Meeting held on Wed 19th August 2026 at 7.30pm
Three people were present. Four sent their apologies.
Following the unnecessary bye election in Clacton we wondered how relevant Farage might be. He has failed to avoid the scrutiny on the Parliamentary Standards Committee regarding financial matters. In the media and public appearances he presents himself as the injured party in the face of ‘The Establishment’. He appears to have lost his confidence and perhaps is more of a loser then a winner. The Reform Party appears to be in some chaos and Farage’s and Reform’s ratings are in decline.
At the same time, the Green Party has also lost ground. Its supporters who had defected from the left of the Labour Party are perhaps now wondering if Labour, under Burnham, might be more to the left than it was under Starmer.
However we had some scepticism regarding Burnham. We felt he had not yet really shown a commitment to redistributing wealth to the poor. While he has made a number of policy decisions, they are all small matters. For example, he focused on BBQs rather than climate change as a major cause of wildfires, when he should be using the recent wildfires to draw people’s attention to climate change. It also seems that he is likely to support further oil/gas drilling in the N Sea, but is avoiding making a decision on that while the public’s attention is on the wildfires and the need to address climate change.
On foreign policy he had also shown no commitment to supporting Palestine or applying economic pressure on Israel, or done anything to risk alienating Trump.
We noted that he had created a “Number 10” of the North. But was this really any more than window dressing? We appreciated that he had put his energy into travelling around the country to gain a sense of what the public want and look forward to seeing how this might help to shape forthcoming policy decisions. As yet, it is still very much the “silly season” in politics where there is little happening.
The next meeting will be on Wednesday 16th September.