Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s first public instinct, after an independent commission found Manchester City Football Club guilty of more than 100 charges, was to worry about losing the owners. “I would be really concerned to lose them,” the former Mayor of Greater Manchester told the BBC. “They’ve been such a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester and obviously the building of Manchester City into the global force that it is. I do actually thank the City Football Group and the wider ownership for the money that they didn’t just put into the Etihad [Stadium] and the campus around it but also into the city.”

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The commission found a conspiracy to inflate revenues and hide costs between 2009 and 2018, by more than £900 million, largely through what it called sham commercial deals. City denies wrongdoing and has appealed. Etihad, the shirt and stadium sponsor, has threatened to sue the league. Number 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister’s official residence, then issued a statement saying “if wrongdoing is established” there should be consequences.

The Paper Trail.

City’s line for years has been that the club is not state-owned. On paper, that is correct. Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan holds the majority through Newton Investment and Development, a private company registered in Abu Dhabi. He is also Deputy Prime Minister and Vice President of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and half-brother of the UAE’s ruler, Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

Chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak runs Mubadala, a sovereign fund with $385 billion under management. He chairs the Executive Affairs Authority, which advises the president, and sits on the board of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. In 2020, he was granted British diplomatic immunity. When Burnham’s predecessor, former Prime Minister Keir Starmer, landed in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi in April for talks on the Strait of Hormuz, Al Mubarak was the official who met him on the runway.

In the early years of the ownership, Al Mubarak told The Guardian there was “almost a personification of the club with the values we hold as Abu Dhabi,” and that “how we are handling this project is telling a lot to the world about how we are.”

There is a Burnham-Manchester-UAE scandal brewing about this Abu Dhabi-Man City stuff.

As people find more out about the scale of corruption by Man City's owners, they'll also learn of the "sweetheart deals" handed to them in Manchester.

Watch this space.

— Raheem J. Kassam (@RaheemKassam) October 4, 2026

The Contract Burnham Worked Under.

Burnham did not negotiate the land deal. The deal was with Manchester City Council, not the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, which he later led. That is the defense. The dates still run through his mayoralty.

In December 2015, the council and Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG) signed a ten-year collaboration agreement, described by critics as a “sweetheart” deal. It gave ADUG right of first refusal on council land around Ancoats and New Islington. Agreed schemes went through Manchester Life, a joint venture set up in 2014. The council’s named contact was Sir Howard Bernstein, chief executive from 1998 to March 31, 2017. The contract ended in 2025.

Burnham became mayor on May 8th, 2017. He was automatically disqualified from the role on June 19th, 2026, when he returned to the House of Commons as Member of Parliament (MP) for Makerfield as part of a successful bid to oust Starmer as leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister. He was appointed Prime Minister on July 20th. For eight of the ten years the first-refusal contract was live, he was the elected face of the city-region whose growth story depended on it.

A 2022 University of Sheffield report, Manchester Offshored, said the council “sold the family silver too cheap”: 999-year leases, prices below some comparable plots, rental, and sales income sitting with ADUG-linked entities in Jersey. The Sunday Times later called Manchester the city that “sold out” to Abu Dhabi. The council says independent valuers were used, market interest was thin, and the return was the best available. External auditors last year found weaknesses in the joint ventures, particularly on overage—the extra payments due to the council when land values rose.

The Friend Who Changed Sides.

Bernstein was the officer who, with council leader Sir Richard Leese, drove the 2002 Commonwealth Games, Metrolink, and the Devo Manc deals that created the mayoralty Burnham won.

In November 2017, months after leaving the council, he was appointed strategic development adviser to City Football Group. City Football Group announced it. The job put him on the board of Eastlands Strategic Development Company, the council–ADUG joint venture for the Etihad Campus. He was already honorary president of the club. He died in June 2024.

Burnham’s tribute to Bernstein after his death was intimate. “I am privileged to have known and worked with Sir Howard since I was first elected to Parliament in 2001,” he said. “I had total admiration for his tenacity in representing his city and its residents, and always valued his counsel and friendship.” He called him “the architect of modern Manchester.”

Crucially, the public record shows a straight line. The named contact on the first-refusal contract retired from the council and, within the year, was paid to develop the same ground for the buyer, while the mayor who called him a friend ran the city-region.

