Steve Rayson

🚨Dispatch from the battle for Birmingham - a six-sided battle for Europe's largest council - Plans for Greens to stand aside for Independents aborted after Gorton, but coalition to govern still on the cards - Whitehall warnings of new intervention if city becomes ungovernable

Journalist, "Rejoin the EU or stay out?" Andy Burnham, "I want to rejoin" "I hope in my lifetime, I want to rejoin the European Union" "I believe in the unions of all kinds. The union of the UK. The EU benefitted this country. Trade unions" "People prosper more when they're part of unions" Earlier in the interview... "Then you come to Brexit... During the 80s and 90s, the growth we had through the European Union masked some of structural problems" "But the minute you come to Brexit, then look at the last decade" "Shouldn't we start calling out the disaster that Brexit has been more directly?" "I think we should" "We've been stuck now with sluggish growth, and all of the aspirations now are harder to achieve as a country" "That's Nigel Farage and Brexiters doing, and you have to hold them accountable for that" Pippa Crerar, "Is there a danger of being seen as the same old Labour pushing to rejoin the EU?" Andy Burnham, "I don't think there's a prospect of joining any time soon, but I do think we should be honest with people" "It's not just on the economy and growth. It's immigration" "Immigration has ben weakened as a result of Brexit" "We've replaced short term immigration from the EU with long term immigration from outside the EU" "Call out Nigel Farage and Brexiters" Journalist, "Do you think Nigel Farage is racist?" Andy Burnham, "I don't know him well so I'm not going to say that. But I do see policies that are discriminatory. And that worries me"

Trump on Taiwan: When you look at the odds, China is very, very powerful, big country. That's a very small island. Think of it, it's 59 miles away. We're 9500 miles away. That's a little bit of a difficult problem. Taiwan was developed because we had presidents that didn't know what the hell they were doing. They stole our chip industry.