Grumpy from Basildon @GrumpyfromBas

£700,000 for Migrants. 18,000 Homeless in Manchester. That's the Burnham Method. Andy Burnham is asking the voters of Makerfield to send him to Westminster. Before they do, they should know what he has been doing with their money in Manchester. This week it emerged that Burnham's Greater Manchester Combined Authority is spending £722,685 on schemes to help migrants navigate the British welfare system. The Safe Transitions programme will provide guidance in multiple languages helping refugees understand their rights, entitlements and access to housing, benefits and public services. A Refugee Lodging Scheme will match refugees with resident landlords who will support them to access housing, benefits, employment, education and community networks. Greater Manchester already hosts more than 8,500 people in asylum support accommodation. More than 18,000 people across the region have no permanent address. One in every 61 people in Manchester alone is homeless. The £700,000 is not going to them. This is not a one-off decision. It is the visible expression of a consistent set of political instincts that Burnham has spent years developing and is now quietly concealing ahead of June 18. Since 2019 he has repeatedly called for the abolition of the No Recourse to Public Funds policy, the rule that prevents migrants from immediately accessing Britain's welfare state and social housing. He called for it on his mayoral website in 2019. He signed a joint letter demanding it in 2023. He launched a pilot programme in Manchester called the Living Income Campaign, designed to top up the incomes of those living under NRPF conditions and build the case for scrapping the rule nationally. He has now quietly dropped that position. Not because he has changed his mind. Because he is campaigning in Makerfield. His allies have confirmed that as Prime Minister he would tear up the multi-billion pound Home Office contracts with private asylum accommodation providers and hand responsibility to local councils. Dispersal housing rather than hotels. The saving is real. Hotel rooms cost £145 per person per night against £23.25 for dispersal housing. But dispersal housing means more migrants placed directly into communities like Makerfield, Wigan and the surrounding boroughs, without the visibility of a hotel that can be identified and closed. The cost saving comes with a community cost that nobody is discussing. Meanwhile Makerfield itself tells a different story to the one Burnham is presenting on the doorstep. The constituency sits within a region where Reform won all eight council wards in May's local elections with around fifty percent of the vote. Around two thirds of the constituency voted Leave in 2016. The voters who went to Reform did so because they feel their communities have been transformed without consent, their housing lists lengthened, their public services stretched and their concerns dismissed. Burnham's answer to those concerns is to spend £700,000 helping more migrants access the same overstretched system. The repositioning on NRPF is the tell. A politician who held a position for six years, built a pilot programme around it and signed letters demanding it nationally does not abandon it because he has been persuaded by the evidence. He abandons it because the polling in Makerfield made it electorally inconvenient. The same thing happened with his position on EU rejoining, held on Saturday and walked back by Sunday when his team realised around two thirds of the constituency voted Leave. The voters of Makerfield are not being asked to elect a mayor. They are being asked to send a potential Prime Minister to Westminster. The £700,000 tells them more about what that Prime Minister would do than any doorstep conversation. It tells them what he does when nobody in Makerfield is watching. "One in every 61 people in Manchester alone is homeless. The £700,000 is not going to them."

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🚨JAILED: 21-year-old Mohammed Fahir Amaaz has been sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison for assaulting two female police officers and a member of the public at Manchester Airport in 2024. Is this truly justice?

#Stoptheboats

@Daily_Express are u selective on what you post here than on Facebook 5hrs ago? Fears of an outbreak have erupted at an Essex asylum hotel after a small-boat migrant tested positive for tuberculosis. The man is currently living in an asylum hotel in Essex and has been quarantined

@Keir_Starmer Bore off

@Keir_Starmer

Beethoven was tone deaf writing this, it was used in the wanKIER’s departure (who is also tone deaf). It over played his resignation by a spectator he labelling as a yob. Bye kier 👋 🤣 it’s now my ringtone

My friends, The crackdown on identitarians continues. We are forced to submit to our invaders, forced to love our tormentors. Protect your freedom of speech at all costs, because otherwise you’ll be next. Keep fighting. Please share and support @gannat_JEG !

@isaacrrr7 Lucky wasn’t from the UK or she would of felt the full force of Starmer Law

🇬🇧 UK lawyer Paul Powlesland cleaned 200 bags of waste from a polluted river. Fish and dragonflies have returned. Now he faces up to 2 years in prison for doing it without a permit. This is modern Britain: punishing people who actually clean up the environment while the bureaucracy strangles common sense. Absolutely insane. Source: @Coinvo / Writer: Oliver x.com/Coinvo/status/…

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If the UK replaced the simple left-right political spectrum with a quadrant system, people could express their views more accurately instead of feeling forced to pick a side

I blame France

@PolitlcsUK One incident like this and it’s @RupertLowe10 fault?

@Keir_Starmer Assuming mental health isn’t a factor? 🤔

This isn’t the way forward..

@Neccccy illegal murdering, raping immigrants is all that’s needed, many are respectable

@Avabelly__ I’d be more concerned with you showing your face 🤣

🤣🤣 @elonmusk

@vxylily Dynamo