.@andyburnham, with respect, you treat the British public with contempt if you expect us to swallow this. Britain has the dearest industrial electricity in the IEA, and you want us to blame 1986. You say we pay some of the highest energy bills in Europe because we privatised the basics, and you blame conflict overseas. But the data supports neither claim. British industrial gas prices sit below the IEA median. Industrial electricity does not. In 2023 British industry paid 25.85p per kWh against an IEA average of 17.7p. Over the last decade the premium over the median has run between 17% and 49%. In 2024 we had the highest industrial electricity prices of any IEA member with data available. If gas were the cause, we would be near average. We are at the top. Wholesale costs drove most of the rise since 2021, but they cannot explain why we pay more than our neighbours for the same gas. Policy can. Taxes and levies on household electricity rose 59% in real terms between 2017 and 2025, when they made up 23% of the average bill. One Oxford Institute for Energy Studies estimate puts policy related costs at 33% of the pre-tax electricity bill once contracts for difference, carbon charges and the capacity market are counted. The government's own analysis has supported British industry paying £86 per MWh from this year, against £69 in France and £60 in Germany. The relief your government announced in April was a transfer. It scrapped a levy funded efficiency scheme and moved 75% of the domestic cost of the Renewables Obligation onto general taxation. The cost did not disappear. The Treasury now collects it from the same households through tax. Then the grid. The typical household is on a price cap of £1,723 a year, up £60 since July. Networks made up about 30% of the spring price cap, and Ofgem has set out a further expansion of local networks for 2028 to 2033, paid for by households through higher charges. Your answer is Great British Grid. It will be funded from Great British Energy's existing budgets and will work with the private sector and network companies. That means no new money, no new cable and one more public body. Your own government has also acknowledged that its buy British approach to grid contracts could add cost, yet no full impact assessment has been carried out. You promise European prices within a decade. You have not shown us the bill. You speak of lost control. You were a cabinet minister when the Climate Change Act passed in 2008. Ed Miliband, its author, later set the Clean Power 2030 target. Britain refuses new North Sea licences and imports gas it could produce at home. Gas remains the marginal source that sets the wholesale electricity price, so every turbine added on this model leaves the bill tied to gas while households fund the cables and backup behind it. Public ownership has been tried locally. Nottingham's Robin Hood Energy cost taxpayers an estimated £38m. Bristol Energy, closed this week, left a final bill of £39.3m. Both were Labour-run councils. Solar panels on a library roof are pleasant. They will not move a national price. Bills fall when costs fall. Remove levies that don't belong on electricity. Licence new North Sea fields. Build nuclear on time. Then publish what your plan costs and who pays for it. "Burnham was a cabinet minister when the Climate Change Act passed in 2008. Ed Miliband, its author, later set the Clean Power 2030 target."

Britain Is Pricing Out Its Own Young While Opening The Door To Everyone Else Pat McFadden flew to Rotterdam to find out why British youth cannot find work. He came home with a plan for youth hubs and a column blaming the death of the paper round. He did not need the flight. The answer was sitting in his own department's data: 27 young non-EU migrants hired in Britain for every one young British worker since 2020. Non-EU youth employment up 355 percent. The young British workforce grew by 0.3 percent over the same period. His own figures describe displacement. His own review, led by Alan Milburn, concluded there was no evidence immigration played any role. The same department wrote both documents. They cannot both be right. Now Andy Burnham proposes to widen the door McFadden's department has just spent a review pretending does not exist. A youth mobility scheme with the EU could bring up to 100,000 young Europeans into Britain to work, study and live, with reciprocal rights for young Britons who, on current form, will be competing for jobs that do not exist at home either. Strip away the language of partnership and what remains is a bargaining chip, traded for access to an EU industrial scheme a "well-placed European source" would only call a vibe. Alongside it sits a plan to cut tuition fees for EU students from £38,000 to £9,535, brought back from the dead after Sir Keir Starmer shelved it on his way out of Downing Street. The timing could not be worse chosen. The Student Loans Company has just admitted it has lost track of more than 370,000 graduates owing almost £13 billion, many of them EU nationals who took a British loan and left the country beyond reach of the taxman. Britain already cannot collect from the EU students it has funded. The proposed answer is to fund more of them, at a steeper discount, then hand the same cohort a formal route into the labour market once the degree is done. Each piece of this, taken alone, might survive scrutiny. Taken together, they describe a government working against its own stated priority in three directions at once. Entry-level jobs were made more expensive by October's budget, through the employer National Insurance rise and a near twenty percent jump in the youth minimum wage. The government spends twenty-five times more paying young people to stay unemployed than it spends helping them into work. Youth unemployment stands at 16.2 percent. Nearly one million young Britons are not in education, employment or training. Against that backdrop, ministers are simultaneously discounting the entry price for foreign students and negotiating a treaty to bring more foreign workers in. McFadden calls this an oversight of technology and habit. Burnham calls it a step-change in relations. Neither has explained why a government that cannot find jobs for its own school leavers is competing for the ones that remain against a subsidised, mobile, and untraceable cohort of its own making. The paper round did not disappear because of Deliveroo. It disappeared into a labour market Westminster has spent two years quietly stacking against the young people it was elected to serve. That is the real reset on offer this autumn. Not of Britain's relationship with Europe, but of who Britain's economy is actually run for. "Andy Burnham is negotiating access to EU trade schemes at the cost of Britain's own youth labour market"