In this actual emergency podcast, Alan and Jem give way to overwhelming public pressure to respond to a recent decision taken by Labour’s National Executive Committee. The NEC have voted to block popular Mayor of Manchester (and former cabinet minister and MP) Andy Burnham from even having a chance of being selected by the local party to be Labour’s candidate at a forthcoming by-election in the Manchester area.

If that all sounds tediously technical, don’t worry, it is. But we also talk about why this incident, and the cancellation of upcoming local elections, is symptomatic of the increasingly entrenched and ever-more explicitly anti-democratic ideology of the managerial class, why various centrist and centre-right commentators should not be employed by nominally centre-left publications, and why maybe we should just let Wes Streeting sail the Labour ship straight into the iceberg that he’s had his gaze so firmly fixed on since he was a student.

And in case you are wondering, yes we have already released a very long podcast TODAY. But this is an emergency, and our public needs us.

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Why was Burnham Blocked? (Emergency Pod January 2026)