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Authored by Bruce Newsome The New Nuisance,

Britons are struggling to characterize their new Cabinet, following the arrival of a new prime minister on Monday. The Cabinet is not as northern or female as Andy Burnham signaled. Most members have certainly changed. Most are not loyalists to Keir Starmer, even less so to Tony Blair. Like Burnham, many hark back to a mythical golden age of socialism in the 1970s. Like him, most are alarmingly deficient in popular mandate, external qualifications, and even political trust for their new responsibilities.

Let's start with Burnham himself, a man born in Liverpool who pretended to be Mancunian to win the mayoralty of Manchester. He claims to represent the north but has not lived north or east of Manchester. At best, he represents a narrow part of west-central England, just north of the Midlands.

Burnham has always looked south while talking up the north. Burnham was most newsworthy for agitating for changes in national government, despite sharing a party with Starmer.

As Starmer continued to trip himself up with both feet, Burnham was one of the Labourites who prevailed on ministers to brief against their PM. After Starmer blocked Burnham's candidacy for an accidental by-election in February, Burnham prevailed on a local MP to resign from Makerfield to force a by-election in June, which Burnham won easily, to return to Parliament, which would allow him to challenge Starmer for the leadership (less than two years into Starmer's five-year term). Starmer initially vowed to fight on but announced his intent to quit this month. No MP stepped up to challenge Burnham's presumptive run.

Thus, Burnham has no popular mandate to be PM, even within the party, except in the form of pledges by more Parliamentary partisans in support than against. Opposition parties rightly called for a general election to confirm his premiership, but the constitution does not oblige him.

Burnham's supporters pretend that his easy rise proves the strength of his candidacy. In reality, it proves the weakness of his party. It could not find a new leader within its own MPs, despite a whopping majority. It triggered an expensive by-election and a more expensive mayoral election to reach outside of Parliament. Meanwhile, Burnham unwittingly poured scorn on that same Parliamentary party by criticizing normal politics and the London elite. (Since then, he has aired the idea of moving the Cabinet from London to Manchester. His current plan is to spend at least one day per work week there. That's neither efficient nor effective.)

In the many weeks that Burnham enjoyed as rising PM, he remained vague about his Cabinet and his policies.

On Monday, he spent hours appointing just the highest roles in the Cabinet. The other appointments look set to continue for days.

Of the first day's picks, I must start with the only selectee who can be coded as qualified and mandated (although not loyal).

John Healey becomes Chancellor of the Exchequer, the second most powerful position in government. He had quit as defense secretary six weeks ago, over Starmer's procrastination on filling a hole in defense spending. Healey said that Britain should spend 3 percent of GDP on defense by 2030, which means he will need to find a couple dozen billion pounds per year. Previously, he advocated issuing "war bonds," but who would buy them when the government is running record debt? He will need to cut other departments or raise taxes (probably both). On Monday, Healey said "fiscal control" would be his "first duty." You could see the markets' confidence decline immediately.

Healey's resignation suggests a certain loyalty to Burnham, but otherwise they barely know each other. More usefully, he was a minister in the Treasury under Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Yes, Healey is actually qualified by experience! This is remarkable given that his predecessor, Rachel Reeves, falsified her CV, couldn't add, and quickly became the most U-turn-prone and hated chancellor ever, as well as the most tearful.

Healey remains constrained by record government debt and his party's suicidal unwillingness to cut spending. Remember that Starmer increased spending on welfare and benefits, after backbenchers rejected his proposal to cut them. (That was within Starmer's first year of premiership.)

Burnham is an out-and-proud socialist who had already signaled that his government would spend and tax more. By Tuesday, his administration revealed plans to cut VAT (a sales tax) on electricity, to be funded by cutting the Starmer administration's planned digital ID. But the minister responsible for that plan, Darren Jones, revealed, after being fired by Burnham, that digital ID was never funded. So Burnham is either ignorant or dishonest. This . . . doesn't . . . bode . . . well.

In any case, scrapping VAT on electricity doesn't make much difference to a household electricity bill in which most of the pricing goes to fund green initiatives, debt, stealth taxes, and administration.

