Andy Burnham's Democratic Myth

Having won the recent Greater Manchester Combined Authority mayoral election, securing a third term, Andy Burnham, the Labour and Cooperative Party candidate, said:

Being elected to represent [the people of Greater Manchester] means absolutely everything to me. [. . .] I have tried to [reject] the politics of division and culture wars. [. . .] I will continue to adopt a place first, rather than a party first approach. [. . .] This is the new politics we are pioneering. [. . .] This result [. . .] is an emphatic endorsement of the change we are bringing. [. . .] We still need change and that is why it is so good to see the country voting for it at these elections. [. . .] Devolution in England is working and these elections show voters are buying into it and it is time now to go much further.

There are 2,088,644 registered voters in the Greater Manchester region. Total votes cast were 663,631 representing 31.8% of the electorate. Andy Burnham was elected by 420,749 people, representing 20.1% of eligible voters. This means that 79.9% of the electorate did not want Andy Burnham and 68.2% of the voting population didn't elect anyone to rule over them?

Similarly in London, 59.5% of eligible Londoners did not vote for anyone to be their mayor. Of the minority that did vote in London, an even smaller 43.8% of voters "elected" Sadiq Khan, also for his third term. This means that just 17.7% of Londoners chose Sadiq Khan to "lead" them. The nation's capital is currently under the control of a politician who 82.3% of Londoners rejected.

Apparently, this is called "representative democracy."

Burnham was not elected to "represent" anyone, other than the 20% of the population who voted for him. The vast majority of people in Greater Manchester want nothing to do with him. By exploiting the pointless and destructive political system we wrongly call "democracy," Burnham is effectively imposing his authority on the people.

The people of Manchester show no sign of "buying in" to devolution in England. Nor is Burnham accurate when he claims he is "rejecting the politics of division." Most people in the Greater Manchester region are not interested in electing any politician. Empowering a small minority to enforce their will on everyone else, and then having the temerity to call it "an emphatic endorsement," couldn't be more divisive.

Authoritarian diktat is the "new politics" people like Burnham and Khan are "pioneering." They do not "represent" the wider population in any kind of plausible, "democratic" sense. They have no legitimate democratic mandate and, what's worse, they don't even represent the tiny minority of people who were sufficiently bamboozled to vote for them.

Andy Burham's World Economic Forum profile doesn't necessarily imply he's a globalist stooge. It is pretty hard to find a leading political figure who doesn't have a WEF profile. Are they all globalist stooges? Some undoubtedly are, but perhaps not all.

Andy Burnham’s WEF profile

It is the other evidence, in addition, that suggests Burnham "represents" globalist interests rather than the people duped into electing him.

He’s not offering a “place first, rather than a party first approach.” Andy Burnham is offering a global governance first, rather than a people first approach.

For example, in 2021 the WEF reported Burnham's speech delivered to the Summit of Mayors at the globalist’s Climate Adaptation Summit. Speaking to an international audience of mayors and their advisors—most of whom command a similar democratic mandate to Burnham's nonexistent electoral legitimacy—Burnham said:

Given what we all lived through over the past year [COVID-19], I think people are more open to make change to the way we live, the way we work and the way we move around.

This certainly echoes the sentiments of the WEF who stated that COVID-19 was "a unique window of opportunity" to determine "the future state of global relations, the direction of national economies, the priorities of societies, the nature of business models and the management of a global commons." Where the term "global commons" means, in WEF-speak, everything: all life forms, resources, land, water, air and even the entire celestial sphere.

The WEF—representing 200 of the world’s largest multinational corporations—is well placed to make its dreams come true. In 2019, it established it’s “strategic” partnership with the United Nations (UN) to “to accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”

Burnham was among the great and the good who were primed at the UN convened Climate Adaptation Summit to go back to their cities and regions to deliver the UN's and the WEF’s Agenda 2030 program. Burnham was tasked with transforming Greater Manchester in order to comply with so-called sustainable development.

Burnham represents the stakeholders behind the UN's "New Global Coalition" and is also a partner of the UK Tory government, currently led by Rishi Sunak. The UK Tory government is, in turn, a partner with the United Nations. The UK government, the UN and Andy Burnham’s collective ambition is: 

[. . .] to turn international political commitments made through the United Nations Call for Action on Adaptation and Resilience into on-the-ground support for vulnerable communities. [. . .] The Adaptation Action Coalition takes forward the 2019 Call for Action on Adaptation and Resilience from the United Nations Climate Action Summit, committing countries to act now on adaptation, integrate climate risk into all decision making, and increase the availability of adaptation financing.

