The self-styled ‘King of the North’, Andy Burnham, has shaken hands with His Majesty King Charles and formed a government in his name. After two years of Keir Starmer’s government, the most hostile to free speech in living memory, the British public ought to let out a sigh of relief that Britain’s most unpopular premier’s reign of terror is over. But that would be at best premature, and at worst foolish.

Over the course of the past two years, the Free Speech Union’s membership has ballooned from 14,000 to more than 45,000. This is a testament to the dire state of free speech in Starmer’s Britain, and another scathing epitaph for his political career. But our new prime minister could prove an even greater enemy of free speech than his predecessor. He is more likeable than Starmer, a more seasoned political operative, and has a track record – albeit disputed – of getting things done. But once that bloke-ish charm wanes, and it will, we should expect to find him just as hostile towards free speech and its advocates as Sir Keir. Nowhere is that clearer than in his attitude to the press.

Burnham has long advocated greater state control over Britain’s media. In 2016, as shadow home secretary under Jeremy Corbyn, he campaigned vehemently for the second part of the Leveson Inquiry. This planned follow-up was scrapped after scores of journalists were cleared of any wrongdoing by the criminal courts. Yet Burnham has gone as far as to say that relitigating all this is ‘non-negotiable’.

His appetite to chasten the press is further evidenced by his close relationship with Hugh Grant, who, with campaign group Hacked Off, has spent the past 15 years demanding state regulation of the media. As reported in the Telegraph, at an event hosted by Hacked Off in June, Grant addressed a group in Westminster on his favourite topic. He lambasted Starmer for not dog-collaring Britain’s press and identified a Burnham premiership as his opportunity to muzzle it. Nathan Sparkes, Hacked Off’s chief executive, also told the Telegraph of his disappointment in Starmer and his hopes of Burnham taking up the mantle.

They have every reason to be hopeful that the UK’s new prime minister will be even more censorious than the last. Byline Times has reported that, back in March, Burnham said he hadn’t ‘given up on [Leveson part two]’ and that he would enact it ‘if he had the influence’. Well, Andy most certainly has the influence now.

Burnham’s disdain for the press was also on display during his furious run-in with Christian Calgie of the Daily Mail during the Makerfield by-election, and his studied avoidance of any press scrutiny throughout the farcical Labour leadership ‘contest’.

Ominously, Burnham’s cabinet is just as hostile to the press as the PM himself. Lucy Powell, the deputy leader of the Labour Party, has stated that she wishes to censor social media platforms such as X and Facebook during election periods, and has identified the Representation of the People Bill – paused until September – as her legislative vehicle for doing so.

Then there’s Lisa Nandy. The culture secretary, and Burnham’s constituency neighbour, is the architect of a truly Orwellian green paper – ‘Watch This Space’. Its objective is to force social-media sites to prioritise the promotion of so-called trustworthy public broadcasters such as the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, while demoting other outlets and independent content creators.

This, of course, is the same minister who recently abandoned X altogether. Nandy told followers the platform, while ‘originally designed for free speech’, now ‘favours abuse and misinformation over meaningful debate’ and that she did not ‘want to support it’.

All of this bodes ill for Andy Burnham’s premiership. Already, he has been made leader of the Labour Party and prime minister with no election, no public debate and minimal press scrutiny. He is on a collision course with anyone whose views differ from his own.

Max Thompson is the campaigns officer at the Free Speech Union.

The first days of Andy Burnham’s premiership have given the entire country a taste of what was previously the preserve of Manchester alone. Since taking office last Monday, we have watched his speeches from Downing Street, read his social-media pronouncements and witnessed the first removal of his court from London to Number 10 North in Manchester. Through it all, Burnham has displayed a curious combination of ordinary-bloke affability and the kind of seigneurial self-aggrandisement that Britain supposedly left in its feudal past.

Ordinary Joe he may be, but someone who underestimates his own abilities he is not. After he was elected MP for Makerfield, Burnham’s return to London took on the air of a restoration. His arrival at King’s Cross lacked the historical grandeur of Lenin stepping on to the platform at the Finland Station or Ayatollah Khomeini landing in revolutionary Tehran. Yet the media and the parliamentary Labour Party treated it as a watershed. Rolling news followed his train south, before Labour MPs assembled in Westminster Hall for a mass selfie.

Hot on the heels of his return from the wilderness, Burnham posted about the grooming-gang ringleader, Shabir Ahmed: ‘Like everyone, I want this vile criminal out of the country… I will ask the home and foreign secretaries to review all possible options – and they should consider nothing is off the table.’ Some may have thought this a bold statement from a backbench MP elected less than five minutes earlier. Yet note the repeated first person: ‘I want… I will…’

This tendency to announce policies as if they were his own fiats has become a striking feature of Burnham’s communication strategy as prime minister. ‘I’m choosing to end rough sleeping’, he announced. ‘I’ve done it before and I will do it again now: a £2 cap on bus fares for millions across the country’, he declared. ‘I’m giving thousands of pubs, clubs and music venues a 20 per cent cut in business rates’, he offered as largesse. ‘I have instructed my team to put a pause on the sentencing changes that were due to start in September’, he stated. Every policy appears to flow directly from Burnham himself, rather than from a cabinet, a parliament or even a government.

