The parachute problem in the Labour Party

 

The Parachute Problem and 

why Andy Burnham’s Vision Requires Local Working-Class Candidates

The political landscape is shifting beneath our feet. 

With Andy Burnham's decisive victory in the Makerfield by-election and his clear trajectory toward the party leadership, the public appetite for a different kind of politics is undeniable. Burnham doesn’t talk down to working-class communities; he builds them up. He understands that real economic growth requires secure foundations for the workforce and consumers.

But as we look to a future shaped by regional devolution and wealth retention, we run into a glaring roadblock: the centralized, top-down machine that governs how Labour party political candidates are chosen.

The Westminster Production Line

For decades, the candidate selection process has felt less like a local democratic choice and more like a corporate placement scheme. The central party machine regularly shortlists and "parachutes" middle-class, professional political insiders into regional seats, ahead of local working-class people who have spent their lives building the community.

This isn't just a complaint about fairness, 

it is an economic and cultural failure. 

When you populate parliament exclusively with people whose entire careers have been spent inside the Westminster bubble, think tanks, advisor jobs and the like, you lose the practical, ground-level understanding of what makes economies tick. When these bodies are filled with graduates who have never done a days work they can never be in touch with the reality of working class life and the lived experience.

the Labour party was founded to represent working class people

this requires working clas MPS

The View from Bournemouth

We see this dynamic playing out right here on the south coast. In Bournemouth West, our MP is Jessica Toale. To be absolutely clear, this is not a personal critique of her character or her work ethic. She is a highly educated professional with hard hard earned PPE degree doing her job.

The issue isn't the person it is the system that brought her here.

Prior to standing for Bournemouth West, Toale was a member of Westminster City Council in the heart of London. To the local electorate, this creates an undeniable friction. It sends a message that regional towns are merely career destinations for a mobile, metropolitan political class, rather than places that deserve to be represented by their own local people.

What We Lose: The Value of Local Roots

When the selection process closes its doors to local workers, it closes its doors to people like David Stokes.

Stokes the previous candidate for Bournemouth West is a local man, a member of Unite the Union, and someone deeply embedded in the social and economic fabric of Bournemouth for decades. A person with that background doesn't need a briefing pack to understand the housing pressures, the infrastructure bottlenecks, or the employment challenges of the BCP area. They live it. They have spent a career measuring out the costs of building a community.

When a top-down selection process freezes out people like David Stokes in favour of London-centric elitist professionals, the party detaches itself from the very working class reality it claims to represent and protect.

Rewiring the System

If the UK is to truly decentralize power—the very thing Andy Burnham has championed through the Bee Network and regional devolution then that decentralization must include candidate selection.

We don't need a political class that views local government or regional seats as a stepping stone on a career ladder. We need a system that actively recruits, supports, and values the working class people who are already on the ground doing the work. Until the selection process changes, Westminster will continue to feel miles away from the realities of towns like Bournemouth.

what can Andy Burnham do for Bournemouth?

 Burnham and Bournemouth.

If Burnham become Prime Minister BCP council won't get a blank cheque to go and build council houses.

But they will get something like a reformed public works loan and low interest rates ring fenced to council house building. This is likely to be combined with the planning powers to build on council owned land like the old power staion or the old winter gardens.

Building council houses will in due course be an income stream for the council that will help in multiple ways.

Land owners can hang on to land or make outlandish claims about the value of vacant land. The Starmer government was making changes to allow councils to purchase land at realistic values and not at inflated claims.

In essence and it really is this simple, the government borrows money to build council houses at low (sovereign) interest. Then lend councils money at slightly higher but still low interest. Councils then buy the land and build the houses. In due course the loans are paid off and the council gets an income stream that goes to lowering council tax and/or paying towards other essential services.

Problem is Rachel Reeves said borrowing to build council houses isn't borrowing to invest. Well the nect chancellor should have more sense.

And Burnham is right. A decent house, a good place to live gives a family the security to build a good life on.

With council housing every body throughout the whole process wins.

The 'market' can look after the so called affordable homes, councils can look after families who have low incomes and insecure jobs where they can't get mortgages.

The one drawback. Building council houses could reduce private sector demand as people who could manage a mortgage prefer to rent from the council. This could reduce house prices and millions depend on the equity value in their homes.

But during the periods of major council house building such as after WW2 the private housing market was bouyant with a high demand for houses in both sectors.

Two of the biggest financial burdens on BCP Council is SEND and adult social care. The council are having to borrow £96 million to cover SEND. Adult social care takes up £165 million of the budget. It would take a while but income from council house rents could go towards and even cover these cost burdens.

(accuracy checked by and image generated with the help of google gemini)

So lets get building...

(accuracy of the post checked by and image created with help from google gemini)

M27 trapped at 50 mph

 

The Endless Roadworks: 

Why is the M27 Still Trapped at 50mph?

The cones are gone, the tarmac is clear, and yet the brakes are still on.

Back on April 21st—nearly two months ago—the long-running roadworks on the M27 east of Eastleigh were finally declared finished. For drivers who endure this route daily, it felt like the light at the end of a very long, very frustrating tunnel.

This isn't just any stretch of road. The M27 is a vital artery connecting the south coast traffic, linking two major cities, and supporting a massive social and economic network. We endured years of delays, missed appointments, and gridlock with the promise that a better, faster link was on the horizon.