To this end, a few months after returning from the Climate Adaptation Summit, Andy Burnham signed the Greater Manchester population up to the UN's Making Cities Resilient 2030 (MCR2030) initiative. Thus committing the people of the region to a partnership with, among others, the World Bank, the World Council on City Data (WCCD) and the C40 cities initiative, currently co-chaired by Sadiq Khan. 

Through C40 cities, the people of Greater Manchester have pledged to halve all of their fossil fuel emissions by 2030. In order to meet the UN's Adaptation Plans, they have decided to borrow vast amounts of money, repayable at interest to groups like the the Rockefeller Brothers Fund . Investors like the Rockefellers will—for a profitable tax payer funded return—create the sustainable adaptation and resilience championed by Andy Burnham. 

Now that they are partnered with the WCCD, the people of Greater Manchester have volunteered to hand over their data to help them meet their new "commitment to data driven planning, management and investment." Luckily, this means the people will be able to give away their "high calibre data" to "attract foreign direct investment " in order to advance their sustainable "economic development."  

Of course, no one in Greater Manchester, other than Andy Burnham and his globalist partners, actually chose to do any of this. Not that it matters much because only a few of them "elected" Burnham in any event.

During his third acceptance speech, Burham also said: 

We all need to reconnect power with the promotion of the common good. Rather than what we have seen in recent times: the association of power with corruption and lies. And with that nod to the great new order, I will close by just saying this: I am ready to fight harder than I have ever fought for anything before, for a Greater Manchester where people can live free from the fear of debt, hunger and eviction and where everyone is set up to be a part of the growing success story that is our city region today. [. . .] Thank you so much for your support. I look forward to getting on with the job, again, immediately and I won't let you down.

The “common good” is not defined by andy Burnham, any elected officials, the UK government or the people of Manchester. It is decreed by the UN and its stakeholder capitalist “partners” like the WEF.

The "great new order" is not Burnham's idea either. Most of his policies are decided for him by order of the global governance regime. Even if the people of Greater Manchester did genuinely elect Andy Burnham—which clearly they didn’t—they still wouldn’t have any say in them.

Despite his claims, Burnham does not have the support of the people. Nearly 80% of the population don't want him as leader and the majority of the policies he will implement have been designed by the global public-private partnership he actually represents. 

All this is happening while the UK is led by Rishi Sunak who automatically became prime minister having previously secured the votes of just over 60,000 Conservative Party members. There are about 48 million people eligible to vote in UK elections. Sunak has been prime minister for the past 18 months with an alleged “democratic” mandate to govern handed to him by 0.13% of the UK electorate.

For some unfathomable reason, many people will argue that, as leader of the elected government of the day, Sunak does have a democratic mandate. This isn’t true either because the Tories “won” the 2019 election with only a 44% share of a 67% turnout. This means 14.2 million UK voters “elected” the Tories and 33.8 million didn’t.

You can call that a democratic mandate if you like, but it isn’t remotely credible. What we call “democracy” in the UK is the selection of a their favourite violent gang by a minority who then demand the rests of us submit to its threats and menaces. If we resist we are “anti-democratic” apparently.

How anyone living in the UK is still labouring under the illusion they live in a so-called "democracy" is beyond me. It is a patently absurd contention. 

The great irony is that the solution to all of this undemocratic oppression is real democracy. Democracy has nothing to do with electing representatives to rule over us. Democracy does not mean that we have to obey the diktats of, what independent journalist Gemma O'Doherty quite rightly calls, "puppeticians."

Democracy is a political system first formally established in ancient Greece by Cleisthenes (c. 570–500 BCE). It is a system where we-the people, use random sortition to form our own legislature. In a real democracy, we-the people, also use random sortition to form an Assembly to formally enact legislation.

Most importantly, we-the people, again use random sortition to convene juries that decide upon the practical application of law in jury led trials. If we find the law wanting in one of “our” courts, we retain all the power to annul any and all offending laws, regulations and legislation. 

This is how real democracy is supposed to operate. Alleged "representative democracy," empowering puppeticians like Andy Burnham, Sadiq Khan and Rishi Sunak, is not democracy at all. 

How long are we going to allow the democratic myth to control our lives?