{"id":1170,"date":"2026-07-25T08:08:02","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T08:08:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/urbaneconomynews.com\/?p=1170"},"modified":"2026-07-25T08:08:02","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T08:08:02","slug":"meet-britains-new-cabinet-of-fakers-fraudsters-and-hangers-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/urbaneconomynews.com\/?p=1170","title":{"rendered":"Meet Britain\u2019s New Cabinet of Fakers, Fraudsters and Hangers-On"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Britons are struggling to characterize their new Cabinet, following the arrival of a new prime minister on Monday. The Cabinet is not as northern or female as Andy Burnham signaled. Most members have certainly changed. Most are not loyalists to Keir Starmer, even less so to Tony Blair. Like Burnham, many hark back to a mythical golden age of socialism in the 1970s. Like him, most are alarmingly deficient in popular mandate, external qualifications, and even political trust for their new responsibilities.<\/p>\n

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Let\u2019s start with Burnham himself, a man born in Liverpool who pretended to be Mancunian to win the mayoralty of Manchester. He claims to represent the north but has not lived north or east of Manchester. At best, he represents a narrow part of west-central England, just north of the Midlands.<\/p>\n

Burnham has always looked south while talking up the north. Burnham was most newsworthy for agitating for changes in national government, despite sharing a party with Starmer.<\/p>\n

As Starmer continued to trip himself up with both feet, Burnham was one of the Labourites who prevailed on ministers to brief against their PM. After Starmer blocked Burnham\u2019s candidacy for an accidental by-election in February, Burnham prevailed on a local MP to resign from Makerfield to force a by-election in June, which Burnham won easily, to return to Parliament, which would allow him to challenge Starmer for the leadership (less than two years into Starmer\u2019s five-year term). Starmer initially vowed to fight on but announced his intent to quit this month. No MP stepped up to challenge Burnham\u2019s presumptive run.<\/p>\n

Thus, Burnham has no popular mandate to be PM, even within the party, except in the form of pledges by more Parliamentary partisans in support than against. Opposition parties rightly called for a general election to confirm his premiership, but the constitution does not oblige him.<\/p>\n

Burnham\u2019s supporters pretend that his easy rise proves the strength of his candidacy. In reality, it proves the weakness of his party. It could not find a new leader within its own MPs, despite a whopping majority. It triggered an expensive by-election and a more expensive mayoral election to reach outside of Parliament. Meanwhile, Burnham unwittingly poured scorn on that same Parliamentary party by criticizing normal politics and the London elite. (Since then, he has aired the idea of moving the Cabinet from London to Manchester. His current plan is to spend at least one day per work week there. That\u2019s neither efficient nor effective.)<\/p>\n

In the many weeks that Burnham enjoyed as rising PM, he remained vague about his Cabinet and his policies.<\/p>\n

On Monday, he spent\u00a0hoursappointing just the highest roles in the Cabinet. The other appointments look set to continue for days.<\/p>\n

Of the first day\u2019s picks, I must start with the only selectee who can be coded as qualified and mandated (although not loyal).<\/p>\n

John Healey becomes Chancellor of the Exchequer, the second most powerful position in government. He had quit as defense secretary six weeks ago, over Starmer\u2019s procrastination on filling a hole in defense spending. Healey said that Britain should spend 3 percent of GDP on defense by 2030, which means he will need to find a couple dozen billion pounds per year. Previously, he advocated issuing \u201cwar bonds,\u201d but who would buy them when the government is running record debt? He will need to cut other departments or raise taxes (probably both). On Monday, Healey said \u201cfiscal control\u201d would be his \u201cfirst duty.\u201d You could see the markets\u2019 confidence decline immediately.<\/p>\n

Healey\u2019s resignation suggests a certain loyalty to Burnham, but otherwise they barely know each other. More usefully, he was a minister in the Treasury under Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Yes, Healey is actually qualified by experience! This is remarkable given that his predecessor, Rachel Reeves, falsified her CV, couldn\u2019t add, and quickly became the most U-turn-prone and hated chancellor ever, as well as the most tearful.<\/p>\n

Healey remains constrained by record government debt and his party\u2019s suicidal unwillingness to cut spending. Remember that Starmer increased spending on welfare and benefits, after backbenchers rejected his proposal to cut them. (That was within Starmer\u2019s first year of premiership.)<\/p>\n

Burnham is an out-and-proud socialist who had already signaled that his government would spend and tax more. By Tuesday, his administration\u00a0revealed\u00a0plans to cut VAT (a sales tax) on electricity, to be funded by cutting the Starmer administration\u2019s planned digital ID. But the minister responsible for that plan, Darren Jones,\u00a0revealed, after being fired by Burnham, that digital ID was never funded. So Burnham is either ignorant or dishonest. This . . .\u00a0 doesn\u2019t . . . bode . . . well.<\/p>\n

In any case, scrapping VAT on electricity doesn\u2019t make much difference to a household electricity bill in which most of the pricing goes to fund green initiatives, debt, stealth taxes, and administration.<\/p>\n

