LyrArc Article Gist
Financial markets favor West Streeting for chancellor, for No.11, yet that is the very reason the No.11 under Starmer failed. Financial markets are not one voice but many voices. And if one listened carefully there have to be voices that look for what is best for Britain as what is best for Britain will be good for financial markets not the other way around. After 14 years of austerity plus divisiveness of Brexit and previous decade under Labour's then failed policies that led to deindustrialization and the financial crisis of 2009, there is a need to rebuild the economic and social fabric of Britain torn apart by decades of failed policies from failed leaders.  Business and industry should put its interests in with the interests of the British people and the workers in a united effort to pull Britain up from its current economic weakness. Wes Streeting lacks experience and Ed Milliband not only has proven himself at the Energy Ministry and has experience, says this report in the Guardian, but also has a better sense of the needs and aspirations of workers and working class Labor districts across Britain. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Kylian Mbappe adds 2 goals for France in 3-0 game with Iraq, World Cup Soccer 2026.

LyrArc Article Gist
BBC view of Starmer - a top lawyer whose "rules approach" did not connect with British public- coming after 14 years of austerity Starmer's style of governing, the actions of his chancellor at the finance ministry, and the messaging, all seemed totally out of place. Starmer spent most of his carreer as a human rights lawyer for the Crown. He was head of the crown Prosecution Service for 2008 to 2013, which did not prepare him well for the post austerity disaffection of the British public- he ended up with the worst ratings of any prime minister.

LyrArc Article Gist
BBC's look at Andy Burnham, whom it calls "King of the North" having won 60% of the vote as Mayor of Greater Manchester for three successive terms. A brief look at Andy Burnham's life. His father was a BT enginee and his mother a GP receptionist both strong Labour party supporters. He studied for a Masters degree in English at Cambridge. BBC says he was inspired to join Labour at age 14 years after seeing a documentary "Boys from the Blackstuff,"' about life in the city of Liverpool for the disadvantaged. He is a soccer player and Everton soccer team fan, who played for Lancashire schoolboys cricket team. He starts out as ajournalist working for trade magazines, then as researcher for the MP for Duwich, later joining the Blair movement that returned Labour to power. Under Blair he was junior minister, then MP for Leigh in the Manchester area. He moved to Cabinet Minister under Gordon Brown as chief secretary to the Treasury and Health Secretary. With Conservatives in power he was Shadow Home Secretary under Jeremy Corbyn in the Opposition. He ran against Jeremy Corbyn and Ed Milliband for the leadership of the Labour Party before being elected as Mayor of Greater Manchester three times with 60% of the vote. As Mayor he put the bus and transport system back under government control and built the Bee Network, which is one of his success stories in Manchester. He is seen as the only Labour leader who enjoys confidence of the British public from the way he ran the large local government of Manchester. With UK Reform winning local elections he is seen as the leader who can bring confidence back to Labour, and to Britain as it navigates the post Brexit environment and strives for renewal of Britain, its economy and role in Europe. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
An increasingly volatile and impatient electorate says The Guardian. Yet it is also true that Labour's win was much more fragile than the number of MP's elected to parliament, as there was no increase in support between the last two general elections. Labour's win was because of the conservative vote being divided by Reform UK splitting the conservative vote. After years of austerity Labour needed to get the message right that it was going to act in earnest and fight for working people which Starmer not only failed to do this but sent a mixed message that he was more concerned about budgetary restrictions. Starmer had a chancellor who clearly sent the wrong message to the public and Britain after 14 years of austerity. The Mandelson appointment showed a degree of callousness to the opinion of working people of both Starmer's chief of staff McSweeney and Starmer, as Mandelson was from a previous era of Labour which had clearly failed the British people. People in Britain were right to ask who is this guy who can't come out clearly and say what he is for after 14 years of brutal austerity under different conservative prime ministers, and a divisive vote for leaving the European Union, the least of Britain's priorities. Labour pretended to talk tough about migration during the election but once elected failed to grasp the concerns and unease of working people about asylum hotels and migrations, hanging on to now inappropriately applied  European Commission of Human Rights concerns when whole communities were first deindustrialized by British policy on manufacturing that hurt the social and economic fabric, and then asked to have migrants from remote countries whom they knew nothing about in their neighborhoods. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Keir Starmer resigns June 22 2026, as Andy Burnham takes oath in parliament as MP and future UK Prime Minister.