Yet, weeks after the heavy machinery departed, a frustrating reality remains: 

the 50mph speed trap is still live.

The Real Cost of False Finishes

National Highways seems to view these lingering restrictions as a minor administrative detail. But for the people using the road, it represents a massive, compounding economic drain.

Every single day that these unnecessary restrictions stay in place, they inflict a measurable cost on:

• Local Businesses: Couriers, freight handlers, and logistics companies losing billable hours idling in artificial traffic.

• The Tourism Economy: Visitors heading to the coast trapped in pointless bottlenecks.

• Everyday Consumers: Commuters losing precious time out of their days for no visible reason.

"Testing the System" is No Longer an Excuse

When pressed for answers, the standard bureaucratic line is that they are "testing the system."

Let’s be reasonable: weeks have gone by. In the digital age, that is a lifetime to run diagnostics. If a system requires months of empty-lane testing while actively choking the flow of a major motorway, then the system itself is the problem.

A Call for Transparency

Drivers deserve clarity, not compliance for compliance's sake. If there is a legitimate danger on that road, National Highways needs to be transparent about it. If not, the signs need to come down.

We are asking two straightforward questions:

1. What is the precise, technical justification for maintaining the 50mph restriction today?

2. Where is the specific safety data that proves this restriction is still required?

It’s time for National Highways to either publish the data that justifies holding us back, or change the signs and let the south coast move again.

it is safer to cruise at 70 than choke at keeping to 50

Over to You

Have you been caught in the M27 post-work bottleneck? How much time is this "system testing" costing your weekly commute? Let us know in the comments below.

Conservatives created the National Grid and then corrupted it.

 We are told that public ownership is inherently inefficient.

Yet, when Britain needed a modern electricity network to survive the 20th century, it was a Conservative government in 1926 that realized private enterprise was too fragmented, parochial, and inefficient to build it.

The National Grid wasn't born out of dogma; it was born out of absolute practical necessity.

Here’s a brief history of the National Grid up to the time of the disastrous election of Margaret Thatcher. Yes, there is no doubt that the election of Margaret Thatcher was and still is a disaster for Britain. The worst of it is the current Lino - Labour in name only government are carrying on the essentials of Thatcherism!

Brief history of the National Grid

The pre 1926 chaos

(and have we returned to this)?

It was an engineering supply nightmare. Electricity generation was entirely split between roughly 600 incompatible, localized private companies and municipal bodies.

The Problem

There was no standard voltage or frequency. If you moved a few streets over, your machinery or appliances wouldn’t plug into the wall. Because stations couldn't share power, every single local station had to keep a massive surplus of spare generating machinery sitting idle just to handle local peak times.

The Diagnosis

The government’s Williamson Report (1918) and the Weir Report (1925) both reached the same conclusion: Britain was falling way behind industrial competitors like Germany and the US because its power supply had a ‘parochial stamp’ on it. It was fragmented with too many localised generating suppliers.

The Failure of Voluntary regulation

The government tried to pass an Act in 1919 asking companies to voluntarily cooperate and merge. It failed completely. Private companies refused to surrender their local monopolies or invest in standardising their equipment and output.

The 1926 Act and the Taming of the Market

In 1926, Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government realised that the state had to intervene.

They passed the landmark Electricity (Supply) Act 1926, which created the Central Electricity Board (CEB).

The CEB was a public corporation, and it did something extraordinary:

·         It forced the standardization of the entire British system to 50Hz (cycles per second).

·         It selected the most efficient power stations to generate electricity, closing down the wasteful ones.

·         It didn't buy the power stations yet, but it acted as a state-mandated monopoly wholesaler buying all the electricity from generators and sending it over a brand-new, publicly owned network of high-voltage wires.

The Economic Payoff

By the time the initial grid was fully operational in 1938, the results were an unassailable proof of the efficiency of a unified public system:

·         The amount of expensive spare plant machinery required nationwide plummeted from 80% down to just 15%.

·         The capital saved by not needing all that duplicate machinery paid for three-quarters of the entire cost of building the Grid itself.

·         Production costs fell by 24%.

 

1947 Nationalisation – The Golden Era of Coordination

While the 1926 Act created the grid architecture, the ownership of the actual power stations was still split. Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government finished the job with the Electricity Act 1947.

They swept up all the remaining private and municipal assets, forming the British Electricity Authority, which later evolved into the iconic Central Electricity Generating Board (CEB / CEGB).

This unified, state-owned system could handle massive fluctuating demands:

·         The Supergrid: In the 1950s, the state built the Supergrid (275\kV and later $400kV.

 

·         Instead of digging up and hauling millions of tons of coal by train from the North down to southern cities, the state built massive power stations directly on the northern coalfields and transmitted the energy cleanly down the wires.

·         The Price Drop: By planning the system as a single machine rather than a collection of competing profit-centres, the standard price of electricity in 1989 (just before the sell-off) was, in real terms, among the lowest and most stable in the system's history.

 

May 1979. Then came Thatcher and Thatcherism

It took Thatcher ten years to get round to smashing the electricity generating system. Although Gas seemed to be her first privatisation, her first victim was the steel industry. Followed by massive unemployment. So much unemployment that people were encouraged to go sick to massage the unemployment figures. It is worth noting that we still have Thatcherism to this day despite the damage that has been done – and is still being done to you and me.

In 1989 the destruction of the stable national grid started!

Even worse was to happen, and is still happening to you now, when George Osborne came along!