Burnham already looks unprepared and unreliable.<\/p>\n

Confirmation comes in the form of his deviation from his team\u2019s prior briefings that he would appoint either Ed Miliband or Shabana Mahmood to the Treasury.<\/p>\n

Red Ed goes to the Foreign Office, for which he is woefully unqualified and an undoubted liability. He infuriated the U.S. (and most Britons) as energy secretary, with his absolutism about reaching net-zero carbon by 2030, at whatever cost to the consumer. Ed also, by the way, reminds everybody of the weakness of the party\u2019s leadership selection. He was leader from 2010 to 2015, when he literally and metaphorically stumbled at every election husting. Yet Burnham thinks Miliband is the best person to articulate British interests abroad? This won\u2019t last long.<\/p>\n

Miliband is already hurt. He has been denied the job he wanted, even though he was the first senior minister to call for Starmer to go, and he helped Burnham with an economic plan. (Some plan: it remains as vague as ever, except for the Soviet-style time horizon of 10 years.)<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Mahmood stays at the Home Office. Under-informed (or biased) souls read this as confirmation of her competence in pushing through controls on illegal immigration in the face of majority opposition from civil servants and backbenchers. In fact, she is hurdling a low bar after decades of government failures to control immigration, despite popular demands and almost every party\u2019s commitments to lower net immigration.<\/p>\n

Worse, Mahmood is duplicitous. She tells the right wing that her\u00a0tweaks\u00a0to the benefits and the timeline of asylum applications will dramatically control immigration. She tells the left wing that she will make the refugee route easier (which is the route by which almost all illegal immigrants get residency, with more privileges than citizens). Also concerning is Mahmood\u2019s long history of Islamocentrism, which is bizarrely ignored by mainstream media. She tars normative Britons as racists (whites and Jews in particular: isn\u2019t that racist?), campaigned against Israel, played up her status as the first Muslim home secretary, promised that her promotion would serve \u201cher\u201d community, and railed against supposedly routine experiences of racism in her hometown of Birmingham, where her demographic is the largest.<\/p>\n

I doubt Mahmood will last much longer than Miliband within Team Burnham. He favors the left of the party, which has characterized her (ridiculously) as a Nigel Farage in Labour colors. For now, Burnham needs to be seen to reward her, if only because one of her allies in Parliament, Josh Simons, was the MP who resigned from Makerfield to make way for Burnham.<\/p>\n

So the highest three officers in the land will not last as long as normal, in my estimation. Burnham\u2019s administration will not bring the stability that Britons crave, let alone the competencies that the markets and foreign governments crave.<\/p>\n

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Talking of high ministers who won\u2019t last long, we must go next to\u00a0Wes Streeting, who had resigned as health secretary (the poisoned chalice of all ministerial appointments anyway), to build support for a challenge against Starmer. Yet after the by-election, Streeting said he wouldn\u2019t run against Burnham, who now must reward him. Streeting becomes\u00a0defense secretary. During the weekend\u2019s rumor mill, the former chief of the British Army, Lord Dannatt,\u00a0said that Streeting \u201cknows the square root of nothing about defence.\u201d Indeed. He\u2019s one acquisition scandal away from a sacking. And that sort of scandal leaks every few months from Britain\u2019s MOD.<\/p>\n

From a turncoat Starmerite, we now turn to the loyal Starmerites who remain in government on borrowed time.<\/p>\n

The highest-profile survivor is Pat McFadden, who will remain as work and pensions secretary\u2014which is strange given that the government has decreased neither\u00a0worklessness\u00a0nor\u00a0liabilities. Excuses abound for his early dismissal. And since Burnham is committed to the so-called triple lock on pensions and to increasing welfare (he talks about social care as the neglected component, but he\u2019s not talking about cutting anything), McFadden has no obvious options except to increase spending. That\u2019s the vicious cycle that these monkeys refuse to see, hear, or speak.<\/p>\n

Jonathan Reynolds was Starmer\u2019s chief whip, a role that Burnham talks about deleting (he must think that everybody will love him forever without whipping). Reynolds will take over the merged departments for Science and Technology, and Business and Trade. Burnham has a short-term interest in Reynolds. Reynolds was an ineffective whip, but in his previous role, as business secretary, he temporarily solved the collapse of British Steel by forbidding more foreign ownership and investing in government ownership. Burnham has always liked public ownership of heavy industry and transportation and has already confirmed a policy to fully nationalize British Steel. But once that process is complete, Reynolds-the-Starmerite won\u2019t be needed. The backbenches are full of untested socialists who think closer to Burnham on public ownership.<\/p>\n

For similar short-term reasons, Burnham kept Heidi Alexander as transport secretary and kept Lisa Nandy as secretary of state for digital, culture, media, and sport. The latter is one of the departments with its own unit for countering \u201cdisinformation\u201d (i.e., criticism of government) by spreading disinformation. It\u2019s also led the lawfare\u00a0to punish social media companies for \u201charmful\u201d content, to restrict children under 18 years of age from accessing social media (an age that makes a mockery of the same government\u2019s plans to lower the voting age to 16), to restrict everybody\u2019s access to VPNs, and to censor information during election season. Burnham supports such authoritarianism. His hopes for the general election in 2029 depend on it.<\/p>\n

