A new Imperial Dynasty begins after the fanfare of the Starmerian just two years ago, and the usual highly personalised deposition in Labour Party processes. This time the new Emperor comes not from Rome, sorry London, but Manchester, the once industrial power house of factories and rail and canals and very hard working people. And just as when Emperors came not from Rome anymore but Leptis Magna in North Africa, Syria, or the brute force of the Illyrians of our present day Balkans, Serbia, Slovenia, and still those eastern Europeans are big tough people, because the Empire was big and complicated, so the Labour Party extends its control out of London to try and answer, and solve, the complications of the ‘UK’.
And just as some Emperors who achieved the glory of that title did then make things very good for their friends with estates and gold and roles not at all related to their ability, so the Burnhamian dynasty has set off in the right direction.
Sir Kier Starmer ‘successfully’ emptied the House of Lords of its 92 remaining hereditary peers with the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Act 2026 which ensured when the Parliamentary session ended on April 29th 2026, so did they. So did their combined inestimable knowledge, context, lack of ego and personal glory, understanding of what service is, understanding of history, understanding of geography, understanding of constitutional power, understanding of the importance and role of the House of Lords, oh the list could go on…Their departure left a good number of empty seats, but not for long.
Only a few months after emptying the capabilities of the remaining hereditary peers, the new arrivals appear. Prime Minister Burnham, talking much about devolution, about the economic growth which will come to each and every city, town, village and hamlet under his policies, has started off in as polar opposite as could be, and offered the chameleon leader of Labour in Scotland the chance to climb that Stairway to Heaven, there to sit with the increasing number of Labour appointees or gift arrivals. It is quickly forgotten that Anas Sarwar himself called for the HoL to be abolished. The House of Lords looks more and more like a Labour slush fund, and the question raised over this lack of respect from Labour towards the present governmental level, which is Westminster and the HoL, the court system, the police, the Armed Forces such as they still exist, and the present devolved powers, is where is governance going to exist under the Burnhamian era?
If further devolution actually becomes a race to the bottom instead of this glorious new era we are about to enter, where is the constitutional power held? The constitutional crisis caused by Tony Blair’s devolution policies just gets worse and worse, more questions which cannot be answered and more problems which require an urgent solution. Now another Imperial Prime Minister with the charismatic rhetoric and a big story, speaking directly to ‘the people’, taking them ‘with him’, with the crumbling constitutional edifice filling the backdrop behind him.