They sent the man to the union hall. They gave him the stage, the crowd, the podium the workers built. He gave them a speech about the biggest change in forty years. And then he went home and planned to drill for oil.
Andy Burnham walked into the Trade Union Congress headquarters in London on Friday and promised five pledges. Significant change. Power to local authorities. A government that works for working people. It sounded like everything working people had been waiting for. It sounded like somebody finally goddamn listened.
Then the cameras asked what he was actually going to DO, and the man went coy. Wouldn’t name a cabinet. Wouldn’t spell out a single concrete plan. He just promised ‘significant change’ and left every detail at the door. His first concrete policy signal? New North Sea oil and gas drilling. More rigs. More extraction. More fossil fuel money flowing to the same places it always flows while the workers who put him on that stage get a speech and a handshake.
I have seen this exact same bullshit play before. It happens in Adams County, it happens in Wisconsin, it happens everywhere a politician needs working-class votes: a man shows up at the union hall, says all the right words, uses the workers as his backdrop, and then serves the extraction industry. The workers built the stage. The oil company got the permit.
And Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative opposition leader, calls it ‘airy fairy stuff’ and says Burnham has not said what he’s going to do. She’s not wrong about the vagueness. But her own party spent years telling working people they’d fix everything before gutting their fucking services and calling it fiscal discipline. Both parties walk into the union hall, take the stage, and leave the workers holding nothing but the speech.
Burnham didn’t promise change. He promised the word. The oil industry got the actual policy. That’s not change. That’s the same shit with a new face.
Source story: the source story.