Ahead of Labour conference, Andy Burnham took to the regional airwaves today for a shameless exercise in pandering to the party faithful. Kicking off by bending the knee to Remainers, the Prime Minister declared that Brexit was to blame for the small-boats crisis.
Asked by the BBC about the continuing border farce, Burnham responded:
I do point to the loss of collaboration with neighbours that came with Brexit. That hasn’t helped. We had a more cooperative system, if you like, in the past, so we are not able to have the same levels of collaboration that we used to have. But I don’t put that forward as a reason why we won’t keep working until we get the crossings right down.
The Prime Minister then insisted that his goal was clear: ‘We don’t want to see any crossings at all.’ Mr S can say with some confidence that calling for an end to illegal arrivals will not be the view of swathes of open border nuts descending on Liverpool for Labour’s annual lefty piss-up.
Responding to the Brexit bashing, shadow home secretary Chris Philp said: ‘This is total nonsense. Andy Burnham is gaslighting us all to hide his own failures, with over 1,000 illegal immigrants coming in this week alone. Under the previous Dublin arrangements in the EU, we only ever sent a handful of people back to Europe, and in fact received more than we sent.’
Away from immigration, Our And-eh turned to left-wing demands that the Prime Minister refuse to engage openly with The Sun. While it has long been known that Burnham will not give direct interviews to the paper, today he said so out loud for the first time. He told the Beeb: ‘I’m not going to go into my precise media arrangements, but it’s clear what my position is. I won’t be doing any special interviews (with The Sun), no.’
Burnham also ruled out an early general election, though Mr S is not buying that for a minute. After all, Labour has never knowingly let a promise stand in the way of a good U-turn…
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