Burnham says ‘too much time is wasted in those dramas’ when asked about Scottish independence – as it happened

theguardian.com

This blog is now closed Burnham spoke of Ravenscraig, once the pride of Scotland’s steel industry that employed tens of thousands of people before it closed in 1992. He said: When it closed, it wasn’t just a works that shut, it was a whole community which saw the pillars underneath it just taken away, collapsed beneath it. That was a decision taken hundreds of miles away without any real consequences for what that would mean for people here, taken by people who would never have to live with those consequences, or see those consequences. I was the MP there for 16 years from the early 2000s, just after the pits had shut in the 1990s. It broke my heart to see the old miners shuffling into my surgery, carrying oxygen bottles, still struggling to get compensation for the damage that was done to their lungs. It pained me to drive past the wasteland around Bickershaw Colliery, one of the last pits to close in Leigh. Nobody asked Leigh what was going to come next either. I care about Scotland a lot, and I am coming today with a big offer and in search of common ground. When I walked into Downing Street in July, I said I wanted to do politics differently. Place first, not party first. Honestly, I meant it, and I arrive here in that spirit because people in Scotland, in my view, deserve better from politicians and politics. Continue reading...