On 16/05/2026 at 08:43, Tony1951 said:

Burnham is not an MP.

He doesn't have to be an MP to be PM. We've had a number of such examples over many years, the last one being Sir Alec Douglas Home, a baronet taken from the House of Lords for that purpose.

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1 hour ago, flecc said:

He doesn't have to be an MP to be PM. We've had a number of such examples over many years, the last one being Sir Alec Douglas Home, a baronet taken from the House of Lords for that purpose.

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I think you should read this source.

https://publiclawforeveryone.com/2026/05/14/does-the-prime-minister-have-to-be-an-mp/

On 16/05/2026 at 09:43, Tony1951 said:

Burnham is not an MP.

Makerfield MP Josh Simmonds is prepared to stand down, but it is far from clear that Burnham would win an election there. Reform just beat Labour in the ward Ashton and Makerfield on 7th May. Labour got 1100 votes, Reform got 1572. That ward is not teh same size as the parliamentary constituency, but the only ward in Wigan which was not won by Reform on 7th May was won by an independent candidate.

It has been a catastrophic night for Labour in Wigan after ...

Wigan Today

https://www.wigantoday.net › News › People

If Burnham loses Makerfield by-election, Streeting and Rayner will fight Starmer. If he wins Makerfield then it's between Starmer and him. The other two have signalled that they will support him. If you go by any questions and any answers, the majority of callers do not want a Labour leadership contest nor Starmer.

26 minutes ago, Tony1951 said:

I think you should read this source.

https://publiclawforeveryone.com/2026/05/14/does-the-prime-minister-have-to-be-an-mp/

Convention, not law, all of which was known to be true when Douglas Home was appointed, but it still didn't stop it happening and him holding office in two consecutive years.

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4 hours ago, Tony1951 said:

"God definitely exists. That's why we have a word for it. "

We have words for many things which do not exist: Fairies, Goblins, Devils.

People have a capability to imagine things. Especially in times before we had other means to explain our world.

Our forebears invented myths to explain the bewildering circumstances they faced, like, life, death, and the end of their own existence.

Homo Sapiens big brain did not always bring solutions; it also brought intellectual troubles that other creatures do not have.

Voltaire, the French philosopher made up a famous quote in the 1760s -

"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."

It is my opinion, that Voltaire hit the nail very firmly on the head.

As a youngster, I was brought up in a household where religion was never far away. I was a convinced believer until about the age of seventeen. By twenty, I came to the view that the personal God - the shadowy, wise and benign, super-human analogue, supposedly watching everything we do, and judging us, was a mythological construction. This came about mainly because I was starting to understand the scale of the universe.

At that time, I only knew about our own galaxy, but the scale of it, just blew me away. I realised the idea of some eternal, benign individual, existing in another dimension, and occasionally intervening in our own, was impossible wishful thinking.

The whole construction is almost designed to explain away the fact that there is no evidence at all for such a belief. God is supposed to be invisible, omnipotent, all good, an everlasting force. Nothing can touch him - and yet.... Nobody sees him, he is all good, but allows monstrous evil and pain.

'Ah - but it is mankind that brings the pain,' say adherents....

Then why does he not intervene and stop them?

'Ah - he has given his creation 'free will'. He can not intervene.'

But he is omnipotent. Why not?

We live in a universe with countless billions of galaxies. It is probably infinitely huge, each galaxy containing billions of stars.

Our Sun, is just one star - our planet just a speck of dust, with a sliver of an atmosphere, and a smear of ocean water.

This image taken with the deep field camera on the Webb space telescope, shows a field of view about the same as if you were looking through the bore of a narrow drinking straw. Imagine how many such pictures you would need to take to cover the whole of the space around the Earth! These smudges are not individual stars. There are only two stars from our galaxy in the image. You can spot them because they have diffraction spike artefacts on them. The smudges are galaxies, each of them containing hundreds of billions of stars - and this view is the view through a straw.

This is creation.

This is why I do not believe in a personal God.

We are an upright, smart primate with a brain that seeks closure. We want to know answers to big questions and we answer them with our best guesses. God and eternal life, are just two guessed answers to the questions:

'How did we get here?' and 'Where are we going?'

My answer to these - and like all human theories, it is just my best guess, is that we got here because of the processes behind what we call physics, chemistry, and biology, and the answer to the second question, 'where are we going?' is that we will return to the dust that we are fashioned out of.