Burnham already looks unprepared and unreliable.

Confirmation comes in the form of his deviation from his team's prior briefings that he would appoint either Ed Miliband or Shabana Mahmood to the Treasury.

Red Ed goes to the Foreign Office, for which he is woefully unqualified and an undoubted liability. He infuriated the U.S. (and most Britons) as energy secretary, with his absolutism about reaching net-zero carbon by 2030, at whatever cost to the consumer. Ed also, by the way, reminds everybody of the weakness of the party's leadership selection. He was leader from 2010 to 2015, when he literally and metaphorically stumbled at every election husting. Yet Burnham thinks Miliband is the best person to articulate British interests abroad? This won't last long.

Miliband is already hurt. He has been denied the job he wanted, even though he was the first senior minister to call for Starmer to go, and he helped Burnham with an economic plan. (Some plan: it remains as vague as ever, except for the Soviet-style time horizon of 10 years.)

Meanwhile, Mahmood stays at the Home Office. Under-informed (or biased) souls read this as confirmation of her competence in pushing through controls on illegal immigration in the face of majority opposition from civil servants and backbenchers. In fact, she is hurdling a low bar after decades of government failures to control immigration, despite popular demands and almost every party's commitments to lower net immigration.

Worse, Mahmood is duplicitous. She tells the right wing that her tweaks to the benefits and the timeline of asylum applications will dramatically control immigration. She tells the left wing that she will make the refugee route easier (which is the route by which almost all illegal immigrants get residency, with more privileges than citizens). Also concerning is Mahmood's long history of Islamocentrism, which is bizarrely ignored by mainstream media. She tars normative Britons as racists (whites and Jews in particular: isn't that racist?), campaigned against Israel, played up her status as the first Muslim home secretary, promised that her promotion would serve "her" community, and railed against supposedly routine experiences of racism in her hometown of Birmingham, where her demographic is the largest.

I doubt Mahmood will last much longer than Miliband within Team Burnham. He favors the left of the party, which has characterized her (ridiculously) as a Nigel Farage in Labour colors. For now, Burnham needs to be seen to reward her, if only because one of her allies in Parliament, Josh Simons, was the MP who resigned from Makerfield to make way for Burnham.

So the highest three officers in the land will not last as long as normal, in my estimation. Burnham's administration will not bring the stability that Britons crave, let alone the competencies that the markets and foreign governments crave.

Talking of high ministers who won't last long, we must go next to Wes Streeting, who had resigned as health secretary (the poisoned chalice of all ministerial appointments anyway), to build support for a challenge against Starmer. Yet after the by-election, Streeting said he wouldn't run against Burnham, who now must reward him. Streeting becomes defense secretary. During the weekend's rumor mill, the former chief of the British Army, Lord Dannatt, said that Streeting "knows the square root of nothing about defence." Indeed. He's one acquisition scandal away from a sacking. And that sort of scandal leaks every few months from Britain's MOD.

From a turncoat Starmerite, we now turn to the loyal Starmerites who remain in government on borrowed time.

The highest-profile survivor is Pat McFadden, who will remain as work and pensions secretary - which is strange given that the government has decreased neither worklessness nor liabilities. Excuses abound for his early dismissal. And since Burnham is committed to the so-called triple lock on pensions and to increasing welfare (he talks about social care as the neglected component, but he's not talking about cutting anything), McFadden has no obvious options except to increase spending. That's the vicious cycle that these monkeys refuse to see, hear, or speak.

Jonathan Reynolds was Starmer's chief whip, a role that Burnham talks about deleting (he must think that everybody will love him forever without whipping). Reynolds will take over the merged departments for Science and Technology, and Business and Trade. Burnham has a short-term interest in Reynolds. Reynolds was an ineffective whip, but in his previous role, as business secretary, he temporarily solved the collapse of British Steel by forbidding more foreign ownership and investing in government ownership. Burnham has always liked public ownership of heavy industry and transportation and has already confirmed a policy to fully nationalize British Steel. But once that process is complete, Reynolds-the-Starmerite won't be needed. The backbenches are full of untested socialists who think closer to Burnham on public ownership.