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Burnham Wants the Site. 

The i Paper reported on October 4th that land covered by the first-refusal deal includes the former Central Retail Park in Ancoats, the proposed long-term home of Burnham’s “Number 10 North,” a satellite office of 10 Downing Street the Labour leader is establishing in Manchester. The council bought the 10.5 acres in 2017 for £42.35 million, then its most expensive land purchase, and earmarked it for Manchester Life flats. ADUG and the council each put in £750,000. The scheme never happened, but under the council could not offer the land to other partners under the terms of the deal. It sat largely empty for about a decade.

The plot Burnham wants as a northern seat of government is still ground the owners had locked, under a contract his friend signed, during the years he was mayor.

The Shareholders.

Burnham’s conference pitch is that he will take “what I did in Manchester, our plan for good growth,” and drive it into every postcode. In the same speech, he said he was tired of a world where “shareholders never lose” and “the public never win.”

Yet The Guardian has reported that of 10,974 homes built in the Greater Manchester region in the nine years to 2024, 679—six percent—were classed as affordable. The first-refusal contract gave the shareholders the option. The public got a profit-share the council defends and the Sheffield academics called cheap.

On October 1st, Tax Policy Associates said the commission’s findings and leaked documents point to about £12 million in unpaid British tax on payments to former manager Roberto Mancini, routed through a consultancy the commission treated as a sham. With interest and penalties, the same note puts the bill nearer £23–24 million, and says knowingly false accounts may imply Companies Act offenses. That estimate was published in the same week Burnham thanked the ownership.

No Transparency.

Burnham has said his dealings as mayor would “of course” stand up to scrutiny. The Liberal Democrats, a rival left-wing party to Labour, have asked him to publish every meeting and conversation with City Football Group, Abu Dhabi United Group, and UAE representatives, and every piece of Etihad hospitality received during his mayoralty. He has not.

Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds met Al Mubarak in person within the past month. A government source said the City verdict was not discussed. The Foreign Office has previously refused to release correspondence on the charges because disclosure could harm relations with the UAE.

The question is why a Prime Minister who says shareholders should stop winning opened the week of a guilty verdict by thanking these ones, and why the meetings from nine years as mayor are still unpublished.

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The Trump Administration secured a victory in the Supreme Court this week that will allow the government to resume deporting illegal aliens whose countries, for one reason or another, refuse or are unable to take them back. Since President Donald J. Trump took office in January of 2025, over 25,000 illegal aliens have already been deported to third countries, but legal challenges paused the policy in February of this year.

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The pause presented a real problem for the Trump administration in terms of dealing with potentially violent or criminal illegals who could not be sent home because their countries refused to take them back. The administration has described third-country deportations as an important mechanism to remove people who would otherwise have to remain in the United States.

Meaningless Deportation Orders. 

Deportations go through a variety of stages, from warnings and court hearings to the eventual physical removal of those deemed to be in the United States illegally, whether by having entered the country illegally, overstaying a legal visa, or for other reasons, such as committing crimes and having their residency or visa revoked.

Agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) also require basic information about foreign nationals scheduled for deportation, such as their identities, proven nationality, and more, for the receiving country to accept them back. Sometimes this is done through existing passports and other documents, and sometimes through other means, such as fingerprint databases. In other instances, lawyers and leftist human rights groups argue that a foreign national’s identity cannot be clearly established, or that deportations to certain countries are too dangerous for those being deported.

ICE classifies countries that refuse or delay deportations for their nationals as  “uncooperative” or “recalcitrant,” and under the court case Zadvydas v. Davis (2001), the Supreme Court ruled that migrants waiting for deportation cannot be held indefinitely and that authorities like ICE can generally only hold them for a six-month period. This has led to thousands of illegals subject to deportation orders, including convicted criminals, being released back into the United States.

In 2024 alone, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report showed that obtaining travel documents was a major obstacle for ICE officials who were trying to facilitate the deportations of certain nationals. 4,768 Vietnamese and 2,496 Laotians that year were awaiting travel documents in order to be properly deported, with many released into the U.S. due to the wait time. India and China, two other countries that are reluctant to take their countrymen back, often took months to process any documents for travel.

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The Countries That Refuse to Take Back Their Nationals.

