Local news is mainly on my Facebook page: m.facebook.com/neil4harborou…

Reposting this from the weekend open.substack.com/pub/almond…

Andy Burnham is probably going to raise tax by at least £4.7bn, and maybe much more. Here's my list of 37 ways he might do it: every potential tax rise, how much it would raise, and what the downside would be. There's always a downside. Thread:

I have a new piece on Andy Burnham's policy agenda neilobrien.co.uk/p/the-unbea…

Why stop there? Lets ban COMPUTERS in the NHS and go full luddite

What an unusual coup. You do a deal with a local MP where you get his job with the prospect he can then work for you, causing £5m in by elections. You then topple the Prime Minister, and decide - before you're even in charge - to move the country's seat of power to... your own back yard in a *£1 billion* campus you and two of your friends have 'been working' on 'for a long time'. And the friends you worked on that with? One of them was deputy to the guy you just toppled, with the full inside track, and the other you're currently trying to help into your old job.

Anything nice or colourful in Britain must be abolished because someone may be offended.

China is done with us, we need something big to catch up with them

Incredible luddism here. > We can't cut immigration because who will drive the ubers > We can't have driverless cars because the uber drivers might lose their jobs

Unless there is some very good explanation, this looks like another example of DEI policing in action

The penny is fast dropping that a Burnham gov won’t just be Starmer with better comms. Things are moving firmly leftwards. Yesterday, Andy had a big meeting with the unions just as his camp were sending a flurry of anti-tech briefings to the FT. It has immediately spooked the UK’s tech industry - one of the economy’s rare bright spots right now. Take this one on autonomous vehicles, where Team Burnham criticises the gov’s ‘headlong pursuit of driverless cars.’ We should be so proud that the UK has a dog in the fight when it comes to this field of tech, with British software company, Wayve, competing against the likes of Tesla, Waymo and Baidu. Wayve is developing a different proposition to its competitors, which map everything in a way that is time-intensive and costly. By safely testing its tech on London’s complex road network, a brilliant product is being developed and refined in the UK that could be exported or have application in other settings. Instead, all the focus is on the threat of robotaxis to jobs even though there remain substantial real-world hurdles to rolling them out at scale, not least their cost versus a driver. Do we want the UK to develop world-leading tech or just receive what everyone else is willing to give us? It looks like a Burnham gov may want to crush our chances, just as it wants to remove Palantir from the delivery of important gov projects even if its tech can deliver better NHS services or policing. I am on record as being sceptical of Labour’s unquestioning embrace of US big tech in its first two years because I worried that they were too dazzled to carry out due diligence on promised investments, draw up decent contracts which avoided vendor lock-in or to procure from a wider range of more innovative, often domestic, companies. But that’s not the critique the Left is making of this current gov’s tech policy thus far. Tech companies of all kinds are their new bogeymen, to be driven out the moment a union’s interests are threatened. After all, if Labour was truly concerned about tech’s impact on jobs, it would not have made it so much more eyewateringly expensive and difficult to employ people.