That dust was created in the earliest generations of stars through the process of atomic fusion and nucleosynthesis, in which hydrogen is sequentially fused into helium, carbon and into heavier elements as stars age and begin to collapse, stepwise increasing the phenomenal pressure in their cores and forcing elements together so hard that new elements are formed. Ultimately, these are blown away into space by super nova explosions when at the end of their lives, massive stars explode. Eventually, through gravity, that dust and gas collects into new stars, and into planets.

The remains of a supernovae Cassiopea A.

All the atoms in your body and mine, have passed through stars of earlier generations.

Earth is a solid mass of star dust collected together by gravity.

The dust of the planet passed atoms and molecules of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, calcium and phosphorus into plants. We ate the plants, and we ate the animals that ate the plants, and this is how we grow from a three kilogram, new-born infant, into the 75 or 100 kilogram, homo sapiens.

I say this is a guess, but it is more than that really, because it is based on empirical fact.

Empiricism - a paradigm which demands that belief is based on actual observation, measurement and testing, is probably the most powerful tool our species ever made. It is the foundation of science, and is what propelled us from the poverty, drudgery, unabated sickness, and misery of the pre-modern world to where we are now.

The progress of our society over the last three hundred - perhaps four hundred years is entirely due to empiricism. Without empiricism, I would be long dead and I would have had a far more miserable life than I have.

Look at the idea of God with an empiricist hat on, and you will not get far in finding him.

Nice use of AI. I never use AI for that sort of thing. I think it's better use your own thought process to develop and present ideas. Goblins and fairies do exist. That's why we have words for them. You have to think about what existance is.

1 hour ago, D8veh said:

Nice use of AI. I never use AI for that sort of thing. I think it's better use your own thought process to develop and present ideas. Goblins and fairies do exist. That's why we have words for them. You have to think about what existance is.

AI?

I wrote every single word of that myself in about half an hour this morning at around half past seven or eight o'clock. Later on, after I had been out for a walk, I went over it again and put in missed punctuation and changed some not very good sentences. I think I might have added a couple of points in the final version too.

I write essays like that to try and keep my brain working. I challenge you to try to find any of that text online anywhere.

If you doubt I am telling the truth, you can find a slightly different version on an old blog I have. I posted this essay there this morning just to preserve the data, because I am not convinced this website will survive long term. The traffic has fallen off a cliff and had been dwindling for ages anyway.

Look here and find an earlier version with some differences to the final version

BLOG Version

Of course, youare attempting to wind me up again, which it seems, you try to do, whenever you can't answer my points.

You say you think it better to use your own thought process to develop and present ideas. I think the best thing to do in a debate is to do exactly that, and engage in a discussion rather than to make an insulting and snippy remark. Or of course, you have no obligation to answer anything, and are completely free to ignore posts.

Just insulting a poster who treated your remark seriously, and gave you a thorough answer, while disagreeing with your viewpoint, does not make you look that good really.

Edited 6 hours ago6 hr by Tony1951

15 minutes ago, Tony1951 said:

AI?

I wrote every single word of that myself in about half an hour this morning at around half past seven or eight o'clock. Later on, after I had been out for a walk, I went over it again and put in missed punctuation and changed some not very good sentences. I think I might have added a couple of points in the final version too.

I write essays like that to try and keep my brain working. I challenge you to try to find any of that text online anywhere.

If you doubt I am telling the truth, you can find a slightly different version on an old blog I have. I posted this essay there this morning just to preserve the data, because I am not convinced this website will survive long term. The traffic has fallen off a cliff and had been dwindling for ages anyway.

Look here and find an earlier version with some differences to the final version

BLOG Version

Of course, youare attempting to winding me up again, which it seems you try to do whenever you can't answer my points.

Really! How come your pre-AI posts are nothing like this? Did you wake up one day after seeing how AI does it, and decide that you could do a better job, so you started writing essays instead of normal posts? The game's up my friend. The internet conspiracy theorists have won the day.

5 minutes ago, D8veh said:

Really! How come your pre-AI posts are nothing like this? Did you wake up one day after seeing how AI does it, and decide that you could do a better job, so you started writing essays instead of normal posts? The game's up my friend. The internet conspiracy theorists have won the day.

