3 min read20 min

Brown brought in a set of advisers he had worked with for years, a sense of changes he wanted to make to the centre of government, and policy that included a big programme of constitutional reform.  

But the adjustment from Chancellor to Prime Minister – and being the face of all aspects of government – was one which Brown struggled to make, and his premiership was knocked off course by the financial crisis. Brown was lauded for his response, but many of his plans for power remained undelivered.   

While Burnham has long held prime ministerial ambitions, his ascent to the job could still be far more rapid than Brown’s. But you cannot undertake a comprehensive preparation for government programme in under a month and Burnham and his team should not try. 

Speeches in the weeks ahead look set to reveal more about his plans for power, but there are other key steps he needs to focus on: prioritising early decisions about policy in the first weeks in government, using access talks to ensure the civil service can also help make the transition a success and identify the people he wants to take into government. 

Burnham is likely inundated with ideas from helpful well-wishers for what he should do – he should shelve much of it for after the trip to the Palace. If he does take over at the start of parliamentary recess, Burnham and his team will have the rest of the summer to continue working through the huge amounts of policy he will inherit or has been thinking about. They would do so with the support of the whole of the civil service and a far better insight into what is currently going on inside government. He will also have to govern during that period, and should be prepared to be hit by events, crises or political distractions, but he can still turn the timetable into a benefit. What he should focus on now is his overall vision and the top priorities for early change.  

Access talks are the crucial first step to building a relationship with the civil service, particularly the Cabinet Secretary. But there is a limit to what they can do, particularly in this context. The Civil Service cannot start serving him, but they can listen to and probe his plans. Burnham should use them to focus on the policies he wants to prioritise early on, the problems he is likely to inherit, the changes he wants to make to structures, and how he wants to work.  

With three years at best before the next election, Burnham cannot afford a No.10 that descends into confusion about who does what or infighting over whose ideas dominate. Burnham needs his No.10 to speak authentically and consistently for him if he wants the system to be clear on what it is supposed to be doing. He needs to be thinking about how to appoint a high-performing team around him, selected in terms of who he needs, not just who he knows and wants to reward. He will have to let some people down.  

Appointing his No10 team will be followed by Burnham’s first ministerial reshuffle. He will want to think about policy or political signals, balancing party factions and giving encouragement to MPs, but he also needs to think about where continuity on existing policy or performance in the role means avoiding changes, particularly in the junior ranks who are too often the victims of the tail-end of reshuffles. If he wants to make a difference to the performance of his government, he would do well to plan changes by department, focusing on building ministerial teams, not just slotting names into whatever gaps are left.   

Andy Burnham probably has less than a month to think about how he will do the job that is more demanding than anything he faced as a government minister or mayor of Manchester. There is much that he can do to prepare, but he needs to be ruthless with how he uses this time.  

These are the people whose job it was to stop the leadership of the SNP from stealing almost £700,000 of “ringfenced” fundraiser money from independence supporters, and who utterly failed at that job.

It was also their job to stop Peter Murrell stealing the best part of £500,000 from the SNP, in a separate but related crime, and they failed at that one too.

A small handful of them (marked with red asterisks) tried their best to do their duties, and were blocked primarily by one powerful woman – Nicola Sturgeon – and a room full of cowards, weaklings and bullies, listed above.

This video is a horrifying watch.

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But the most shocking part comes about 12 minutes in. Allison Graham, a member of the SNP’s Finance and Audit Committee (FAC) as well as its National Executive Committee (NEC) relates how at an NEC meeting on 20 March 2021 she read out a statement from herself and two other FAC members.

Though the statement was quite diplomatically phrased considering the seriousness of the issues, the response to it from the online meeting was a sustained personal attack on Allison Graham from Cllr Ian Cockburn, then the co-leader of the SNP group on Highland Council and who’d completed a law degree just three years earlier.

Despite therefore presumably knowing that he and the other NEC members were legally liable for the SNP’s finances, Cockburn laid into Allison Graham to the extent that she physically bowed her head in front of her PC screen, and then the rest of the committee – including Nicola Sturgeon – joined the pile-on, with both anger and mockery.

Most of those doing so were women, but alert readers will have also spotted the eternally poisonous Glasgow councillor Graham Campbell – part of Sturgeon’s inner circle and seen on the far right of the pic below – going so far as to say that a member of the party’s Finance & Audit Committee shouldn’t even have been allowed to read out a statement expressing the FAC’s concerns about the party finances at a meeting of its National Executive Committee.

(In other words, that the FAC literally should have been prevented from doing its job of warning the NEC about a massive seven-figure gap in the SNP’s accounts.)