For similar short-term reasons, Burnham kept Heidi Alexander as transport secretary and kept Lisa Nandy as secretary of state for digital, culture, media, and sport. The latter is one of the departments with its own unit for countering "disinformation" (i.e., criticism of government) by spreading disinformation. It's also led the lawfare to punish social media companies for "harmful" content, to restrict children under 18 years of age from accessing social media (an age that makes a mockery of the same government's plans to lower the voting age to 16), to restrict everybody's access to VPNs, and to censor information during election season. Burnham supports such authoritarianism. His hopes for the general election in 2029 depend on it.

Yvette Cooper has been demoted from foreign secretary to health secretary, which seems designed to set her up for further failure. Ironically, she is the most qualified minister by experience, having served through the Blair and Brown administrations, but that experience is to the right of Burnham's ideological bent. (Always strange to describe a Labourite as to the right of anything.) She already has a reputation for indecisiveness, invisibility, and foot-in-mouth disease. She must immediately deal with yet more strikes by medical unions unless exorbitant demands for pay raises are met. These have been going on for years. She won't last years.

Another poisoned chalice is the Ministry of Justice, given mainstream recognition of two-tier justice, increasing political violence, and overcrowded prisons (to be relieved in September by, er, releasing prisoners early, including murderers and rapists). The new justice secretary is Alex Norris, who spent a year as minister for border security. And look how border security improved.

Bridget Phillipson has been sacked as education secretary, having decimated private schools by abolishing their charitable status (one liability is VAT, at 20 percent). She keeps her job as minister for women and equalities, but I don't expect that to last long. At some point she must be sacrificed to protect the administrative state from its foot-dragging over decades of rapes of mostly white children by gangs of mostly Muslim immigrants and second-generation immigrants (with the awareness and sometimes participation of local police, social workers, and politicians, mostly from the Labour Party).

So let's get to high offices that will last, despite lack of qualifications. Get this one. The effective deputy PM goes by the titles of first secretary of state and chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Burnham gave the titles to Louise Haigh. She is a strong Burnham ally, which isn't a compliment in my book, although it is some justification for deputizing. Her penchant for dyeing her hair blood-red perhaps helps. Otherwise, she isn't qualified. Her highest prior role was transport secretary, which Burnham loves (he's always banging on about subsidizing public transport and has already announced a cap on bus fares). But she held that role for just a few months in 2024, before resigning after revelations that she was convicted of fraud in 2014. Funny she hid that history on the campaign. (The irony.) So the effective deputy PM is a convicted fraudster. She's also privately educated but opposed to private education. Only in Britain … and other tinpot democracies.

We're not done with (alleged) fraudsters in government. Angela Rayner is back as housing, communities, and local government secretary, having resigned from the same role when she failed to pay a tax ("stamp duty") on her third house. It was an oversight, she said . . . even though she was the minister administering the tax.

Another promotion is Lucy Powell, the new education secretary. Does she claim any expertise in education? No. Except that she is female, which is qualification enough for most progressives of our time, and she is a close ally of Burnham, and she is from "the north" (self-declared). See the pattern?

Alas for her, the Titanic education secretaryship is heading for an iceberg that few in government are willing to admit: blowback for the government's manipulation of safeguarding doctrine to hide information (such as transgender dysphoria) from parents whom teachers think won't be supportive enough, and for a new policy of screening boys for the pre-crime of violence against women and girls, and for decades of politicized, racialized indoctrination of children, at the expense of real knowledge and skills. Is it any wonder that one in six Britons aged 16 to 24 years is not in employment, education, or training? Well, it's still a wonder to the government, conveniently.

A sort-of-incumbent is the new energy secretary. Miatta Fahnbulleh had served as Miliband's undersecretary before she quit in late 2024 when Starmer's administration cut payments to most pensioners for their winter fuel expenses. (Starmer U-turned but didn't recall her to government.) Don't expect her to permit drilling for North Sea oil and gas. Do expect her to stick slavishly to net-zero madness. The inflationary effects on the Consumer Price Index alone are enough to guarantee the defeat of this government in 2029.

