Seven Prime Ministers, Sixteen Years, and I'm Meant to Feel Something About the Latest One

Andy Burnham gets sworn in today. I'm writing this the morning of, because I wanted to get my actual thoughts down before the news cycle tells me what my thoughts are supposed to be.

Since 2010: Cameron, Cameron-Clegg, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, Starmer. Now Burnham. That's seven different people holding the top job in sixteen years, which averages out to just over two years each, and even that average is generous, because it's dragged up by Cameron and Blair-adjacent stability at one end and Truss's forty-nine days propping up the other. Nobody in this country under the age of about twenty-five has lived through a stretch of political continuity long enough to actually judge a government on what it did rather than what it promised before the next one turned up.

I don't think that's a coincidence, and I don't think it's healthy, and I want to say both of those things before I say anything about Burnham specifically, because the revolving door is the story here. He's just the man currently standing in the doorway.

The Door Keeps Turning, Whoever's Walking Through It

A government that changes leader every couple of years isn't a government that's course-correcting. It's a government that's stopped being able to plan past the next reshuffle. You can't fix social care, or housing, or the NHS, on a timescale shorter than a single parliamentary term, and we've had six changes of occupant in a period that should reasonably have held three, maybe four, terms total.

Burnham himself said something close to this in his first speech as leader – that power's been draining out of every region and nation of this country for four decades, slowly enough that most people didn't clock it happening in real time. I think he's right about the diagnosis. I'm considerably less sure anyone currently holding a red box is capable of reversing it, because reversing it requires the kind of patience that a revolving-door political culture actively punishes. You get maybe eighteen months of goodwill before the polls turn and the knives come out, and eighteen months isn't enough time to turn a supertanker, whatever the supertanker in question actually is.

For What It's Worth, on Burnham Specifically

If you're new here: I'm Scottish by a quarter and English by the rest of it, raised in England, and about as instinctively suspicious of Westminster as a person can be without actually living north of the border. So take the following with whatever grain of salt that context earns it.

Burnham built his entire political identity on being the "King of the North" – a phrase I've seen him use unironically often enough that I believe he means it, or at least believes he means it, which in politics is sometimes the same thing. Manchester's devolution settlement under his mayoralty is genuinely one of the more interesting things to happen to English regional politics in my lifetime, and if there's a version of Burnham's premiership that actually delivers something, it's probably built on the same instinct: power held closer to the people it affects, rather than parked permanently in Whitehall.

Whether that instinct survives contact with Downing Street is the actual question, and it's not one I can answer from here, because every one of his six predecessors also arrived promising something that looked like renewal and left having delivered something that looked like managed decline. I want to believe "for us" is more than a by-election slogan stretched over a bigger job. I've watched enough of these arrivals now to know that wanting to believe it and having good reason to believe it are different things.

Where I'm Actually Sitting While I Watch This

I'll say plainly what I'm bringing to this, because I don't think it's honest to pretend I'm a neutral observer of a revolving door I'm not personally affected by. I'm Gen Z, I'm queer, I'm disabled, and the last several years of whoever's currently holding the red box haven't exactly been built with people like me in mind. I want to be specific about that rather than just gesture at a vibe, because "oppressive" is a word I don't think you get to use without pointing at something.

The Online Safety Act

Age verification requirements that mean handing over ID or a face scan to a third-party checker just to read things that were legal to read the day before the Act came into force, sold the whole time as a child-protection measure while functioning, in practice, as a mechanism that pushes anyone who values privacy toward a VPN and does approximately nothing to stop the specific harms it was named after. I'm not against protecting children online. I am against a law that treats every adult as a suspect first and a citizen second, and calls that trade-off obvious.

I've watched the 1984 comparisons pile up online since the Act came into force, and I get why people reach for them – a government that wants your face on file before it'll let you read something, a name for the law that means roughly the opposite of what the law does, the general sense of being catalogued for your own good. It's not a perfect fit, and I think it gets thrown around too easily as a reflex rather than an argument – Orwell was writing about a one-party surveillance state with telescreens in every room, not an age-gate on a website, and collapsing the two flattens what's actually alarming about each. But the instinct underneath the comparison isn't wrong even if the specific book is the wrong shorthand: a state that asks "prove who you are before I'll let you access information" is doing something with a real lineage, and pretending the lineage doesn't exist because the current version comes with a cookie banner instead of a telescreen is its own kind of naivety.

The EHRC Guidance, and What It Actually Asks People to Do

The EHRC's single-sex spaces guidance is the one that lands closest to home, because it's not abstract to me – it's my transgender friends. That guidance comes into force next month and effectively permits service providers to exclude trans people from the toilets, changing rooms, refuges, and wards that match who they actually are, following on from last year's Supreme Court ruling on the legal meaning of "sex" under the Equality Act. Starmer welcomed that ruling as clarity. For the people I know who are actually going to live under it, it isn't clarity. It's a door that used to be open quietly closing, dressed up in the language of resolving ambiguity rather than the language of what it actually does, which is make some of the people I care about most legally excludable from ordinary public life.