It may be understandable that countries in the midst of civil war or severe instability, like Libya, are unable to take back their nationals, or can only do so in limited quantities. Countries the U.S. has limited relations with, like North Korea or Afghanistan, are also understandable.

However, a June 2023 ICE list found that many countries not at war and even some with relatively normal diplomatic relations with the United States were among those most likely to refuse to take back their own people. Among them are Bhutan, Pakistan, Samoa, Ethiopia, China, Laos, Cambodia, Lebanon, and Somalia. Cuba and Iran appeared on the list as well, though it can be noted neither has official diplomatic relations with the U.S.

Several other countries were listed as “at risk of noncompliance,” including India, Vietnam, South Sudan, Jamaica, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Third Country Deportations Are the Only Answer.

The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) allows the government to deport illegals to third countries when sending them back to their actual country of origin is deemed “impracticable, inadvisable, or impossible.” The Trump administration has been able to set up a network of 35 different countries around the world to receive foreign nationals so far, with over 25,000 illegals sent to 29 countries already. In return, those countries have collectively received over $49 million in U.S. government funding.

Mexico has taken in the most illegals under these agreements, with roughly 20,000 or so non-citizens of Mexico being sent to the country between January 20, 2025, and August 15, 2026. Most of these deportations are said to be illegal from other Latin American countries like Cuba, Guatemala, Honduras, and Venezuela. The statistics show that the administration often uses third countries in the same region as the deportees’ home countries. The chance of a Salvadoran being deported to a country in Africa is low, but not zero, providing a significant deterrent against resisting deportation.

Allowing deportations to these third countries destroys any leverage over the United States that countries have by rejecting the deportation of their nationals. It also greatly reduces the incentives for migrants to obstruct their return by destroying their papers and otherwise refusing to help facilitate their removal, as the consequence can be deportation to somewhere like the Central African Republic rather than release into the United States.

The Lawfare Campaign Against Third Country Deportations.

While the recent SCOTUS victory allows the Trump Administration to resume deportations to third countries, the legal battle over the policy is not over. Leftist “human rights” groups continue to push for an end to the practice, often arguing that deportees have issues with language or culture in the countries they are deported to, or that they could potentially be sent to countries where they may face some sort of persecution.

The First Circuit previously upheld a lower court finding that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) procedure for third country deportations did not provide adequate notice and opportunity to raise fear-based claims. The Trump administration argues that those requirements, which put the comfort of illegal aliens over public safety, impede lawful removals, and have caused flight cancellations and other logistical problems.

The Supreme Court has now allowed removals to continue temporarily and will consider statutory authority, due process, and the lower court’s jurisdiction over the matter in December.

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The annual cost of Britain rejoining the European Union is still being quoted, even by committed Eurosceptics, at around £25 billion. The budget arithmetic now coming out of Brussels suggests it would be far higher.

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The European Commission, the EU’s unelected executive body, has proposed a 2028–34 Multiannual Financial Framework worth 1.26 percent of EU gross national income (GNI). Britain’s latest GNI stands at £3.0 trillion (~$4.0 trillion). Apply the Commission’s own ratio to that figure, and the indicative gross burden is about £38 billion (~$50.3 billion) a year, or roughly £730 million (~$970 million) a week. That calculation sits upstream of receipts, the precise EU financing formula, and whatever terms an accession deal might eventually contain.

Significantly, a returning Britain would not receive the old rebate on its budget contributions secured by Margaret Thatcher as compensation for historic overpayment. This partial refund was negotiated in 1984, defended for decades, gradually eroded, and disappeared altogether with Britain’s withdrawal from the EU. Nothing in the bloc’s current budget proposals, and nothing in the politics of Brussels, suggests those terms would be restored.

Preferential accession arrangements on issues such as committing to eventually adopting the euro currency are equally unlikely.

For some reason I’m currently the most realistic source of information on the subject of Britain rejoining the EU.

Even the most ardent Eurosceptics are quoting a £25bn annual rejoining figure.

THAT IS NOT TRUE.

IT IS WAY HIGHER.

Let me explain.

Brussels has proposed a… pic.twitter.com/WCtNfcm8IQ

— Raheem J. Kassam (@RaheemKassam) October 2, 2026

The Numbers.

