I’m coming to you live from Manchester. Well, I say live. I don’t think podcasts can be live. This is not a podcast though, so make of that what you will.
It’s been a hell of a week of travel. Tuesday in Birmingham, Wednesday in London, Thursday in Leeds, and last night I arrived in Manchester. I am thoroughly enjoying the up and down, though I am a bit tired of the inside of train carriages.
Very coincidentally, as I arrived in Birmingham, Jess Phillips decided to stand down from her ministerial role. As I arrived in Manchester last night, Andy Burnham had basically gone, “yeah, I’m coming back to Parliament.”
I’m not saying I had anything to do with any of this, but it is funny how these things work.
Beyond the travel chaos, I think everyone would agree this has been one of the most chaotic Labour weeks we have ever seen. It’s largely reminiscent of the constant Tory chaos, though in a much slower way, which somehow annoys me even more. We’ve all known that Keir Starmer is in trouble for a long time. The election results crystallised it, but the lead-up has been building for a couple of months. It’s in the last week where things really picked up pace. People started talking out over the weekend, resignations came in on Monday, and it all came to a head yesterday with Wes Streeting putting in his resignation. That feels like a domino starting to push things over.
There will definitely be a leadership election by August or September. That timeline depends largely on what happens with Andy Burnham standing in what was Josh Simons’ old seat.
All in all, it’s a pretty slow-moving situation. With the Tories, I don’t really want to give them compliments, but they were fast on this. I remember those hot summer days when Boris Johnson was on his way out. I remember where I was when I got the BBC News alert that Rishi Sunak and various ministers had started standing down. I was actually in B&Q. I told my husband: we need to get home, I need to get on Twitter. Within 48 hours he had stood down. The Labour way of doing things feels constipated. It genuinely just feels so slow.
Is that a better thing? If you’re going to be taking the scalp of your leadership, it is a bit more considered, a bit more thought out. Am I annoyed it’s happening? Yes, absolutely. I think this is the absolute last thing the country needs. Do I understand why it’s happening? Also yes. Both things can be true. Keir Starmer has not been a good leader, policy-wise. A couple of successes, but he is a technocrat. I wrote about this at length earlier this week if you need the full version.
In terms of candidates: Wes Streeting, I really don’t want to see him as Prime Minister. While he has done a good job on elective recovery, he is not painting a full picture. Community services in the NHS are still so strapped, and community services are the ones that live most closely to people. They come to your house. They look after you outside a hospital. I’m not talking GPs. I’m talking district nurses, urgent community response, all the bits and pieces that happen a bit more quietly. By the time I had left the NHS, it was a dreary place. I could go into a lot more of that, but I’ll leave it for another post.
Angela Rayner, cleared of her HMRC issues just yesterday, is also a potential candidate. I think with Andy Burnham coming in, it will likely be him with the support of Angela Rayner, which I think is a bit of a shame. I genuinely believe Angela Rayner could make a fantastic Prime Minister. She is a thoroughly human, thoroughly relatable politician. She would surround herself with the right people, and that matters enormously. As for Andy Burnham: wildly popular, and if you’re looking at the election win for 2029, he’s probably a good bet. Policy-wise, I think he could make some real differences.
I’m currently sitting in Manchester and I realised yesterday that it has firmly become my favourite city in the country. I love London and I will very likely always live there, but my second home has without a doubt become Manchester. It is clean, it runs well, it’s a genuinely pretty place. Yes, I only come here once in a while, and there are people in Manchester who can tell me about all the issues. I don’t doubt them. But there is a feeling of cohesiveness here in terms of how things function.
My bigger concern through all of this is actually the NHS and DHSC needing firm, consistent leadership. There is a replacement Secretary of State and I don’t know particularly well who he is. I need to do far more research. But the hope is just that there is continued stability, because that really is desperately needed.
Now I don’t want to just focus on Labour today. I also want to do a quick update on last week’s episode around Reform, racism, and crisis. And it is now definitely of crisis proportions.
Reform did very well in the local elections. They won more than 1,300 council seats and made really big inroads, however, the candidates they put up were somewhat less than savoury.
Byline Times did an analysis around the 12th of May and identified 30 newly elected Reform councillors facing allegations of wrongdoing and racist social media posts: Holocaust denial, neo-Nazi sympathies, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism. Hope Not Hate published their Dirty Dozen report naming 12 councillors they said Reform really should have already expelled.
By midweek, at least six had been suspended, expelled, or resigned from their seats, triggering by-elections. Which costs money, by the way. So Reform is never going to save any money for any of their councils, because they are incapable and don’t have any of the skills necessary. But that’s an aside.
Somehow in between all of this, Reform’s Home Affairs spokesperson Zia Youssef publicly boasted of having the best vetting in the country. Obviously not. The events before and after the council results have made that claim completely untenable.
Hope Not Hate’s campaign director Georgie Lamming put it well: they’ve exposed countless Reform candidates, including racists, anti-Semites, Islamophobes, conspiracy theorists, and even former BNP members. The question is, why do so many extremists think Reform is the party for them?
