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Friday, April 10, 2026
‘Burnhamomics?'
‘Burnhamomics’ already lies in tatters.
It is one thing to throw out a sinking, lacklustre PM. It is entirely another to bet the house on a Leftist with a reckless economic agenda.
Sherelle Jacobs
26 September 2025 2:48pm BST
Sir Keir Starmer is right about one thing: Andy Burnham, the Left’s last great hope, is living in an economic fantasyland.
True, the King of the North has amassed an impressive army of Labour followers who hope he can win back working class voters. The former Blairite, then Brownite, and now reborn as a committed socialist, somehow exudes authenticity, with his love of Madchester music and boxer’s brow.
He has made a virtue of his two failed leadership bids. Time away from the Westminster bubble means voters don’t associate him with the disliked and discredited “uniparty”. His mix of cultural nationalism and economic socialism will appeal to former Labour voters dismayed by two-tier Keir’s directionless. It’s possible his policies could even destabilise Nigel Farage’s party, splitting the working class vote. Like Boris Johnson before him, he will sell himself as a People’s Mayor, albeit from the North.
But scepticism is building, doubts are setting in. One poll showed that Labour won’t overtake Reform were he to be crowned leader. Even more importantly, his plan to win back the Red Wall with an even more high-spend agenda – and his apparent nonchalance towards the risk of a market backlash – has sent a wave of panic through Labour that the party is walking straight into the “Truss trap”. It’s enough to give even some of Burnham’s backers second thoughts.
This won’t have been helped by Starmer’s suggestion that Burnham in No 10 would be a “disaster for working people”. In an extraordinary intervention this week, the PM drew parallels between his Labour colleague and Liz Truss, arguing that any attempt to abandon fiscal rules in favour of spending would end in financial implosion. This might reek of desperation, but Starmer is right.
The Manchester Mayor’s economic prospectus denies our fiscal reality. Britain is on the brink: the debt is colossal, taxes have soared, our inflation is the highest in the G7, the markets are extremely nervous. The cure to Britain’s economic torpor cannot be a dose of analgesic.
The scale of his spending commitments, including on council housing, border on lunacy. The tax hikes he advances could trigger a property market crash that would plunge the financial sector into turmoil. His plans to raise the top rate of income tax to 50p would risk a consumer spending slump and chase away what is left of our entrepreneurial class. His nationalisation plans – even more ambitious than entertained by Jeremy Corbyn – would surely lead to failed auctions on the debt markets.
Mere talk of Burnham in No 10 has coincided with a rise in UK bond yields, and warnings from investors that the gilt markets would be “spooked”. Even some Burnham supporters are rattled. “It’s just plain economically illiterate. You don’t go to the bank and tell the manager you want to borrow a load of money but don’t really respect the terms of the agreement,” one says.
Markets provide the ultimate safeguard against folly, administering their own inescapable form of rough justice. Even the US President has been forced to act within market strictures: when 30 year US Treasury yields touched 5 per cent earlier this year, Donald Trump paused his tariff war.
Yet Burnham is insistent we need to “get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets”. As the economist Paul Johnson brusquely pointed out, the best way to do this is to reduce borrowing, which is already much too high under Rachel Reeves.
The Telegraph has now revealed that Starmer’s allies are planning to block Burnham’s return to Parliament by ensuring that Labour’s National Executive Committee – stuffed with TTK loyalists – would not approve his application to run for a Parliamentary seat. And that is assuming Burnham would be able to find a seat in the first place. The backbenchers in safe constituencies who had been identified as possible candidates to make way for the King of the North are now hesitating to cooperate.
Those who have been in Parliament long enough to remember the rise and fall of Gordon Brown – a bunker chancellor answerable to nobody who was elevated into a bunker PM answerable to nobody – favour a contest over a coronation for the King of the North. This would at least allow them, and the British public, to challenge and test Burnham’s ideas.
Labour is facing a historic test. It is one thing to throw out a sinking, lacklustre PM; it is entirely another to bet the house on a radical Leftist with a doomed economic agenda.
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Hmm.
Andrew Atherston. Sarah Mullally and the evangelical past she doesn’t talk about.
The new Archbishop of Canterbury is seen
as a liberal, yet her faith is rooted in
a long history of conservative
Christianity
Andrew Atherstone
Sarah Mullally, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, is often described as a liberal or progressive Anglican. She preaches on the need for Christianity to be “radically inclusive”, champions a socially progressive faith, and has been the public face of the Church of England’s controversial Living in Love and Faith project to offer church blessings to same-sex couples.
Mullally’s appointment to the top job in the Anglican Communion has infuriated conservative archbishops worldwide, some of whom plan to boycott her installation at Canterbury Cathedral later this month. She has also been a thorn in the side of conservative politicians for her frequent interventions on immigration and diversity. One magazine recently accused her of being part of the hectoring “lanyard class” among the metropolitan elite, guilty of “vacuous milquetoast progressivism” and “anaemic liberal views”.