The figures that follow from the gross calculation, once the absence of a rebate is allowed for, are roughly:

— £40 billion a year
— £3.3 billion a month
— £770 million a week
— £110 million a day

An inflation adjustment between now and the start of the new budget period takes the annual cost to about £42 billion (~$55.6 billion)  by 2028. These are membership costs only, describing only the scale of the contribution Britain would be expected to make toward the EU budget, not the wider consequences of membership, which would require giving up independent trade deals and an additional share of Britain’s fishing stocks, among other concessions.

The weekly number is worth dwelling on because it is the unit the public already understands from the EU referendum campaign. £770 million a week is more than double the famous £350 million cost advertised by the Vote Leave campaign in 2016. EU grants, subsidies, or research funding might reduce the net figure, but they would not return it to the £25 billion range still being cited.

What the Membership Fee Leaves Out.

Rejoining the EU on ordinary terms would reimpose the bloc’s Free Movement migration regime on Britain. This carries immense and unpredictable fiscal, housing, and infrastructure costs that never appear in the GNI contribution. The National Pulse has separately modeled those migration effects; the budget’s cash cost is independent of them and must be met either way.

As mentioned above, reaccession would also require a commitment to eventual adoption of the euro. Britain would surrender its independent monetary policy and absorb the transition costs of a currency change. State aid rules would once again limit the support that governments can offer to national industries. Steel, energy, automotive production, and defense supply chains have all been treated as strategic priorities since 2020. EU competition law restricts that kind of support.

The Terms of the Argument.

The “rejoiner” case has so far been able to lean on lower estimates of potential British budget contributions,  and on the claim that Brexit’s opportunity costs exceed any subscription fee. The European Commission’s 1.26 percent proposal, applied to a £3 trillion GNI and stripped of the old rebate, changes the baseline. £40 billion a year, £770 million a week, and £110 million a day are the numbers that now have to be answered before the conversation moves on to borders, the currency, or industrial policy.

To put these figures in context, spending on Britain’s overcrowded prisons is only around £8.4 billion annually. Spending on the courts, which are also extremely overburdened, stands at £2.538 billion. Border Force funding stands at only around £730 million, and funding for the Immigration Enforcement directorate is somewhere around £470 million.

£40 billion a year as an annual subscription fee for EU membership is therefore an extremely high price to pay, especially considering Britain currently has a longstanding trade deficit with the EU and would be required to surrender sovereignty on issues ranging from immigration and international trade to state aid and fisheries alongside the fee.

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For over a quarter of a century, the political establishment and the corporate media have tried to convince the public, and themselves, that Nigel Farage is a temporary anomaly. Yet time and again, the undisputed godfather of Brexit and British populism has defied their expectations.

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Here are seven times Nigel Farage rewrote the rules of Western politics:

2009: Breaking the Two-Party Monopoly.

Before the 2009 European Parliament elections, the conventional wisdom dictated that third parties in the United Kingdom were relegated to perpetual protest status. Operating within a tightly controlled media environment, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) under Farage weaponized the European stage to bypass the Westminster gatekeepers.

Earning 13 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), Farage achieved a historic first and pushed then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s governing Labour Party into a humiliating third place. It was a tremendous breakthrough; just two election cycles prior, UKIP secured just one percent of the national vote. It was the first structural crack in Britain’s century-old Labour-Conservative duopoly, proving that a disciplined populist message could break the establishment’s grip.

2014: The First Nationwide Victory for an Insurgent Party.

If 2009 proved the duopoly could be wounded, 2014 proved they could be beaten outright. Farage marched UKIP into the 2014 European Parliament elections and secured an outright nationwide victory, taking 24 seats and 27.5 percent of the vote.

This was an electoral earthquake. It marked the first time since December 1910 that a party other than Labour or the Conservatives had won the popular vote in a nationwide British election. Farage had taken a fringe independence movement and transformed it into the most potent electoral force in the country, completely upending the institutional calculus in London.

The 2014 By-Elections: Forcing Cameron’s Hand.

The Westminster commentariat insisted that Farage’s success was confined to Brussels and could never translate to the First Past the Post (FPTP) system used to elect national lawmakers to the House of Commons. Farage killed this myth by orchestrating high-profile defections to UKIP by Conservative Members of Parliament (MPs) Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless.