Yvette Cooper has been demoted from foreign secretary to health secretary, which seems designed to set her up for further failure. Ironically, she is the most qualified minister by experience, having served through the Blair and Brown administrations, but that experience is to the right of Burnham\u2019s ideological bent. (Always strange to describe a Labourite as to the right of anything.) She already has a reputation for indecisiveness, invisibility, and foot-in-mouth disease. She must immediately deal with yet more strikes by medical unions unless exorbitant demands for pay raises are met. These have been going on for years. She won\u2019t last years.<\/p>\n

Another poisoned chalice is the Ministry of Justice, given mainstream recognition of two-tier justice, increasing political violence, and overcrowded prisons (to be relieved in September by, er, releasing prisoners early, including murderers and rapists). The new justice secretary is Alex Norris, whospent a year as minister for border security. And look how border security improved.<\/p>\n

Bridget Phillipsonhas been sacked as education secretary, having decimated private schools by abolishing their charitable status (one liability is VAT, at 20 percent). She keeps her job as minister for women and equalities, but I don\u2019t expect that to last long. At some point she must be sacrificed to protect the administrative state from its foot-dragging over decades of rapes\u00a0of mostly white children by gangs of mostly Muslim immigrants and second-generation immigrants (with the awareness and sometimes participation of local police, social workers, and politicians, mostly from the Labour Party).<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s get to high offices that will last, despite lack of qualifications. Get this one. The effective deputy PM goes by the titles of first secretary of state and chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Burnham gave the titles to Louise Haigh. She is a strong Burnham ally, which isn\u2019t a compliment in my book, although it is some justification for deputizing. Her penchant for dyeing her hair blood-red perhaps helps. Otherwise, she isn\u2019t qualified. Her highest prior role was transport secretary, which Burnham loves (he\u2019s always banging on about subsidizing public transport and has already announced a cap on bus fares). But she held that role for just a few months in 2024, before resigning after revelations that she was convicted of fraud in 2014. Funny she hid that history on the campaign. (The irony.) So the effective deputy PM is a convicted fraudster. She\u2019s also privately educated but opposed to private education. Only in Britain \u2026 and other tinpot democracies.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re not done with (alleged) fraudsters in government. Angela Rayner is back as housing, communities, and local government secretary, having resigned from the same role when she failed to pay a tax (\u201cstamp duty\u201d) on her third house. It was an oversight, she said . . . even though she was the minister administering the tax.<\/p>\n

Another promotion isLucy Powell, the new education secretary. Does she claim any expertise in education? No. Except that she is female, which is qualification enough for most progressives of our time, and she is a close ally of Burnham, and she is from \u201cthe north\u201d (self-declared). See the pattern?<\/p>\n

Alas for her, the Titanic education secretaryship is heading for an iceberg that few in government are willing to admit: blowback for the government\u2019s manipulation of safeguarding doctrine to hide information (such as transgender dysphoria) from parents whom teachers think won\u2019t be supportive enough, and for a new policy of screening boys for the pre-crime of violence against women and girls, and for decades of politicized, racialized indoctrination of children, at the expense of real knowledge and skills. Is it any wonder that\u00a0one in six Britons aged 16 to 24 years\u00a0is not in employment, education, or training? Well, it\u2019s still a wonder to the government, conveniently.<\/p>\n

A sort-of-incumbent is the new energy secretary.\u00a0Miatta Fahnbullehhad served as Miliband\u2019s undersecretary before she quit in late 2024 when Starmer\u2019s administration cut payments to most pensioners for their winter fuel expenses. (Starmer U-turned but didn\u2019t recall her to government.) Don\u2019t expect her to permit drilling for North Sea oil and gas. Do expect her to stick slavishly to net-zero madness. The inflationary effects on the Consumer Price Index alone are enough to guarantee the defeat of this government in 2029.<\/p>\n

In a related portfolio, Dame Angela Eagle is the new secretary of state for environment, food, and rural affairs, coming from the Home Office. Should you have heard of her? No. Her claim to fame is challenging Jeremy Corbyn for the leadership back in 2016, which gives her sort of centrist standing. Anyway, she failed. She withdrew to support Owen Smith \u2014 who also failed. It\u2019s an inspiring bench.<\/p>\n

A surprisingly relevant portfolio to this government\u2019s failed economics is Wales. Let me explain. Burnham has asked Stephen Kinnock to replace Jo Stevens as Welsh secretary. Stephen\u2019s qualifications are: he is Welsh, and he is the son of Neil Kinnock, who led the Labour Party through general election defeats in 1987 and 1992 and yet is Burnham\u2019s ideal of the prime minister we should have had.<\/p>\n

Stephen is the exemplar to end with\u2014the exemplar of the terminal mess the Labour Party has got itself into:<\/p>\n