Here’s a quick run through the ones who’ve gone so far:
Stuart Prior resigned on the 10th of May, days after being elected to both Essex County Council and Rochford District Council on the 7th. He had gone on social media saying white people were the master race with larger brains, called Muslim people rats who could never suffer a genocide, called for Black people to be segregated, and appeared to celebrate the rape of a Sikh woman. He was exposed by a joint investigation by the Daily Mirror and Hope Not Hate. Reform did not expel him. He was allowed to resign. He should have been publicly expelled.
Jay Leslie Cooper was actually expelled from Reform and had her membership revoked after the Liverpool Echo reported that she had posted: “I don’t agree with murdering innocent people, but the Holocaust is a hoax. There wasn’t even 6 million Jews in Europe at the time. Propaganda.” She also shared content claiming 9/11 was fake. Nigel Farage said she was not marked in Reform. Good riddance. Why the hell did she get through vetting in the first place?
Glenn Gibbons, elected in Sunderland on 7 May as part of Reform’s takeover of the city, was suspended after now-deleted Facebook posts emerged in which he allegedly said Sunderland’s Nigerian community should be “melted down and used to fill in potholes.” He also called BBC presenters Mel and Sue “the unfunniest, fat, repulsive lesbian hosts” and said female sports commentators should stick to cooking. Richard Tice initially dismissed all of this on Laura Kuenssberg as smearing and sneering. No, sweetheart. It is not a smear to report racism in your party. Have a look at why your party is filled with so many particularly racist people, rather than just going “this is all an attack.”
Ben Rowe was suspended within days of his election after Hope Not Hate and The Times reported that he had accused Jewish people of creating division, described immigrants as “breeding like rats,” shared blackface memes, and fantasised about impaling Muslims. Had to go. Don’t know why it took them so long.
Nathaniel Mende of Sheffield City Council was suspended on the 13th of May after posts emerged showing a Nazi flag with a swastika, an image of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, descriptions of himself as an ethno-nationalist, requests to add a neo-Nazi Sunwheel emblem to a football flag, and a shared image of the 1936 Nazi Olympic stadium. When approached by the Times before the election, Mende claimed he enjoyed “risky humour and pushing boundaries” and admitted he had “flirted with far-right ideology” but claimed he had rejected its core tenets. Reform confirmed his suspension for “failure to disclose social media posts that have brought disrepute to the party.” No. He should have been completely expelled for being a neo-Nazi. I don’t know how you can make that clearer.
Daniel Devaney was probably the most chaotic case. He had reportedly withdrawn from the race before polling day, remained on the ballot, and won, which raises quite big questions about the robustness of Reform’s candidate management. He allegedly posted that he wanted to blast all Muslims off the face of the earth and called Muslims “pure scum.” He told his local paper he said it while in a bad mood watching TV and that it was “well out of order,” while also defending other comments and insisting he was not racist. His status remained unresolved as of today, with a by-election expected if he does not take up the seat. I imagine he will be out of there fairly soon.
There is a panoply of bigots still waiting to be suspended, expelled, or have anything done to them at all. I do wonder whether this is being purposely mismanaged, because another little piece of news that came out this week may or may not be related.
You may remember the five million pounds that Reform leader Nigel Farage received as a gift from Harborne, a Thailand-based billionaire. What has now come to light, following further investigation by Sky News, is that around that time Farage bought a house for 1.4 million pounds in cash. Because why would anyone get a mortgage? That’s clearly just for the normos among us.
The slight issue is the timing, which is exceptionally suspicious. According to a Reform spokesperson, the purchase of the house had commenced before the donation was received from Harborne. That’s where it gets tricky, because “commenced” could mean anything given how slowly things move in UK house buying. What many critics may be saying out loud is that there was a nice little bit of money that came in to help support it. Supposedly the donation to Farage was given to him for security purposes. Is he going to try and sell the house as a security purchase? Is it some sort of fortress he’s bought?
It is just a bit troubling, the whole picture around Nigel Farage’s properties. There’s the £800,000 question around his girlfriend, who bought a house in cash with money that came from somewhere. No one is quite sure. There is now obviously the question around the donation and the £1.4 million purchase. Things are getting very hard for Nigel Farage to navigate.
To draw to a close here, there was a comment on my Bluesky recently asking why media organisations aren’t covering this. And I have to say, people like Byline Times, Hope Not Hate, The Nerve, The Lead, so many other independent media organisations are doing a very good job. If you aren’t supporting them already, through paid or free subscriptions, do go and look them out. They are brilliant journalists doing brilliant work with very little funding in a very hostile media environment. And share their work.
On the large media ecosystem, yes, more scrutiny is needed, but, we also literally just heard from Sky News this week. It is going to happen at two levels: big investigative pieces that spur other organisations on, and the independent journalists who follow the threads further. Support the small media guys. They are doing a fantastic job.
I have a full day of meetings to get ready for. I also must apologise for the sound quality. I forgot my mic at home. I am currently talking at you while sitting on a hotel bed, straight into my laptop, which may be the most middle-aged thing I have ever done.
Either way, thank you all for the comments, support, and messages this week. Nothing in particular happened. You guys are just really, really nice. So I just wanted to say thanks for that. Have a great week, and I’ll catch you over the weekend.