And I want to say the thing underneath that plainly, because the policy language obscures it: the entire premise of this guidance rests on the idea that trans people are the ones who might be looking at what's in someone else's pants. That's the fear being legislated for. Meanwhile the actual mechanism of the guidance requires someone, somewhere, to make that exact determination about a stranger before deciding whether they're allowed through a door – a bouncer, a receptionist, a fellow member of the public, eyeballing a person and deciding whether their body matches the sign on the wall. The thing trans people are accused of doing is the thing the law now requires everyone else to do to them. I don't think that inversion is an accident. I think it's the whole design.

Why It Doesn't Stop With Trans People

It doesn't stop at that one policy either. It's the general temperature – queer people treated as a subject for debate rather than a fact of life, over and over, in slightly different clothes each time. I'm a gay man, and I notice it. Not because every headline is aimed at me specifically, but because the mechanism doesn't actually care which letter it's currently pointed at. Today it's trans people and toilets. The framing that makes that thinkable – that someone's existence is a policy question rather than a person – doesn't stay contained to the group it started with. It never has, historically, and I don't see why this decade would be the exception.

What a "Review" Actually Is

The disability point is its own version of the same thing, and it's got a specific shape I'm tired of. Disabled people who can't work get filed under "lazy" or "leech" by a chunk of the same political conversation that's currently tightening what support looks like, as though needing help is itself the character flaw rather than a fact about a body.

The word "review" doesn't cover what actually happens in one. Calling it that is dehumanising on its own, before you even get to what's inside it. I've had four brain surgeries in my life so far. Nobody chooses that. Nobody sits down and decides four separate times that this is how they'd like to spend a portion of their one life. The NHS has the records. Multiple chronic conditions, diagnosed, documented, sitting in a system the DWP could pull from directly if the process were actually built around trusting the evidence it's given rather than making you re-perform your own suffering on command. Instead you get a "review," a word that makes it sound like paperwork, when what it actually is is a stranger deciding whether your documented, diagnosed reality is convincing enough today.

My dad had to be actively dying of cancer before the system agreed he qualified for a house. I went through my own PIP assessment and came out the other side with the bare minimum, despite not being able to leave my own town without my mum's help – and every friend I've told that to has said the same thing without me prompting them: that I should have gotten more. That's not one bad case worker having an off day. That's what the process is built to produce.

Most of us aren't asking for much. We just want to live – ordinarily, without having to prove our suffering is severe enough to deserve the bare minimum, without every review feeling like an interrogation you have to win. That's not a big ask. It gets treated like one anyway.

The NEET Numbers, And Now Mine Too

There's a number I've quoted on this blog before without it applying to me personally, and it applies to me now: over a million 16-to-24-year-olds in the UK are NEET – not in education, employment, or training. The latest figures put it at 1.01 million as of the first quarter of this year, 13.5% of the age group, up by 89,000 on the year before. That's the highest the number's been since 2013, and it's climbing, not levelling off. I'm in that number now. Not because I stopped trying, not because I stopped building things – you've read the rest of this blog, you know that isn't what happened – but because "trying" and "being counted as NEET" turn out to be entirely compatible states, and nobody warns you about that until you're the statistic instead of the person quoting it.

The maths under that number is the maths I've already gone through elsewhere on here: not enough real entry-level roles, a chunk of what's advertised asking for years of experience it has no business asking for, and a share of postings that were never going to hire anyone in the first place. But there's a second layer to being stuck that doesn't show up in an employment statistic at all, and it's the one that's actually been grinding me down day to day: even the free version of having a life has mostly stopped being free. Hanging around somewhere that isn't your own bedroom, in a town that hasn't been actively hostile-architectured against loitering, without buying a coffee you can't really afford to justify sitting there – that used to just be what being young looked like, and increasingly it isn't an option at all. Gen Z isn't just locked out of the labour market. We're being quietly priced out of existing in public while we wait for it.

And Then There's Housing

I've already written about this at length elsewhere on this blog, so I won't relitigate the whole argument here – the short version is that homeownership for my generation has roughly halved from where it stood for the generation before us, off the back of policy choices made by people who will never have to live with the consequences of them.

The Shape Underneath All of It

None of those five are the same kind of problem. One's a surveillance law, one's a rights rollback dressed up as clarity while quietly requiring strangers to police each other's bodies, one's a decades-long habit of treating need as suspicious, one's a job market that's stopped producing the roles it advertises while pricing people out of even the free version of a life, one's four decades of asset-protection dressed up as prudence. But they share a shape: something narrows, someone official calls it necessary, and the people actually affected are the last ones consulted about it. None of them got any better across six changes of occupant behind that door, either – which is the thread I want to pick back up properly in a minute. When I write about hopelessness on this blog, about never owning a house, about a job market that demands experience it refuses to hand out, that's not a separate complaint from this one. It's the same rot, aimed at a slightly different part of me each time.

