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@opinion_black The circus has begun. You have little to no idea who this WEF puppet Andy Burnham is. A left wing tax and spend socialist who is a Manchurian candidate operating on behalf of the corporatists and oligarchs that control this country. A man sent to destroy what’s left of this once great country. A man who will surround himself with other puppets dedicated to that same ideal. The UK needs an election not a coronation. If that does not work then certainly a revolution.

President Donald Trump appeared to scoop Downing Street on Sunday, announcing that Prime Minister Keir Starmer would resign before any public statement from Starmer himself. “Keir Starmer will resign as Prime Minister of The United Kingdom,” proclaimed in a social media post, in which he also asserted that Starmer had “failed badly” on immigration and energy policy. Then, Trump added: “I wish him well!” Doubts about Starmer’s political future have swirled for weeks since his Labour Party suffered staggering losses in local elections in May, and prospects of a leadership challenge increased markedly on Friday after his most formidable rival,...

Andy Burnham is sworn in as the MP for Makerfield hours after Keir Starmer announces his resignation as Labour Party leader Burnham earlier said he would stand to replace the prime minister, with backing from former Health Secretary Wes Streeting Streeting - who quit Starmer's government last month - previously said he would contest any leadership race After being sworn in, Burnham was met with whoops and cheers as he had his picture taken with around 200 Labour MPs

Britain may — very likely — soon have a new government under Andy Burnham. Amid the swirl of senior Labour figures vying for a place at the top table, one name keeps coming up: Ed Miliband. The energy secretary, who led the Labour party himself between 2010 and 2015 — when he was rejected by voters at the ballot box — is regarded by many MPs, as well as by bookmakers, as the frontrunner to be Burnham’s chancellor. The two men are longstanding political allies and have been in regular contact in recent weeks, including one-to-one phone calls about policy...

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Friday he would not walk away, vowing ​to fight any challenge from his leading party rival Andy Burnham and potentially ushering in a new bout of political instability. Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor, won ‌a decisive victory for Labour to claim a parliamentary seat in northwest England, and has signalled that he will use it to enter any contest to replace Starmer. The scale of his victory in Makerfield in northwest England prompted more Labour lawmakers to say Starmer, unpopular and under pressure from the populist Reform UK in surveys, should consider stepping...

Sir Keir Starmer has warned Andy Burnham against launching an immediate challenge to his leadership if he becomes an MP, urging him, and the party, to focus instead on the election for a new Greater Manchester mayor. If Burnham wins in Makerfield on Thursday he would have to resign as Manchester mayor, with a by-election to replace him expected by 6 August. Burnham is widely anticipated to challenge the prime minister for the leadership, if he is elected to Parliament. Speaking from the G7 summit, the prime minister said a leadership contest would be a "bad thing" for the country...

Reform UK has been put in a dangerous position ahead of the Makerfield parliamentary by-election by a rival right-wing party. In what is likely to be Britain's most important by-election in history, Restore Britain, led by Rupert Lowe, is splitting the vote. Lowe is a former Reform UK MP who was ejected from the party. Times Radio presenter Rod Liddle commented that Restore is dividing the electorate in "an incredibly stubborn manner". The by-election on June 18 was triggered when Labour MP Josh Simons stepped down specifically to allow Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham to run for Parliament. If he...

In a handful of former mining towns and villages in north-west England, there is a lot of frustration with the state of the UK. It is common to hear people say "Britain is broken", "we are forgotten", and calls for "change". This is the Makerfield constituency, where locals are being heard louder than ever before in the most consequential by-election in decades. A constituency that made up 0.1% of voters at the last general election is not only picking a new MP on 18 June. Voters here are also potentially choosing the next prime minister. That is because Labour's candidate,...

Voters in perhaps the most consequential special election ever held in Britain are angry, and they really want someone to feel their pain. That’s the clear verdict from a special focus group by Public First for POLITICO of voters in Makerfield, the former mining area in northwest England whose June 18 vote could determine the next prime minister. Some in the group said Andy Burnham, the Labour candidate who is hot favorite to succeed party leader Keir Starmer as PM if he can get himself back into Parliament, might make a difference. But the overwhelming mood during the 90-minute conversation...