You have not been reading what I have posted - and why should you? I do not demand an audience. I write as I said, to keep my brain active. Look on that blog and you will find a variety of essays I have written. I don't claim they are any good, but there are stacks of them and all my own. Many - most of them pre-date AI by a long mile, and you will find the same stylistic problems in all of them.

It is a pity that you have descended to accusing another poster of dishonesty.

Edited 6 hours ago6 hr by Tony1951

From 2004 -

OLD BLOG about Iraq War

Several posts so scroll down after the first.

Edited 6 hours ago6 hr by Tony1951

More from 2004 - about 18 years before modern generative AI.

On Blunket's resignation

On 15/05/2026 at 06:34, jonathan.agnew said:

On the plus side, this is my final post, dont have much use for illiberal playgrounds or small time napoleons.

On no not again. If the odour of this forum was bottled, it'd surely be "Eau de Rancune". People go away to grow thicker skins and return. I've seen it happen many times. Can't return unless you've left. They keep coming back like Arnie. It's the circle of rancour.

Edited 3 hours ago3 hr by guerney

4 hours ago, flecc said:

Convention, not law, all of which was known to be true when Douglas Home was appointed, but it still didn't stop it happening and him holding office in two consecutive years.

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That is not quite right as stated. Home was rapidly elected to Parliament. He was not in office without being an MP for two years which is what can reasonably be inferred from what you said above.

Since Prime Ministers are expected as a core responsibility, to be accountable at Prime Minister's Questions in the Commons, it is pretty well certain that it would be a very radical departure to elect as Party Leader and PM, a man who had just failed to be elected to a seat in the Commons (if he did fail).

In 1963 Alec Douglas Home was a member of the House of Lords when McMillan resigned and he was made Party Leader.

Parliament was not in session, but about to re-convene on the 24th of October 1963, and the return of Parliament was postponed for twenty days until the 12th November, to allow for the election to a vacant safe seat. Home although PM without being an MP, was never in that position while Parliament was in session. It was an extremely temporary aberration.

It was nevertheless a most controversial matter, and two of McMillan's ministers declined to remain in office under Home, during the period before he was elected to Parliament.

The conjectured case today is different.

If Burnham can win a by-election in Simmond's old seat, and then succeed Starmer as party leader, there is no controversy at all.

If Burnham was rejected by the electorate in Mayfield - how could he possibly be PM?

If that happened, it won't wash. it would be as if a party like Reform invited Elon Musk to be its leader and he turned up in Downing Street without being elected to Parliament or even being entitled to be there.

We elect people to represent and govern us. They can't do that without that mandate.

Edited 3 hours ago3 hr by Tony1951

1 hour ago, guerney said:

On no not again. If the odour of this forum was bottled, it'd have to be "Eau de Rancune". People go away to grow thicker skins and return. I've seen it happen many times. Can't return unless you've left. They keep coming back like Arnie.

It's with sadness that I too have to announce that this is my last post - as a capitalist libertarian. I've now joined the communist party. Long live the prolitariat!

I went to the Shropshire branch meeting, which was mainly a bunch of weirdos ranting about stuff I didn't understand. there's normally a long delay between application and membership, but I'm still a paying member of the Teachers Union because I forgot to cancel my membership, so they said they could accept me immediately. They told me not to worry if I couldn't yet figure out how it all worked because it often takes time to adjust, and once I get it, I'll be on my way to the stars. If I work hard at it and do a lot of stuff with them, I'll probably get to meet within a year guys like Keir Starmer, Sadiq Kahn, Peter Madelson and other members of similar rank. After that, I might eventually get to meet Bill Gates, Mark Carney, Larry Fink and some of the other rich banking people.

It's pretty good because they have a free health care scheme that's supposed to be better than BUPA. they said it's run by a really good guy, who saved the world called Faucci something or other.

One intersting thing I noticed was that the women there were really nice, but I'm a bit suspicious about whether they're actually human. Maybe they're some other strand of evolution of mankind because they nearly all had green or purple hair. None of the girls I ever dated had anything like that. I don't think it's normal human DNA. I wonder if they have any other unusual features that I need to look out for.

Edited 3 hours ago3 hr by D8veh

Fauchi was significantly involved in farming out genetic virus meddling research to Chinese laboratories. You would be moving in pretty bad company if you were influenced by him.