Nor is this merely a quirk of language. Watch Burnham move through the raggle-taggle crowd of Labour activists, lickspittles and drooling campaigners on Downing Street, after their new king’s audience with the actual sovereign. He advances as a liege lord extending his hands to the local squirearchy. Unlike his recently deposed predecessor, he can bask in the adulation, untouched by collapsing poll ratings. The crowd delighted in a man who, like Monty Python’s King Arthur, ‘hasn’t got shit all over him’.

In the same vein, there are Burnham’s much-vaunted weekly trips to Number 10 North, which have much in common with the Tudor royal progresses. These journeys allowed ordinary subjects to see their monarch, cultivating loyalty in regions distant from the court while simultaneously reinforcing the sovereign’s authority. Burnham’s own progress between Westminster and Manchester performs a similar function. For all his talk of devolution, he is hardly about to risk loosening his grip on the power base that made him.

Everything has to become part of the Burnham story. The occasion of his first visit to the ugly brutalist block chosen to house his northern away-days was marked by his telling the gathered staff that this ‘might be the best day of my life’. It’s all biography and buying into ‘me’ with little Lord Andy.

Yet what substance lies beneath this? Pronouncements and progresses are good for the time being, but time is fleeting. Promises remain contingent. No matter what Burnham says, prisoners will have to be released unless he recalls parliament, repeals the Sentencing Act and ultimately builds more prison space. The tax cuts and fare caps will need to survive a budget. Pakistan will have to have its chin tickled, or its arm twisted, before the charming Mr Ahmed wings his way home. None of this will happen just because Andy Burnham speaks it into being.

Burnham is playing a dangerous game. If ‘my government’ or ‘we’ are promising these wonders, then one minister or another can take the blame when they fail. But if ‘I’ promise them, then ‘I’ may fail to deliver. And then ‘I’ must take the fall.

The new PM clearly believes that, after the Starmer disaster, he must rebuild trust between the office and the electorate. To do so, he offers himself. The curious Instagram montage issued by Downing Street last week showed Burnham, then his ministers, first as children and then as adults. We see an ordinary boy (happy knowing nothing?) in cricket whites, followed by the equally ordinary politician who now occupies the highest office in the land. Burnham seems determined to build a cult around that boy turned man. But given the studied dullness of the bloke himself, it amounts to a cult of no personality, barely masking the same old substance-free politics.

James Martin Charlton is an English playwright and director. Follow him on X @jmc_fire.

Why is the UK shutting its iconic space telescope? The news that Jodrell Bank, which hosts the largest telescope in Britain, is to be closed, after the government scrapped funding for the facility, has been greeted with widespread outrage. The Royal Astronomical Society said it was ‘shocked and dismayed’. I’m angry and depressed.

Jodrell Bank is a serious bit of kit. The Lovell Telescope – 76 metres in diameter – is the world’s third-largest, fully steerable dish radio telescope. In the Cold War, it tracked Sputnik. Just last year, GCHQ revealed the secret role Jodrell Bank played in the space race, working with the intelligence agency to intercept signals from satellites, orbital weapons and space probes. The dish continues to conduct world-leading radio astronomy. It has researched black holes and the afterglow of the Big Bang. Just last week, experts demonstrated that the telescope could track space debris.

The mooted closure is reportedly the result of cuts to the government’s physics and astronomy research budget. The UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has decided that, when the current funding agreement ends in March 2028, it will stop supporting the entire e-Merlin network – a group of seven UK radio telescopes, including the Lovell at Jodrell Bank. Together, they make up one of the world’s most important networks for astronomical observation. Manchester University, which helps run the observatory, said it would be ‘difficult to sustain’ the telescope without replacement funding.

At present, Jodrell Bank receives just £2.8million a year. That is peanuts. Never mind that the facility represents just 0.03 per cent of UKRI’s annual budget. As a country, we recently spent £100million on a bat tunnel for HS2. We spend £300million a day on debt interest. By the time you’ve read this article, Britain will have spent more servicing its national debt than it would cost to keep Jodrell Bank operating for an entire year. We spend £9million a day on asylum accommodation. But then, who needs to search for alien life when we have illegal aliens arriving on the south coast who need housing?

The decision to close such an iconic facility, which costs such a measly amount to run and which clearly punches so significantly above its weight, provokes genuine bafflement. Perhaps, as one weary soul on X suggested, it had been given the chop because the telescope is white.

But seriously, how can the UK credibly claim to be the best place in the world to do science, let alone want to lead the technologies of the future, while choosing to close internationally respected research infrastructure that costs what amounts to a rounding error? The UK has managed to become a significant global player in radio astronomy thanks to just a handful of globally significant sites, including Jodrell Bank and the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory near Cambridge. That leadership is now seriously imperilled. And how is it that UKRI, an organisation whose budget will reach £10 billion by 2030, cannot find a couple of million for one of its most iconic and important facilities?

