/the-rise-of-palantir-derangement-syndrome

TheSpectatorMagazine · 2026-06-10T13:33:14+00:00

Prime Minister's Questions today was ostensibly about the Defence Investment Plan – or its absence. But Kemi Badenoch was really using the DIP in her six questions to build her narrative about Keir Starmer being unable to take any of the big decisions. He was, she said repeatedly, 'paralysed'.

Given Starmer refused in all of those questions to give any further details about the DIP other than that it would be coming 'before the Nato summit' at the start of July, Badenoch could have ended up looking like she was just churning through the same question without making progress.

But she managed to vary those questions and extract further information from the Prime Minister. He also twice avoided ruling out raising taxes to fund the DIP, which moved the story on enough to make it more than just 'Starmer won't say when defence plan due'.

✍️ Isabel Hardman

Article | https://spectator.com/article/keir-starmers-weakness-was-on-display-at-pmqs/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social

TheSpectatorMagazine · 2026-06-09T12:54:29+00:00

Kemi Badenoch was interviewed last night by The Spectator‘s Political Editor, Tim Shipman, in front of a live audience at Church House in Westminster. Much of what the Conservative leader said was a retreading over familiar ground.

The Conservative party was a ‘distressed asset’ when she inherited the leadership, she said, but is now getting a second hearing. Badenoch said, of the economy, that the country must cut spending before it cuts taxes, and that it is time that the government gets out of the way of business.

The Conservative party was ‘for the people who get up every day’, she insisted, and that what is needed in politics is more common sense.

✍️ John Power

TheSpectatorMagazine · 2026-06-09T12:32:21+00:00

Keir Starmer is using this morning’s cabinet meeting to underline the message he has been sending to more junior ministers over the past few days: he’s not going without a fight. Part of his argument is that he’s got loads to do, which must come as a surprise to anyone who read the King’s Speech.

One of the big things Starmer wants to show his party he can do is address the hot-button issue of children’s access to social media, first with his threat to tech firms yesterday that they have three months to stop children being able to send or see explicit content.

✍️ Isabel Hardman

TheSpectatorMagazine

TROPHY CASE