It is a slam dunk certainty that Covid-19 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the autumn of 2019.

It is also on the balance of probabilities, likely that the virus was not a naturally occurring one, and that it had been engineered by serial passage, to enable a virus previously harmless to humans, to gain the function of penetrating human cells, which it did with a remarkable effectiveness. That emergence from nowhere, instantly empowered to infect a new species with ease, creating a pandemic, when it did not exist anywhere in the wild before the end of 2019, makes it certainly not a natural spillover from animals.

Biden's last day pardoning of Fauchi is, to say the least interesting. If there was not a realistic probability that he had been responsible for a shocking degree of negligence, why pardon him?

33 minutes ago, Tony1951 said:

That is not quite right as stated. Home was rapidly elected to Parliament. He was not in office without being an MP for two years which is what can reasonably be inferred from what you said above.

Since Prime Ministers are expected as a core responsibility, to be accountable at Prime Minister's Questions in the Commons, it is pretty well certain that it would be a very radical departure to elect as Party Leader and PM, a man who had just failed to be elected to a seat in the Commons (if he did fail).

In 1963 Alec Douglas Home was a member of the House of Lords when McMillan resigned and he was made Party Leader.

Parliament was not in session, but about to re-convene on the 24th of October 1963, and the return of Parliament was postponed for twenty days until the 12th November, to allow for the election to a vacant safe seat. Home although PM without being an MP, was never in that position while Parliament was in session. It was an extremely temporary aberration.

It was nevertheless a most controversial matter, and two of McMillan's ministers declined to remain in office under Home, during the period before he was elected to Parliament.

The conjectured case today is different.

If Burnham can win a by-election in Simmond's old seat, and then succeed Starmer as party leader, there is no controversy at all.

If Burnham was rejected by the electorate in Mayfield - how could he possibly be PM?

If that happened, it won't wash. it would be as if a party like Reform invited Elon Musk to be its leader and he turned up in Downing Street without being elected to Parliament or even being entitled to be there.

We elect people to represent and govern us. They can't do that without that mandate.

Fiddled in other words.

Bing's incomplete answer:

Historically, there have been instances where individuals have served as Prime Minister without being a Member of Parliament (MP). However, the specific number of such occurrences is not clearly defined in the available sources. The UK Prime Minister is typically appointed by the monarch based on the advice of the House of Commons, and while the system has evolved, the role of the Prime Minister has been closely tied to the position of MP until recently. For a comprehensive understanding of the historical context, further research may be needed to explore the specific cases where this occurred.

Google's better answer:

Every person in British history who has held the office of Prime Minister was a Member of Parliament at some point before, during, or immediately after their premiership.

Historically, however, there are a few important nuances related to this:

Prime Ministers in the House of Lords: Prior to the 20th century, the Prime Minister was frequently a peer sitting in the House of Lords. These individuals were still considered part of Parliament, though not "MPs" in the modern House of Commons sense. The last Prime Minister to lead the government exclusively from the House of Lords was the Marquess of Salisbury in 1902.

The Intermediary Phase (Alec Douglas-Home): In 1963, Sir Alec Douglas-Home was appointed Prime Minister while sitting in the House of Lords. To conform to the modern convention that the Prime Minister must be in the House of Commons, he disclaimed his peerage three days after taking office. He then spent about two weeks as Prime Minister before winning a by-election to sit in the House of Commons as an MP. Before he had inherited his peerage in 1951, he had also spent years sitting as an elected MP.

The "Unelected" Misconception: While you must be an MP to be Prime Minister in the modern era, you are not directly elected as Prime Minister by the public. A Prime Minister often takes power when a predecessor resigns (taking over their party and majority) without a general election taking place. Prime Ministers who originally came to power this way include Winston Churchill, James Callaghan, John Major, and Gordon Brown.

Fact is, this is the dirty game of politics, where if some thing is convenient or expedient, one can be sure it will happen sooner or later, and more than once if deemed necessary.

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Edited 3 hours ago3 hr by flecc
addition

7 minutes ago, flecc said:

Fiddled in other words.

Bing's incomplete answer:

Historically, there have been instances where individuals have served as Prime Minister without being a Member of Parliament (MP). However, the specific number of such occurrences is not clearly defined in the available sources. The UK Prime Minister is typically appointed by the monarch based on the advice of the House of Commons, and while the system has evolved, the role of the Prime Minister has been closely tied to the position of MP until recently. For a comprehensive understanding of the historical context, further research may be needed to explore the specific cases where this occurred.