When I was growing up, getting my hands on a telescope came second only to a metal detector (so I could go up and down the garden looking for buried treasure). Big telescopes are the sort of thing that capture children’s imagination. If Andy Burnham really wants to encourage kids from working-class communities to dream big and reach for the stars, being able to see them would be a good start.

Of course, the message this sends internationally is pitiful. As China expands its scientific capability and the US continues to invest heavily in frontier science, we are scrapping what assets we have to fund ever more handouts and international aid, including to countries like Pakistan – which has its own space programme.

Like death by a thousand cuts, national decline comes through many small choices that quietly signal a scaling back of ambition. Closing Jodrell Bank is that sort of choice. One waits to see whether Burnham will step in, in response to the backlash – the facility is, after all, just outside Manchester and near his constituency.

We need to decide whether we still want to be the sort of country that dreams big and plays its part in discovering the great questions of life – or just be a welfare state with a country attached. We should stop lowering our sights and instead look to the stars.

Ameer Kotecha is CEO of the Centre for Government Reform. He was formerly a senior diplomat, serving as the head of the British consulate in Russia from 2023 to 2025. 

There were once moral red lines. Children were not to be used to gratify adult desires, and the state certainly wasn’t supposed to facilitate such behaviour. In today’s Scotland, those lines have been erased. LGBT Health and Wellbeing – which receives hundreds of thousands of pounds per year from the Scottish government, the NHS and local councils – runs weekly Edinburgh support sessions where men are encouraged to give ‘human milk to their babies’.

Called ‘Queer Milk’, the group welcomes LGBTQ+ parents ‘breastfeeding, chestfeeding or giving human milk to their baby in any amount… no matter what your feeding journey looks like’.

Let’s be clear: men cannot breastfeed. Some can, after extensive hormone treatment, produce a small amount of fluid. As Susan Smith, director of For Women Scotland, told The Times: ‘Whatever hormone-induced gloop their bodies might be chemically engineered to produce, it is not human milk.’

Even setting aside the obvious medical questions about feeding babies hormone-induced secretions, a more fundamental question remains: why do some men want to breastfeed at all?

Readers of a delicate disposition may wish to stop reading now, because what I’m about to explain is grim. Some men have a keen sexual interest in the functions of women’s bodies, and many who identify as transwomen become aroused by everything from menstruation to the menopause. At the time of writing, on a major porn site accessible in the UK, there are 48,163 videos tagged ‘lactating tits’, and some of the most popular within that genre involve men leaking liquid from their nipples. The male performers in these videos have artificially enlarged their moobs with hormones or the use of breast pumps. What they do not possess is the female breast anatomy and physiology designed to nourish an infant.

Yet claims of male breastfeeding are nothing new. Nearly a decade ago, a man called Dana Fried wrote in the Stranger that a ‘queer lactation consultant’ had given him drugs in the week before his partner gave birth. He reflected: ‘When my baby attached to my breast, there was an incredible chemical cascade that ran through my entire body like lightning. Imagine the most electric thing a partner has ever done to you, then multiply it by 10.’ He then added: ‘And yeah, I kind of got off on it. Don’t judge.’

For years, this fetish remained the preserve of creeps online. Now it is steadily being sanitised by mainstream institutions. Breastfeeding organisations increasingly speak of ‘chestfeeding’, ‘bodyfeeding’, ‘feeding parents’ and ‘human milk’. This is to avoid excluding men who identify as mothers or women who are apparently triggered by words such as ‘breast’ but not by giving birth.

The ideological capture of infant feeding has already claimed some of the profession’s most respected voices. The desexing of breastfeeding proved so divisive that it tore apart La Leche League GB, one of Britain’s best-known breastfeeding charities. Long-serving trustee Miriam Main resigned after the organisation adopted transgender-inclusive policies, saying she refused to help biological men ‘perform a poor imitation of breastfeeding’, which she said put babies’ safety at risk. Meanwhile, Marian Tompson, one of the charity’s founders, walked away from the international movement she had helped build, warning: ‘This shift from following the norms of nature, which is the core of mothering through breastfeeding, to indulging the fantasies of adults, is destroying our organisation.’ In Australia, former Australian Breastfeeding Association counsellor Jasmine Sussex now faces legal proceedings simply for stating that men cannot breastfeed. The message to professionals is unmistakable: affirm men’s identities or risk your reputation and livelihood.

Sometimes the narcissism of trans activists can be bloody funny; the wails of indignation when a 6’3” rugby player in a frock is misgendered, the mad fantasies about bonding over swapping lippy in the ladies’ loo, or hyperbolic claims of genocide despite a conspicuous lack of corpses. It is easy to laugh when the fantasy harms only the dignity of the adults involved. But when children are co-opted into these often deeply sexualised fantasies, there is no comedy angle.

Today, behaviour that would once have prompted safeguarding concerns is not merely tolerated but actively promoted, while those who object are denounced as extremists. We have come to the point where the Scottish government and public bodies are supporting what amounts to a grotesque experiment on babies, in order to validate the identities and feelings of adult men. The red lines have not vanished overnight –; they have been rubbed out deliberately, one linguistic concession, one rewritten policy and one hefty donation at a time.

Jo Bartosch is co-author of Pornocracy. Order it here.