This was entirely in character for Campbell, who at around the same time was demanding that anyone having any dealings (even retweets on Twitter) with Wings Over Scotland – which was also trying to warn SNP members and indy supporters that their money had been stolen – should be expelled from the party.

Ian Cockburn and Christina Cannon, incidentally, are still on the SNP NEC today.

Allison Graham had read out the statement from the FAC members in the hope that it would be recorded as part of the minutes of the meeting.

But the NEC had stopped properly recording minutes of its meetings in November 2020 – by a remarkable coincidence, the exact same month that Douglas Chapman had been elected as Treasurer specifically on a platform of greater financial transparency, and recruited Allison Graham, Cynthia Guthrie and Frank Ross to help him in that aim – and started providing party members with only “Outcome Of Business” notes.

This is all ordinary party members were told about the 20 March meeting:

And even NEC members got only this:

It’s important to emphasise once again that at this stage concerns were only about the missing fundraiser money, not Peter Murrell’s personal embezzlement from the party.

The SNP’s accounts for 2020 wouldn’t be published until months after the FAC members resigned, and by the end of 2019 Murrell had only pilfered around £210,000 –  a small fraction of the amount of the discrepancy the FAC had noticed.

But all attempts to solve the problem had been frustrated not just by Murrell – who had obvious motivations to keep the finances away from prying eyes – but by the aggressive hostility of the NEC, the very body that was supposed to hold him accountable, driven by the attitude of the party leader.

And as Cynthia Guthrie ruefully notes, that was the real problem.

Nicola Sturgeon’s involvement in the coverup of the dodgy finances goes far beyond mere ignorance, far beyond even a wildly reckless lack of curiosity. She actively, brutally crushed any attempt to warn those responsible for the SNP’s finances of any alarming issues about them.

The FAC members told all of this to Operation Branchform police. And yet still nobody has been held accountable for this misappropriation of hundreds of thousands of pounds solicited from donors on a false premise, and which the SNP now admits had already been spent on something else long before the FAC members resigned and long before the majority of Peter Murrell’s embezzlement.

Alex Kerr, who was on that 2020 NEC, is now an MSP and SNP National Secretary.

Kirsten Oswald, the Business Convener who shut down every attempt by the FAC to raise the issue with the NEC, is now an MSP and a government minister.

(Hilariously, the SNP issued a statement yesterday that Oswald had been committed to transparently updating party members about what had happened at NEC meetings.

Let’s just remind ourselves what Oswald told members about a meeting where half the party’s Finance Committee had resigned because they had extremely grave concerns about the party’s finances and the Chief Executive’s refusal to provide them with even the most basic information required to do their job.)

Alison Thewliss, who was on the 2020 NEC, is now an MSP.

Ian Cockburn, who instigated the pile-on against Allison Graham – the only time he ever spoke at an NEC meeting, Allison told Wings earlier today –  has now resigned from Highland Council but is still on the SNP NEC.

Christina Cannon, who also joined the pile-on, is still on the NEC and is an SNP councillor in Glasgow.

Graham Campbell, who thought it was outrageous that the Finance & Audit Committee was even allowed to report to the NEC on the party’s finances, is a councillor in the same ward as Christina Cannon, and chairs the SNP’s BAME Network.

Farah Farzana, who also joined in the pile-on and is also a former chair of the SNP BAME Network, describes herself as a “social injustice activist” [sic] and is currently Equalities And Human Rights Officer at Falkirk Council. She was the Scottish Parliament’s “ambassador” for World Hijab Day, and remains active in the SNP.

Heather Anderson, who also joined the pile-on, became an SNP MSP last month, giving her oath in “Dundonian Scots”. She previously founded Scottish Human Services, a charitable trust focused on “inclusion”.

Laura Brennan-Whitefield, who also joined the pile-on, is an SNP councillor. When seeking to be elected to the NEC in 2018, she expressed her wish to “influence Party policy in a progressive way”.

Stacy Bradley, who also joined the pile-on, stepped down as an SNP office-bearer in 2024 in order to concentrate on a new career as a trainee criminal defence solicitor, which might come in handy in the future.

Emma Hendrie, who also joined in the pile-on, campaigned actively in the SNP’s “Young Scots for Independence” wing, also known as the Twitler Youth, for the decriminalisation of sex work. (She’s the brunette on the right of the pic below.)

When seeking re-election to the NEC in 2020, she said “Constructive criticism is always welcome”, which we’re sure will come as comforting news to Allison Graham. Hendrie to have subsequently vanished from public view.

Findlay MacGregor, who also joined in the pile-on, is the brother of SNP MSP Fulton MacGregor. He was re-elected to the NEC in 2021 after all the pro-accountability “rebels” elected in 2020 were pushed out. This 2019 campaign pic is almost all we know about him.

