Andy Burnham suggests he won't give interviews to The S*n

Labour leadership contender Andy Burnham has said if he wins the race to lead his party he would not do “special favours” for The S*n newspaper.

He suggested that, while the newspaper may report words he says elsewhere, he may not speak directly to The S*n

In an interview Mr Burnham told the BBC he has not forgiven the paper for the way it covered the Hillsborough disaster.

Mr Burnham is battling against shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper, Liz Kendall and left-wing candidate Jeremy Corbyn to lead Labour. The S*n has backed contender Liz Kendall for leader.

But in the BBC interview Mr Burnham said he did not do “special favours” for papers which “attack” him or the Labour Party.

And when he was questioned specifically about the S*n, Mr Burnham told the Sunday Politics North West programme: “I give interviews generally and people can report my words. But I don’t do special favours for newspapers that attack me and attack my party.”

During the same interview Mr Burnham, who is MP for Leigh in Greater Manchester, said he admired former Tony Blair but said the former PM was too close to business and the media.

He said: “I was a member of his government and I in the end, you’ll remember, went to Anfield in 2009 and we saw what happened when a Labour city expressed its feelings that a Labour government that hadn’t been listening to it.

“And why? Because I saw Tony at times get too close to vested interests in business and the media.

“So close that his government couldn’t hear a whole city crying injustice. Now that would never happen under my leadership.”


http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/andy-burnham-suggests-wont-give-9639178


Andy Burnham for Prime Minister

He seems a good guy, but I worry he would be another Miliband in terms of appeal to the masses and, ahem, stature...

Anyone who would outright snub the Sun is alright by me though haha

A Good guy!?


No... just another corrupt leftie double speaking hypocrite!!!


http://www.libdemvoice.org/opinion-what-andy-burnham-didnt-tell-you-about-nhs-privatisation-42072.html

Tommy Monk wrote:A Good guy!?


No... just another corrupt leftie double speaking hypocrite!!!


http://www.libdemvoice.org/opinion-what-andy-burnham-didnt-tell-you-about-nhs-privatisation-42072.html

A liberal democrat candidate said...

I like Andy Burnham, compare him at Anfield to Gideon at the Olympics!

Andy Burnham for Prime Minister!

Doesn't matter where the article comes from... it tells of labour and burnham involvement in privatising the NHS...





Andy Burnham’s recent set-piece speech on the NHS, the latest instalment of Labour’s “summer offensive”, opened with a neat bit of scene-setting. By briefly championing a group of Darlington mothers who are presently marching 300 miles in protest at the use of private providers in the NHS, he conjured a mood of protest while subtly co-opting their campaign. Thereafter he sought only to reduce the 2015 general election to a “binary choice” between “a part-privatised, two-tier health market under David Cameron” and “a public, integrated national health and care service under Labour.”
In terms of how he defined that choice, though, Burnham could hardly have done worse than to frame his argument with an example from Cambridgeshire, singling out for particular criticism its attempt to integrate care services for older people. On one level, it is easy to understand why he did so. Cambridgeshire’s clinical commissioning group is one of the biggest in the country, meaning that the contract was able to provide the headline figure, £800m over 5 years, such a speech requires.
Politically expedient though this may have been, it is a serious mistake. As the former Secretary of State for Health, Andy Burnham ought to know that highlighting goings-on in Cambridgeshire would immediately invite comparison with Labour’s own record in the Fens. This can only be unhelpful, because, from 2004-10, Cambridgeshire was in effect a national testing ground for Labour’s experiments to involve the private sector in the NHS.
So, as the mothers of Darlington lace-up their walking boots and embark on their march, retracing the footsteps of the Jarrow Crusade, I humbly invite them to take a minor detour from the marchers’ original route so that I can show them around a county whose health economy, although home to some of the best specialist provision and research in the UK, is among the most financially challenged in the country.
Our first port of call would undoubtedly be Hinchingbrooke, the Huntingdon district hospital that is controversially run as an “operating franchise” by Circle Healthcare. The previous Labour Government initiated this £1bn project, a fact which still has the capacity to generate intense cognitive dissonance, even outright denial, among the party faithful. Thus, LabourList’s “definitive” online spreadsheet cites Hinchingbrooke as the second biggest contract “offered to Private Profiteers on David Cameron’s watch” (and the biggest to have been awarded).
Scratch the surface, though, and it quickly becomes clear that the “offering” took place under the Brown Government in July 2009, when the Treasury and the Department of Health approved the outline business case and procurement plan, which meant that private organisations would be invited to bid to run the hospital. Andy Burnham was Secretary of State for Health at the time.
Labour are formally correct to point out that the procurement did not report until November 2010, when the preferred provider was presented to the new government, but it is silly to suggest that Hinchingbrooke is therefore a Coalition initiative. Even if one overlooks the fact that the procurement took place under the Labour legislation that made such tenders possible, every last public-sector bidder had either been eliminated from the procurement by February 2010 or had dropped out, leading the BBC to conclude at the time that the hospital was “poised to be privately run”.
This puts our man Burnham in rather a contradictory position, calling on Cambridgeshire’s commissioners to stop an £800m procurement because a private provider could potentially win a 5-year contract, “which would tie the hands of the next parliament”, when he, while in office, agreed to an even bigger £1bn tender to franchise the management of an NHS hospital, not for five years but for 10. As outgoing Labour MP Frank Dobson says: “that’s the embarrassment in the chamber: because they shout back ‘You started it.'”
Fascinating though it is, the history of Labour’s franchising of Hinchingbrooke should not detain the marchers for long. Much deeper damage to Cambridgeshire’s health economy was wrought by Private Finance Initiatives, two in particular. A £22 million PFI-funded treatment centre, built at Hinchingbrooke in 2004, was based on numerous miscalculations and subsequently contributed to the hospital racking up a £39m deficit that provided the impetus for the franchise arrangement.
Just down the road from Huntingdon, PFI-funded Peterborough City Hospital has been an even bigger disaster. Whilst the hospital itself is a gleaming edifice, significant over-specification and interest repayments that are up-rated using the Retail Price Index measure of inflation quickly led to it amassing a £45.8 million deficit, making it the most loss-making Trust in the NHS. Monitor, the NHS regulator, had warned both the Treasury and the Department of Health that the Trust might be bankrupted by this loan, but these warnings were not heeded. So it is hardly surprising that local health professionals bridle at Mr Burnham’s hectoring remarks about “financial sustainability”.
Unfortunately, the problem is not merely financial. In addition to the vast sums the NHS now spends servicing these extortionate loans, the projects themselves have ossified Cambridgeshire’s existing overprovision of acute care for the foreseeable future. This makes it even more difficult to shift spending out of hospitals and into the community, where care can be preventative, as the hospitals have 30-year loans to pay off. Timescales like these dwarf those of the Older People’s Programme, and make the shadow Health minister’s objections to a five-year contract look absurd.

In the meantime, as the Darlington mums march south to the beat of Andy Burnham’s drum, he might be forgiven for hoping, privately, that Virgin actually wins the £800m contract. Otherwise, if the public sector wins it, the candidates fighting for Labour in Cambridgeshire will find themselves campaigning in a county with two disastrous NHS PFI contracts and the first £1bn privately-run NHS hospital in Britain – which would be ideal, were they not all Labour projects.