Burnham says he won’t allow early release of some dangerous criminals – but this does not go far enough Daily Telegraph 30/08/26 The new Prime Minister told the BBC on Sunday that his latest plan to exclude dangerous criminals from early release does not go far enough. Quite an admission, made worse by the fact that this is Andy Burnham ’s fifth policy position on the scandal since he took office. This is meant to be a final resolution of the crisis. But we have been told that by Labour several times before. Why should we believe them now? First, we had a review of Sir Keir Starmer’s original plan, which would see thousands of criminals set loose after serving as little as one third of their sentences. Advertisement Then a pledge to exclude rapists and paedophiles, when we were told Labour had gone to the “very limits” of what was possible. Then another review, this time of grooming gang perpetrators. Then a further pause, when it became clear Pc Andrew Harper ’s killers would s...
The PM praises unpaid placements from a supermarket that has cut 3,000 jobs Daily Telegraph 28/08/26 A million young people in this country have no job , nor are they undergoing any training or education to help secure one. This fact has become so well-worn of late you may as well put it on the side of a bus, yet successive governments have proved capable only of worsening the issue – and the latest seems intent on rubbing salt in the wound. In a remarkably tone-deaf bit of comms, our new prime minister Andy Burnham has demanded we praise a Potemkin employer in a depressing portent of how this Government will meet its goals. Just a year after it culled 3,000 jobs – a move it quietly blamed on the rise in employer National Insurance contributions – Sainsbury’s has announced 10,000 unpaid work experience placements, and Burnham has praised this as an example to follow. The move comes shortly after the Prime Minister asked employers simply to fix youth unemployment, and now we’re b...