All of the people above, and all the other members of the 2020 SNP NEC who didn’t resign, are complicit – either actively, as in the cases of those we’ve just listed, or passively in the cases of others – in the cover-up of the theft of the fundraiser money (and also in the cover-up of Peter Murrell’s embezzlement).

All failed in their duty to the party as NEC members, and in their legal fiduciary duties. All of them bear responsibility for the subsequent calamities that befell the SNP, because none of them asked the questions it was their job to ask, and instead attacked those who did.

But what the testimony of the FAC members this week really demonstrates is that everyone who didn’t resign from the NEC in 2021 was involved in a crime for which nobody has yet been held to account, and that it is now even more astonishing that the Crown Office decided not to even try to prosecute anyone for it, and refuses to offer any sort of explanation for why.

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Crown Agent John Logue’s comments tell us nothing. WHY were the police and Crown Office not able to establish fraud, as the money had demonstrably been spent, and not on what it was raised for? And HOW were they able to establish there’d been no fraud, as at the point when the focus of the investigation switched from the fundraiser fraud to Murrell’s embezzlement they hadn’t questioned anyone in the SNP leadership? Like a magpie distracted by a shiny object, they simply dropped all the twigs they were carrying and went after their new prize.

The SNP was the victim of a crime, but also the perpetrator of one, and until the latter is addressed we’re all just being told to Wheesht For Nicola.

(Avico Ltd / Alamy)

4 min read8 min

This year marks a milestone for animal protection across the UK.

Within the space of a week, both the Welsh and Scottish Parliaments passed legislation to introduce a ban on greyhound racing in their respective nations.

This year also marks the 100-year anniversary of greyhound racing, with the first race in Manchester in July 1926. After a century of the practice, this anniversary must be more than a milestone. It marks a moment to recognise the harm caused, confront the failures of the industry, and acknowledge that public opinion has moved on.

England now faces a clear choice: follow suit or risk becoming an outlier – undermining our credibility on animal protection and damaging our reputation as a global leader.

Concerns around animal protection continue to overshadow the greyhound racing industry. The life of most racing dogs is marked by isolation and misery. Typically confined to unclean kennels, dogs face little social interaction, rough handling, and untreated wounds.

The industry’s own data reflects this crisis. More than 31,000 greyhounds were injured between 2017 and 2024, with thousands more put down – often because the costs of treatment have outweighed the value placed on their lives.

Data also shows that over 600 dogs have fallen during races this year – more than four every day. It has also identified more than 2,000 dogs who have raced since January but have not been seen in over a month, nor reported as adopted or retired. With the industry’s horrific track record, I am deeply concerned about the fate of these dogs.

These figures are all the more worrying given they sit alongside concerns about the effectiveness of the industry’s self-regulation. Statistics from the Greyhound Board of Great Britain (GBGB) show over 100 breaches of their own rules since the start of last year, which reports indicate amount to over 200 potential criminal offences. This includes serious cases of dangerous neglect and failures to protect dogs from injury and death, alongside broader issues such as substance misuse and integrity violations.

Yet none of these cases appear to have been referred to the police. Instead, reports suggest that the industry handles these cases internally, issuing only weak, ineffective sanctions.

As a nation of animal lovers, this isn’t something we can continue to ignore.

Those in favour of the sport argue that it is a ‘cornerstone’ of working-class life and a contributor to jobs and economic growth. But these claims simply don’t stand up to scrutiny.

Public attitudes are shifting. Interest in the sport is in decline, with the vast majority disengaged. Public petitions have demonstrated clear public backing for change and a growing expectation that Government action will follow. Working class culture evolves over time and simply because racing was traditionally seen as a working-class pastime – that in itself is not reason enough to defend it and the mistreatment of the dogs that are involved.

The economic case for the sport is equally weak. While the industry cites a £55m annual contribution to our economy, independent evidence shows that the sector sustains a limited number of low-wage roles without delivering meaningful long-term economic value. This is not a serious growth industry, but rather a sector seeking to be shielded from its own loss of public support.

As a gambling product, greyhound racing is inseparable from gambling harm – with real costs for both society and the public purse.

The impacts of gambling-related harm are widespread and devastating, reaching into families and communities across the country and placing additional strain on already stretched public services.

We cannot allow industry narratives to obscure this reality.

As greyhound racing approaches 100-year anniversary, I urge the government to use this moment to reconsider its position and bring forward legislation to ban greyhound racing in England, aligning with the direction of travel in Scotland and Wales.

Doing so would place animal protection firmly at the heart of policymaking, properly reflect the values of a nation of animal lovers, and help deliver on this Labour government’s commitment to reduce gambling harms.

Neil Duncan-Jordan is the Labour MP for Poole