Aspiration for the South

Andy Burnham is back on the Labour leadership campaign trail, after a domestic situation understandably took him away from it for a while.

Although the leadership contenders seem to be in agreement that, at the General Election, Labour lost significantly in the south of the country and that region needs to be specifically targeted, none of them seems to have a grasp of how that ought to be tackled.

Burnham's new booklet, Aspirational Socialism, (according to Iain Martin who has read it in its entirety)...

"...sounds, unless I’ve missed something (and I read it all), like more tax and more regulation. Of how Britain might make its living and encourage businesses of all sizes and entrepreneurs to make more money, that can be spent on all these schemes for “fairness” he proposes, there is almost nothing said."

Same old same old...

I'd have read the PDF version of the booklet myself, but as Dizzy has found out, the provided link doesn't actually go anywhere!

UPDATE: I've now found it here. It's difficult to read, owing to poor font choices and a less than ideal page layout; but I'll have a proper go later, probably this evening. The opening pages seem good on the surface, but key words and phrases such as "collectivism and redistribution" give the game away; so I can already see something of what Iain Martin has found...