In the subsequent Clacton and Rochester & Strood by-elections (special elections), Farage’s ground game delivered two devastating blows, securing UKIP’s first-ever parliamentary election victories. Terrified of a total collapse on his right flank as he led a fragile coalition government, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron was panicked into formally promising the public a referendum on leaving the European Union in his 2015 election platform.

2016: Defeating the Globalists.

On June 23, 2016, Farage achieved his most impossible victory. The campaign to keep Britain inside the European Union deployed the full force of “Project Fear.” Farage faced down the entire British state apparatus, the leadership of every major political party, corporate boardrooms, the BBC, international banking cartels, and even the direct intervention from U.S. President Barack Obama.

Against all odds, the British public voted for Brexit. Farage’s decades-long crusade successfully severed Britain from the bureaucratic clutches of Brussels. Within hours, David Cameron resigned in disgrace, his political career permanently extinguished by the populist wave Farage had spent a lifetime building.

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2019: The Six-Week Resurrection That Saved Brexit.

By 2019, the Westminster “uniparty” had successfully gridlocked the Brexit implementation process, deliberately attempting to dilute and derail the 2016 mandate. Believing Farage was safely retired, Prime Minister Theresa May—who had voted to remain in the EU—assumed Farage, who had retired as UKIP leader after his referendum win, was now a spent force.

She was wrong. In an unprecedented display of political agility, Farage launched the Brexit Party from scratch. Within a staggering six-week window, he built a nationwide infrastructure that wiped the floor with the establishment parties in the 2019 European Parliament elections. The sheer force of this electoral execution shattered the legislative deadlock, forced the near-immediate resignation of Theresa May, and compelled the Conservative Party to finally deliver Brexit.

2024: Cracking the Westminster First-Past-the-Post Barrier.

For years, establishment media figures mocked Farage for failing to win a Westminster seat, relying on the structural biases of Britain’s national elections to keep him out. But in 2024, with the Brexit Party having been transformed into Reform UK, Farage mounted a high-velocity campaign that shattered the Westminster glass ceiling once and for all. In 2019, the Brexit Party had stood down in constituencies held by the Conservatives on a promise that they would “get Brexit done,” even though the Conservatives refused to reciprocate in Labour-held seats where the Brexit Party had the better chance of winning.

Farage was comfortably elected as the MP for Clacton, leading a disciplined vanguard of Reform MPs directly into the House of Commons. By establishing a permanent beachhead inside the palace walls, Farage proved that Reform was not just a pressure group, but could become a legitimate government-in-waiting. The Conservatives, who had delivered a half-measures Brexit and record-breaking immigration, hemorrhaged voters to Farage’s party and suffered their worst defeat in a century.

Post-2024: Toppling Starmer and Topping National Polls.

Following the 2024 elections, which saw Labour return to power on a low turnout after years of Conservative failure on Brexit and immigration, Reform first displaced the centuries-old Conservatives as Britain’s leading right-wing party and then began regularly topping national opinion polls, drawing massive support from both disillusioned working-class Labor voters and abandoned Conservatives.

The tipping point arrived during the English local elections in 2026, where Reform inflicted historic losses on the incumbent Labour Party. Suffering catastrophic losses in former industrial strongholds, the sheer scale of the Reform surge induced an immediate leadership crisis within Labour, ultimately toppling Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer from power. He was at least the third prime minister to be brought down by Farage; arguably the fourth, including Rishi Sunak in 2019.

The Future.

Farage about to take the stage. Don’t miss this. https://t.co/y5wBcRFN6T

— Raheem J. Kassam (@RaheemKassam) October 1, 2026

Institutional panic over the rise of Reform is palpable, and the establishment’s playbook is becoming increasingly transparent. According to data analyzed by The National Pulse using recent YouGov MRP figures, corporate-backed splinter parties—such as the Rupert Lowe-led, Elon Musk-backed “Restore Britain”—fail to win a single seat of their own in a general election, but threaten to split the right-leaning vote just enough to hand dozens of seats back to the left-leaning uniparty.

Yet history shows that artificial, top-down political experiments can rarely duplicate the organic success of movements like Farage’s. As Britain prepares for its next constitutional turning point, the data makes one thing clear: betting against Nigel Farage is a losing proposition.

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Image by Gage Skidmore.

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