Why I Don't Think Westminster Fixes Any of This

Here's the thread I said I'd pick back up: six changes of occupant behind that door, and not one of them touched the things I've just listed. That's not a coincidence either, and it's the actual reason I don't think the fix is a better prime minister. It's fewer things for a prime minister in London to have power over in the first place.

The Voting Data Underneath the Instability

Start with where the instability is actually taking people, because it tells you something. Look at where the votes are going and the picture's more interesting than "the extremes are rising," which is the lazy read I keep seeing. Reform's growth is mostly older voters, mostly immigration-driven, mostly a right-wing answer to feeling ignored. The Greens' growth is mostly under-25s, and a lot of it is Labour-shaped disappointment specifically – people who thought the 2024 landslide meant something and watched two years of managed decline instead. Two different diagnoses, pulling in opposite directions, agreeing on exactly one thing: whatever this is, it isn't working. When Reform and the Greens are both gaining ground off the same broken centre, from opposite ends, that's not noise. That's a country telling you something in the only language first-past-the-post lets it use.

I don't think Burnham fixes that by being slightly more sincere than the last six. Sincerity's not nothing, but it's not a policy either, and the people I'm talking about – mine, Gen Z, queer, disabled, all three at once in my case – need outcomes, not tone.

Where That Actually Leaves Me

I'll say the conclusion I've been building toward directly, then: I want the home nations independent. All of them. Not as a constitutional abstraction I've read about, but as the actual place everything above points. A revolving door of prime ministers, a surveillance-flavoured internet law, a guidance document that turns strangers into bouncers at the door of a bathroom, a benefits system that makes you re-prove your own diagnosis on a schedule someone else sets, a job market that's stopped producing the roles it advertises, a housing market rigged for the people who already own the houses – none of that reads to me like a system that needs a better driver. It reads like a system that's working as designed, for people it was never designed to include.

I want to be careful here, because "independence fixes everything" is a lazy argument and I don't actually believe it. Reform's polling is rising in Scotland too, not just south of the border – nobody up there gets a free pass on the drift I've spent this whole post being angry about. Devolved governments make bad calls, get things wrong, disappoint people who voted for them in good faith, same as any government does anywhere. I'm not selling a utopia. I'm making a narrower claim: on the specific things I've listed in this post, the devolved instinct and the Westminster instinct have not been pointing the same direction, and that gap is worth taking seriously rather than waving away as sentiment.

The Bill That Proves the Gap Is Real

Take gender recognition specifically, since it's the one that touches my friends directly. Holyrood passed its own Gender Recognition Reform Bill in 2022, and Westminster blocked it from ever becoming law using a Section 35 order – the UK government reaching directly into Scotland's own legislative process to stop it doing the more permissive thing it had already voted for. That's not a hypothetical difference in tone between two governments. That's an actual attempt at a kinder law getting overruled by the parliament with the bigger stick. Say what you like about whether that specific bill was drafted well – plenty of people did, on all sides – but the shape of the intervention tells you something true regardless: when Holyrood tried to move in a direction I'd have wanted, Westminster's answer was no, not because of the policy detail but because it could.

Why Glasgow, Why Skye

None of this is abstract for me personally either. I'm a quarter Scottish, I've been learning Gàidhlig for a while now, and Glasgow – or further out, Skye – isn't a daydream I mention once and drop. It's where I actually picture myself ending up, partly for the language and the land and the family thread that runs there, and partly, honestly, because the politics up there has felt more like it's reaching toward the kind of world I want to live in than the politics coming out of Westminster ever has. I don't think that's naivety. I think it's paying attention to which direction things have actually been moving, in the specific places I've got reason to care about, and choosing accordingly.

Burnham won't touch any of this, for what it's worth. No Labour leader with a UK-wide coalition to hold together is going to spend political capital arguing for the dissolution of the thing that put him in Downing Street. That's not a criticism of him specifically. It's just a structural fact about what a UK prime minister is for.

What I'm Actually Watching For

Not the first hundred days. Nobody's first hundred days mean anything; they're theatre, and everyone involved knows they're theatre. What I'm watching for is whether the door stops turning – whether Burnham's government still exists as a recognisable, roughly consistent thing in three years, in five, long enough to actually be judged on outcomes rather than optics.

I doubt it, if I'm honest. Reform's sat there polling well against a governing party that keeps changing captains mid-storm, and nothing about a seventh PM in sixteen years suggests the underlying instability that produced six changes has gone anywhere. Burnham inherits the same fractured coalition, the same impatient electorate, the same media cycle that turns "give it time" into "why hasn't it worked yet" inside a single news week.

I hope I'm wrong. I'd like, just once before I'm too old to remember what the alternative looked like, to watch a UK government get far enough into a project that I can actually tell you whether it worked. That's a low bar. We haven't cleared it in sixteen years.