But one of the most surprising aspects of Mullally’s life story is her remarkably conservative Christian origins. She talks very little about her early decades, but they were steeped in evangelical culture and theology, from youth to middle age. Conservatism runs deeply in Mullally’s formation and continues to shape her attitudes.
Sarah Bowser, as she was known until her marriage, was raised in suburban Surrey, on a housing estate in Woking. Her local parish church, St John’s, was part of the “Bible Belt” of evangelical congregations across the southeast. It was one of the largest in Guildford diocese, with more than 850 members, overflowing Sunday schools, a flourishing youth ministry and 40 mid-week Bible study groups.
Mullally moved to London in 1980 to begin a nursing degreeBowser’s parents (an electrical engineer and a hairstylist) seldom attended church, but she was encouraged along by her grandparents. It was here, at the age of 16, she experienced Christian conversion, praying a personal prayer of commitment to Jesus Christ when challenged by one of her friends to make a clear decision about faith. Bowser and 60 other young people from her church were confirmed by the Bishop of Dorking in 1978 — massive numbers of which today’s bishops can only dream.
St John’s, Woking, held tightly to the Bible as the supreme authority for Christian belief, the centrality of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This went hand-in-hand with regular gospel preaching and conservative morality. The parish tabloid was called Forward, signifying missional advance. During the Easter holidays, Bowser joined the church’s spinnaker cruises on the Norfolk Broads, where sailing was combined with hymn singing and Bible exhortations on deck. St John’s also bussed coachloads of teenagers from Woking to All Souls, Langham Place, in central London, for large youth events.
At Woking sixth-form college, Bowser immersed herself in the Christian Union, which proclaimed in the college magazine its desire to “reach the rest of the College with the Good News that Jesus is alive”. Alongside Bible studies and prayer meetings, they discussed topics such as spiritual warfare and the imminent return of Jesus. The Christian Union showed a film decrying abortion and attended the college debating society to propose the motion “Jesus Christ is alive today and can radically change your life”. Its biggest event, in May 1979, towards the end of Bowser’s lower sixth year, was a visit from rock star Cliff Richard who spoke to 500 students about his Christian faith and invited them to “think about Jesus”.
Sarah Mullally as a student at the Polytechnic of the South Bank, London, in 1984When Bowser moved to London in 1980, aged 18, to begin a nursing degree at the Polytechnic of the South Bank, she joined the polytechnic’s Christian Union which was explicitly and proudly conservative. This conservative theology was combined with innovative and sometimes shocking methods in student evangelism. The Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship magazine for autumn 1980 carried a startling report from Bowser’s polytechnic, where a Christian Union leader took a gun into the packed student common room one lunchtime. He ran through the doors and fired at a young woman, who fell to the floor with blood flowing from her mouth, before the shooter made his escape into the street. It was a Christian publicity stunt, involving a loud starting pistol and a theatrical blood capsule. Immediately after the shooting, a visiting evangelist rose to his feet and preached to the stunned students on the inevitability of death and the relevance of Jesus.
Christians in Bowser’s hall of residence — a brutalist 1960s concrete tower block near Stockwell Tube station — knocked on doors, encouraging their cynical fellow students “to think more seriously about the gospel”. In her final year as an undergraduate in 1983-84, Bowser rose to be president of the Christian Union, masterminding its evangelistic strategy.
She avoided the liberal and progressive churches in London, and made her home instead with likeminded evangelicals at St Stephen’s, South Lambeth. It was a vibrant, friendly, multiracial congregation, known for its Christian conservatism. Bowser’s involvement was not superficial or brief. She remained at St Stephen’s for over two decades, from the ages of 18 to 39. Here she got to know her future husband, raised her children, and explored her vocation as a Christian leader.
Unlike England’s grand cathedrals with their ornate liturgies, where the archbishop has spent much of her recent ministry, St Stephen’s was a modern, functional building with few ecclesial trappings. Services were informal. There was clapping, drama, and dance, and Bibles in the pews — until the pews were all carted away to create more flexibility. Bowser sang, played her French horn and joined the prayer ministry team. She helped to arrange parish missions, like a “Meet Jesus” mission in 1981 when 2,500 copies of Luke’s Gospel were distributed door to door. She often attended the church’s annual holiday at Spring Harvest, an evangelical jamboree in a big top in Somerset, where she stood up to affirm her sense of God’s call to Christian ministry.
During her decades at St Stephen’s, Mullally sat under the ministry of three vicars, all of them keen evangelicals. The first was Christopher Guinness, part of the brewing and banking dynasty, descended from a long line of missionaries. He persuaded Mullally to begin preaching, aged 28, without theological training or bishop’s licence.