BREAKING: Another Makerfield by-election poll has been released 🔴 LAB - 45% ➡️ REF - 40% 🟣 RES - 8% 🟢 GRN - 3% 🔵 CON - 2% 🟠 LD - 1% Via More in Common, 515 sample, 28 May - 12 June

The UK is on a path towards the “poisonous” politics of the US under the current Labour leadership, Andy Burnham has said. Discourse is becoming more polarised and “communities don’t work together any more”, he said during a campaign speech. The Greater Manchester mayor, who hopes to return to Westminster in next week’s Makerfield by-election, and has made no secret of his Labour leadership ambitions, has been critical of Sir Keir Starmer’s direction. He asked the audience: “Does anyone here feel that we can just stay on the path that we’re on as a country? “It doesn’t feel doable, does...

With less than a week to go to the by-election, the mayor of Greater Manchester has a narrow lead over Reform UK, according to a new poll

If Andy Burnham wins Thursday's election in Makerfield, the seat he needs to challenge ​Prime Minister Keir Starmer for the country's leadership, it may have less to do with his own appeal than the feuding of two populist right-wing parties splitting their vote. The ‌election is shaping up to be one of the most consequential one-off contests in modern British political history. The 77,000 voters who live in Makerfield, in northern England, could decide the identity of the prime minister governing almost 70 million people. Opinion polls show Burnham, currently the governing Labour Party's mayor of Greater Manchester, could win...

Pedro Sanchez, the current Prime Minister of Spain and Trump's most vocal critic in Europe, has a serious problem: he already leads a minority government held together by a coalition of left-wing parties, and in the coming elections looks headed toward a major defeat. He has been embroiled in questions about his wife's corruption, and was almost forced to resign when the allegations first arose. 🇪🇸 Spanish PM Sanchez’s wife charged with corruptionBegoña Gómez, the wife of Spanish far-left Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, has been formally charged with multiple corruption-related offenses, including influence peddling, business corruption, embezzlement, and… pic.twitter.com/n04JCTaMZl— Visegrád...

When anti-regime protests spread like wildfire throughout Iran in mid-October of 2022, the regime’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was quick to lay the blame on the usual foreign suspects. “I say explicitly that these riots and this insecurity were a design by the U.S. and the occupying, fake Zionist regime and those who are paid by them,” he told a class of cadets at a police college in Tehran. He suggested that the ultimate goal of the U.S. and Israel was regime change in Iran. This elicited a response on Twitter from Iranian rapper Hichkas, who defended foreign support for...

While the world’s attention is focused on the combat transpiring in Libya and the events in Egypt and Bahrain, Yemen has also descended into crisis. The country is deeply split over its support for Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, and this profound divide has also extended to the most powerful institutions in the country — the military and the tribes — with some factions calling for Saleh to relinquish power and others supporting him. The tense standoff in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa has served to divert attention (and security forces) from other parts of the country. On March 28,...

At the beginning of September, I told you how French President Emmanuel Macron was on the hunt for Prime Minister Number Four after yet another French government went le poof like a deflated soufflé.It's always entertaining to watch the turgid burps of the excitable Gallic political process as they go about trying to form and reform governments, with cranky citizens (and others) taking to the streets in rowdy, car-b-quing mobs expressing either their delight or disgust. Public unions often join the fray in generally making things even more difficult by striking various aspects of the national service industries.Macron settled on...

Japan is still in many ways a traditionalist – not to say a sexist – society. But the times they are a changing, and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) have just chosen Sanae Takaichi as its leader, which means that she will become the country’s first ever female Prime Minister, and it’s most stridently right-wing one. Takaichi, 64, revels in the nickname the “Iron Lady” and is a hardline patriotic right-winger who is an avowed admirer of the original Iron Lady – Britain’s Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who Takaichi has cited as her role model. She was elected...

France’s government collapsed today. No, it wasn’t because of the Blitzkrieg, but the nation is trying to get its fiscal house in order, which hasn’t been smooth in the French Parliament. The now-ousted French Prime Minister François Bayrou lost a no-confidence vote badly, forcing President Emanuel Macron to appoint yet another prime minister. This would be the fifth premier in less than two years. Bayrou wanted to cut the deficit, and that’s what did him in (via Financial Times):French Prime Minister François Bayrou lost a confidence vote on Monday, bringing his government to an end after only nine months and...

<p>Former Australian prime minister Paul Keating has warned that his country should not be drawn into a conflict with China over Taiwan and has no obligation to assist if U.S. forces launch an attack over the disputed island.</p><p>Keating, who was prime minister from 1991 to 1996, told Australia’s National Press Club that China was not a “contiguous threat” to his country.</p>