In a related portfolio, Dame Angela Eagle is the new secretary of state for environment, food, and rural affairs, coming from the Home Office. Should you have heard of her? No. Her claim to fame is challenging Jeremy Corbyn for the leadership back in 2016, which gives her sort of centrist standing. Anyway, she failed. She withdrew to support Owen Smith - who also failed. It's an inspiring bench.

A surprisingly relevant portfolio to this government's failed economics is Wales. Let me explain. Burnham has asked Stephen Kinnock to replace Jo Stevens as Welsh secretary. Stephen's qualifications are: he is Welsh, and he is the son of Neil Kinnock, who led the Labour Party through general election defeats in 1987 and 1992 and yet is Burnham's ideal of the prime minister we should have had.

Stephen is the exemplar to end with - the exemplar of the terminal mess the Labour Party has got itself into:

• inherited glory within a party that rails against privilege;
• failed politicians lauded as greats;
• doubling down on an unadmitted socialism that has already been rejected by the public multiple times, across nearly half a century;
• the appointment of professional politicians to roles for which they have few non-political qualifications;
• the promotion of ministers based on political ideologies and loyalties rather than functional merits; and
• the retention of incumbents for short-term political purposes, to the neglect of long-term stability.

Strap in: the Burnham administration will be even more calamitous and self-defeating than the Starmer administration.

The silver lining is that it will be entertaining, so far as you can look on the funny side of outcomes that will be very bad for most Britons and catastrophic for some (such as the thousands being imprisoned for tweets, or raped or knifed to death by illegal immigrants).

Yes, Britons must suffer through three years of a premiership even worse than Starmer's before they get a chance to vote it down.

Authored by Pierre Rehov via The Epoch Times,

Institutions built to prevent atrocities eventually face the question of what they actually protect. For the United Nations, voting patterns, internal investigations and its own decisions this year no longer support the fiction of neutrality. An UNRWA school in Gaza sat above a Hamas tunnel shaft and three anti-tank positions, and its own principal was on the payroll of both institutions at once - a fact that American investigators, not the UN, brought to light.

The pattern is old: during the oil-for-food scandal, a mid-level program director faced US prosecution while the officials who managed the program from above kept their positions. When UN failures surface, line staff absorb the exposure. The people who set the policy rarely do.

The arithmetic alone dismantles the pretense of balance. In 2025 the UN General Assembly (UNGA) adopted 15 resolutions targeting Israel, and only 11 addressing the rest of the planet combined - a tally covering North Korea, Iran, Myanmar, Russia and the United States together. From 2015 through 2024, the total reached 173 resolutions against Israel, compared to 80 for all other member states combined. The UN Human Rights Council has run comparable numbers since 2006, adopting 112 resolutions against Israel compared to 45 against Syria, despite a civil war there that killed hundreds of thousands.

On Nov. 20, 2025, the UNGA's Fourth Committee passed six resolutions condemning Israel while producing not a single resolution on Sudan, where fighting has killed more than 150,000 people and driven 12 million from their homes. The bloc that commands the UNGA's automatic majority sets these priorities; the scale of actual human suffering has nothing to do with it.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) supplies the starkest illustration. After October 7, the agency's own internal review found that nine employees may have taken part in the massacre - a figure that American investigators have since made look negligible. According to USAID:

"The USAID Office of Inspector General (USAID OIG), a statutorily independent law enforcement and oversight entity, has referred for suspension/debarment consideration the names of 101 current or former staff at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) for participation in the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks and/or affiliation with the military wing (al-Qassam Brigades) of Hamas. Among the individuals referred were UNRWA school principals, teachers, security personnel, attendants, psychosocial counselors, and medical professionals, including:

- A deputy school principal serving as an al-Qassam deputy company commander in the Ain Gallout/5th infantry battalion.
- A deputy school principal serving as squad leader for the Khan Younis Brigade/2nd infantry battalion.
- A teacher serving as squad leader in Hamas' military security department/intelligence unit who tracked assignment of explosive devices.
- A teacher serving as a platoon commander of the Central Brigade/Al Quds 2nd Battalion.
- A math & computer teacher with ties to an al-Qassam intelligence squad.
- A teacher with expertise as a sniper for Hamas.
- A teacher and Hamas soldier with orders to bring two anti-tank missiles to a prescribed location during the October 7 terror attacks.
- A deputy school principal serving as a platoon commander in Hamas' Nuseirat battalion with communications responsibilities on October 7th.
- A school principal assigned to the chemical department of a Hamas military manufacturing unit whose school had three anti-tank positions and a tunnel shaft located under the facility."

