Anthony J. Evans

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🟨 Captain Tom Moore is booked for Southport. 82' // 🟡 1-3 🔵

He was so real for this

I saw Andy Burnham speak this week. I agreed with a lot of what he said about devolution and was pleased about how central it was to his platform. He seemed to believe that fiscal devolution was a good thing, but I couldn’t tell if that meant accepting that successful places should keep more of the taxes they raise. (That is essential to successful devolution, IMO.) A point he made about not wanting to be ruled by unelected people in Whitehall did not go down well at the conference I was at, which had a lot of NGO/Quango/academics in the audience. One person asking a question compared him to Donald Trump railing against the deep state. (I overheard someone else say to his friend that maybe he had meant the House of Lords rather than the civil service, which would reassure him.) Generally though, the audience mostly seemed very happy with him – many of the questions began by saying how inspired they were by him, or how they assumed almost everyone in the audience generally agreed with him. They were probably right! I was surprised by how vague his other economic policy stances were. He certainly sounded left-wing, but in very unspecific ways: he seemed pretty positive about nationalisations and building council housing, but generally his view just seemed to be “we need more state in important sectors” without any detail about why that would help. Stylistically he reminded me of what was popular ~15 years ago: wearing a t-shirt, suit jacket and trainers and speaking at length about how the London Olympics was the crowning moment of the New Labour years (and Britain’s peak in recent history). It felt pretty outdated to me, but maybe it’s just an age thing. Having said that, he seemed relatively “normal” and less off-puttingly messy than Rayner and more “outsiderish” than Ed Miliband. If I wanted Labour to win the next election he’d probably be my pick of those three (who seem like the most obvious top three contenders), although I think Miliband seems a lot smarter.

🍫 Battered Mars bar with whisky custard (Budweiser Plaza exclusive)

Get the Archibald Leitch on that with “Everton Fooball Club” in the middle of it

I promised a Europe vs UK comparison. 👇Here it is 🤯The difference in central density between Paris & London is striking. The other massive stand out is Brussels vs the likes of Manchester/Birmingham.