.@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."

Burnham Says Brexit Failed. Britain’s Trade Figures Tell a Very Different Story Remember the warnings that Brexit would cut Britain off from its largest market? Five years after Britain left the Single Market, we have enough evidence to ask what actually happened. The figures tell a rather different story from the one Brexit's critics would have us believe. The EU remains our largest trading partner. British firms still sell hundreds of billions of pounds of goods and services there each year, and services sales have grown strongly. In 2019, Britain sold £294 billion of goods and services to the EU. In 2025, it sold £384 billion. The EU took 43 per cent of our exports before Brexit. It took 41 per cent in 2025, and its share has stayed between 41 and 44 per cent for a decade. The picture is not all flattering, and it should be described honestly. Adjusted for inflation, goods exports to the EU are 14 per cent below their 2019 level. Brexit added real friction to goods trade, and that shows in the gap between the EU figure and the 8 per cent fall in goods exports to the rest of the world. But part of the weakness reflects the changing shape of Britain itself. Manufacturing has fallen from 17 per cent of economic output in 1990 to about 9 per cent today, roughly half its former share of the economy, while services have grown from 70 per cent to 80 per cent. Britain has spent decades becoming less dependent on manufacturing and more dependent on services. Since 2019 the pandemic, the energy shock and weak global demand for goods have pulled in the same direction. Brexit cannot be the whole explanation. Services tell a very different story. In real terms, British services exports to the EU are 28 per cent higher than in 2019. To the rest of the world, they are up 26 per cent. That matters because services make up roughly four-fifths of our economic output. Britain now exports more services than goods, and the surplus on services, about £54 billion in the last quarter of 2025, almost exactly offsets the £58 billion deficit on goods. Law, finance, accountancy, engineering, advertising and technology are what modern Britain sells best. Yet listen to the Brexit debate and you could be forgiven for thinking the whole economy consists of lorries queuing at Dover. Andy Burnham now wants to reopen that debate. If his answer to Britain's economic problems is much closer alignment with the EU, he must say what he would align, and what Britain would receive in return. Which barriers would fall? Which sectors would gain? Which powers would be constrained? And how would his settlement serve the services economy, where Britain holds a formidable international advantage? None of this proves a Brexit trade boom, and there was none. What the figures do demolish is the caricature that leaving the EU severed Britain from Europe. We left its political institutions. We did not tow the country into the mid-Atlantic. The weakness in goods exports is real and deserves serious policy, but it afflicts trade outside the EU as well as within it, while services have performed spectacularly. So before Burnham trades regulatory freedom for closer alignment, he owes the country the economic case rather than a bare pronouncement that Brexit failed. Show us the deal. Why should a country whose export strength increasingly lies in services bind itself to a regulatory system because goods trade has disappointed? The serious argument about Brexit concerns the extra friction in goods trade, the value of regulatory autonomy, and whether governments have properly used the freedoms we regained. Have that argument. But drop the fiction that Britain stopped trading successfully with Europe. The numbers do not support it. "Before Burnham trades regulatory freedom for closer alignment, he owes the country the economic case rather than a bare pronouncement that Brexit failed."