Google's better answer:

Every person in British history who has held the office of Prime Minister was a Member of Parliament at some point before, during, or immediately after their premiership.

Historically, however, there are a few important nuances related to this:

Prime Ministers in the House of Lords: Prior to the 20th century, the Prime Minister was frequently a peer sitting in the House of Lords. These individuals were still considered part of Parliament, though not "MPs" in the modern House of Commons sense. The last Prime Minister to lead the government exclusively from the House of Lords was the Marquess of Salisbury in 1902.

The Intermediary Phase (Alec Douglas-Home): In 1963, Sir Alec Douglas-Home was appointed Prime Minister while sitting in the House of Lords. To conform to the modern convention that the Prime Minister must be in the House of Commons, he disclaimed his peerage three days after taking office. He then spent about two weeks as Prime Minister before winning a by-election to sit in the House of Commons as an MP. Before he had inherited his peerage in 1951, he had also spent years sitting as an elected MP.

The "Unelected" Misconception: While you must be an MP to be Prime Minister in the modern era, you are not directly elected as Prime Minister by the public. A Prime Minister often takes power when a predecessor resigns (taking over their party and majority) without a general election taking place. Prime Ministers who originally came to power this way include Winston Churchill, James Callaghan, John Major, and Gordon Brown.

I don't understand what you mean in the first sentence - 'Fiddled in other words.'

Home was never not an MP, while Parliament was actually in session.'

It seems pretty mad to be going back to the period before the twentieth century began, to fish out cases in which Prime Ministers were not members of Parliament, or as in Home's case were immediately elected to Parliament during a brief period when Parliament was not in session, so that they could properly assume the role of PM, as an elected member when Parliament re-convened.

I suppose if you want, we could go back to the rule of Henry Vlll, when the King just nominated people to be his Chief Minister, but that was a different world to ours really.

And nobody with an ounce of sense thinks that PMs must always have a mandate of having won an election as PM. Of course not.

But in modern times they were all in Parliament. How else can you make a claim to be a representative government?

Edited 2 hours ago2 hr by Tony1951

19 minutes ago, flecc said:

Fact is, this is the dirty game of politics, where if some thing is convenient or expedient, one can be sure it will happen sooner or later, and more than once if deemed necessary.

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Well this may be true, but it doesn't offer much hope for the future, and one could not be surprised if some unpleasant, underhand trickery were put in motion, if the people became even more jaundiced and even more dead set against any party or individual who did so.

The big lesson I take from the collapse in popularity of parties in government, is not that certain individual's lacked charisma, it is that established parties have taken their electorate for granted and have not taken the representative aspect of their role seriously at all. Not doing what they promised and deliberately treating the people who voted for them with contempt has led to wholesale abandonment of the parties who did that. You know who they are - and it is not just Labour.

That said - who could have expected that Labour would lose Wales and the North, in so drastic a fashion, or that the Conservatives would be so decimated across the UK?

Edited 2 hours ago2 hr by Tony1951

4 minutes ago, Tony1951 said:

Well this may be true, but it doesn't offer much hope for the future, and one could not be surprised if some unpleasant, underhand trickery were put in motion, if the people became even more jaundiced and even more dead set against any party or individual who did so.

The big lesson I take from the collapse in popularity of parties in government, is not that certain individual's lacked charisma, it is that established parties have taken their electorate for granted and have not taken the representative aspect of their role seriously at all. Not doing what they promised and deliberately treating the people who voted for them with contempt has led to wholesale abandonment of the parties who did that. You know who they are - and it is not just Labour.

That said - who could have expected that Labour would lose Wales in so drastic a fashion, or that the Conservatives would be so decimated across the UK?

They don't care if the public are disenchanted, our democracy has long been a bad joke.

Major examples: Taking us into the EU by the back door of a false Common Market prospectus. Two blatantly Tory barristers, Blair and Starmer misrepresenting themselves as Labour when elected and becoming PM, the latter even having the nerve to gain a Knighthood for doing the Tory's dirty work for them. Plenty more lesser examples.

There is no good in our political scene, just watch Reform let the public down no differently.

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