One of those referred, Hafez Mousa Mohammed Mousa, coordinated with fellow operatives during the Oct. 7 massacre while running an UNRWA school, and became the first person affiliated with a UN humanitarian agency ever debarred by the US government for terrorism. Under mounting pressure, UNRWA itself dismissed 70 staff linked to terrorist organizations in Gaza in the weeks before the referral was published, an admission that followed the release of evidence rather than the agency's own vetting. Groups tracking UNRWA's personnel put the true scale of Hamas penetration considerably higher, closer to 1,500 employees still drawing a UN salary.

The reckoning caught up with the agency in public on July 1, 2026, when the "Board of Peace," the body now overseeing Gaza's postwar administration, announced that UNRWA "has no place in the new Gaza" and described continued dependence on the agency as an obstacle to recovery rather than a form of relief.

Washington's ambassador for UN reform, Jeff Bartos, told the annual pledging conference the same day that member states funding UNRWA had spent years choosing incitement, terrorism and stagnation over an alternative, and warned that history would remember the choice. Within hours, the Palestinian Authority and the Arab League rejected the announcement and insisted that UNRWA's mandate cannot be dissolved by an administrative statement.

Whatever the outcome of this dispute, an institution long marketed as irreplaceable is being dismantled in real time by the very coalition managing the territory it was built to serve.

This state of affairs is not new behavior wearing new language. The UN's largest financial scandal, the oil-for-food program, saw then Iraqi President Saddam Hussein extract $1.8 billion in kickbacks starting in 1996, with help from more than 2,000 companies, while the Volcker inquiry found that weak UN oversight and Security Council paralysis had made the scheme possible. The program's own director was later indicted in the United States for bribery; senior UN officials mostly walked away untouched.

UN peacekeeping missions have produced a smaller, steadier version of the same pattern: a procurement task force documented more than $630 million in tainted contracts and two dozen confirmed corruption schemes, only to be shut down in 2008 after member states with implicated nationals refused to renew its mandate.

Sexual exploitation by peacekeepers followed an identical script, with nearly 2,000 allegations accumulated over 12 years and only a fraction of the accused ever serving prison time.

The historical ledger is worse than the bureaucratic one. In 1994, UN representatives and peacekeepers watched as more than 800,000 people were murdered in Rwanda over roughly 100 days, while its own commander in the field begged for reinforcements and was refused. A year later, the UN declared the Bosnian town of Srebrenica a protected zone, then denied the air support its peacekeepers requested as 8,000 men and boys were murdered under the UN flag. In Haiti, UN peacekeepers introduced cholera into a country that had been free of the disease for a century; nearly 10,000 people died before the organization admitted any responsibility - six years after the outbreak began. The zero-tolerance policies announced afterward changed little about how missions were run or how misconduct was punished.

Rwanda, Bosnia, Haiti and Gaza share the same organizational reflex: investigate quietly, discipline the lowest-ranking staff available, and leave the people who set policy in place.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres told the Security Council after October 7 that the Hamas attacks "did not happen in a vacuum," a formulation he has since echoed on UNRWA's failures - careful language built to avoid naming the agency's own culpability.

The United Nations was founded to make atrocities costly for those who commit or enable them. It has instead built a machine that absorbs those costs internally, so long as the people responsible sit inside the institution or represent the states that control its votes.

Even the coalition now running Gaza's transition has concluded that one of the UN's flagship agencies does not belong there. This verdict came from the "Board of Peace," the body tasked with cleaning up what the war left behind - not from Jerusalem or from Washington's harshest critics of the UN. The record speaks plainly enough on its own. What remains open is how much longer the rest of the world intends to keep paying for it.

Originally published by the Gatestone Institute. Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.