The second vicar was an expository preacher with a doctorate in the urban mission strategy of Calvinistic bishop JC Ryle, a hero among Church of England evangelicals in the puritan tradition. The third vicar was even more staunchly conservative, resisting women’s ordination, campaigning against Anglican liberalism, and threatening to withhold the parish’s financial contributions to the diocese.
Throughout this period, St Stephen’s propagated conservative views of marriage and sexuality. When Southwark Cathedral hosted celebrations of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement in 1996, the church council wrote to protest. “We regard the Bible as God’s written word,” declared the parish profile, “and seek to align our lives to it.”
Mullally has moved away from her conservative origins, but the evangelicalism in which she was immersed for many decades is essential for understanding who she is today. It continues to shape her commitment to personal salvation, mission and a Christ-centred faith.
She maintains close friendships with conservative clergy, even those who do not believe that women should be archbishops, and actively seeks their flourishing in the Church of England. Her views on hot-button topics including abortion and same-sex marriage are more nuanced than is usually recognised. In the House of Lords, her opposition to the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill has been unwavering on moral principle.
Mullally joined the King and Queen for a service at St Peter’s, on the Sandringham estate, in JanuaryJoe Giddens/PAAlthough Mullally is often simplistically pigeonholed as liberal and progressive, her surprisingly deep formation in conservative theology and culture makes her a more complex, and multidimensional, archbishop.
Andrew Atherstone is professor of modern Anglicanism at the University of Oxford. His biography, Archbishop Sarah Mullally is published this week by Hodder & Stoughton.
Nice One, Victor.
Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Vows to Block Visas From Countries Demanding Slavery Reparations.
Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party has vowed to block visas to Britain from any country which demands slavery reparations from the United Kingdom.
Sick.
Spain’s Socialist Govt. Approves Constitutional Reform to ‘Safeguard’ Abortion.
Spain’s socialist government on Tuesday greenlit a constitutional reform bill seeking to “safeguard” abortion by enshrining it as a “right” in the nation’s core legal text.
Thursday, April 09, 2026
There Are Worse Things Happening.
Pipe organs could be extinct by 2070
The pipe organs that remain are largely unused. CT.
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A 'Well Done' To The Lords.
House of Lords votes to abolish Non-Crime Hate Incidents.
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Christian street preachers have been hit with NCHIs.
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Unbelievable.
Dear All,Today, the Supreme Court of Finland issued a troubling mixed decision in the case of parliamentarian Päivi Räsänen.
After nearly seven years of legal proceedings, the Court found her GUILTY of “hate speech” for a church pamphlet she wrote over 20 years ago. The final decision came down by the narrowest possible margin — three votes to two.
Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola was convicted alongside Päivi for publishing the pamphlet for their church.
At the same time, the Supreme Court unanimously acquitted Päivi for her 2019 Bible verse tweet. And she was also previously acquitted for a 2019 radio debate.
While it is right and just that these two acquittals stand, the conviction for publishing a decades-old pamphlet marks a dark day for freedom of expression. The Court found Päivi and the Bishop guilty for “making available to the public a text that insults a group”. Their conviction is under the “War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity” section of Finland’s criminal code.
The Court has imposed criminal fines of several thousand Euros and ruled that the impugned statements from the pamphlet be “removed from public access and destroyed.” Strikingly, the Court acknowledged that the pamphlet’s content did not incite violence or hatred, yet still found Päivi and the Bishop guilty.
The ruling sends a deeply troubling message: that the peaceful expression of one’s opinions in the public square can result in a criminal conviction.
“I am shocked and profoundly disappointed that the Court has failed to recognise my basic human right to freedom of expression. I stand by the teachings of my Christian faith, and will continue to defend my and every person’s right to share their convictions in the public square,” said Päivi.
This is not the end of the road. The fight to defend free speech in Europe and beyond continues, and this case underscores why it is more important than ever to stand firm against so-called “hate speech” laws.
These dangerous laws chill public debate and pose a grave threat to free and democratic societies. They must be removed from our statute books.
We are immensely proud of Päivi and Bishop Juhana for their courage, integrity, and perseverance. They have stood strong not just for themselves, but for the freedom of all people to speak openly without fear. We remain committed to defending that freedom, and stand beside Päivi as she considers appealing this decision to the European Court of Human Rights.
“I am taking legal advice on a possible appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. This is not about my free speech alone, but that of every person in Finland. A positive ruling would help to prevent other innocent people from experiencing the same ordeal for simply sharing their beliefs,” Päivi stated.
You have supported us throughout Päivi and the Bishop’s long and difficult journey, and we need you now more than ever. It is your generosity that enables us to provide free legal defence to people like Päivi and to continue challenging unjust laws that threaten free speech. Will you consider giving today to help us keep defending freedom — for Päivi, for the Bishop, and for future generations?GIVE TODAY With gratitude for your ongoing support,
ADF UK
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