LyrArc Article Gist
Guardian View in 2026 for Burnham:  people will not reward Labour for a new model of the state but for making life cheaper, easier, and more secure. Cutting unprotected departments, cutting public investment, is not the option. It is about making public services from water, energy, transport to education and healthcare work efficiently and better for ordinary people.

LyrArc Article Gist
$6 billion transferred from South Korea to Qatar in a deal to free prisoners is now being used for humanitarian help to people of Iran overseen for purchases made by Iran's central bank by the US and Qatar. This is part of a necessary deescalation in the conflict over nuclear seen as needed at this time by all G-8 leaders including India, and also China which is also monitoring Iran following the spirit of ending the war outlined in the Memorandum. 

LyrArc Article Gist
Makerfield byelection in UK brings people together from all points of view behind Burnham as "the best hope we have."

LyrArc Article Gist
Andy Burnham, Mayor of the Greater Manchester region in Britain wins the Makerfield by election for UK parliament, and is now set to take over the leadership of the Labour Party, to be the next prime minister of Britain. In the election he won with 55% of the vote far surpassing the 44% of the Reform party, Restore party and the Conservatives combined. 

LyrArc Article Gist
Stephen Castle of the NYT gives an objective look at Andy Burnham of the Greater Manchester area and Labour party leader. Burnham has said that Britain has been on the wrong path for 40 years and had the courage to prove this by leaving London for his home region of Greater Manchester in the North of England, after serving as chief secretary of The Treasury and Labour minister under Gordon Brown around the time of the financial crisis of 2009. After winning in Greater Manchester he served as Mayor of this important region of Britain second only to London in importance, which after the fall of the British Empire, has led to politics focusing entirely on London. His term as Mayor involved getting transportation out of the hands of the private companies and having the government run it efficiently for the people of Manchester. His term is viewed favorably for improving the economy of the region. Compared to the people Britain has turned out previously- Thatcher, Blair,  Brown, Cameron, Starmer, he has genuine experience running a region and tackling tough problems, which none of the other leaders had, that comes from his hard work for the people of Greater Manchester as head of the local government. He has the skills to bring people together around his vision for the Labour party, similar to that brought by Clement Attlee. At Lyrarc we looked at what  Britannica Encylopedia has to say about Attlee and found that Attlee spent his first 15 years in the difficult working class district of East London, similar to what Burnham has done by moving back to his home region in the north and quietly working to understand the people, their aspirations and how to make them come true. Attlee did this in 1945-51 (setting up the National Health Service NHS and Bank of England, other revered institutions) the way Franklin Roosevelt did in the 1930's to establish the modernization of New York government that he later applied to 51 states as president. This is the kind of task similar to Attlee and FDR that Burnham has the potential to accomplish for Britain. Like Attlee Burnham is self effacing with little sense of wanting public recognition, comfortable with who he is and where he is from. Like Attlee staying away from Ramsay MacDonald's Labour government in 1931, when it failed to find a clear path ahead for Britain, (Burnham concentrated on Manchester away from London), and decided to forge his own way forward with new ideas and being creative- as it was under Attlee that the British Empire was converted into the British Commonwealth of Nations. An enormous feat that has not been fully grasped and will one day be seen as an amazing achievement of the 20th century- India independent and  creating a modernized state the size of the US, European Union or China by 2040/2047. This is our assessment at Lyrarc of the potential Burnham could have for Britain- and possibly for the world again like Clement Attlee in 1945-1951. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
See The Guardian's complete coverage on the Makerfield by-election and the convincing win of Andy Burnham to give Britain a new direction as he bids for the leadership of the Labour party and of Britain as prime minister.

LyrArc Article Gist
As Labour under Burnham heads to the Greater Manchester election with 2 million voters July 30 - Burnham wins Makerfield by election 55% to the 44% for Reform, Restore and Conservatives combined. It sets the stage for Labour's recovery from attacks by Reform with sensible policy on immigration, and focus on all the people left out in the British economy in the North of England under the Conservatives and neglected by Starmer and a Greater London focused economy. Britain's strength during the Industrial Revolution came from the shipyards of Scotland to the steel mills of Birmingham and the manufacturing industry in Manchester, as well as the financial strength gained from the Empire in India and concentrated in London.

LyrArc Article Gist
Amanda Lacaze of Australian rare earths maker Lynas- what can be learned from her experience in rare earths? Lynas is a Australian mining company with a mine in an eroded volcano Mount Weld that has a concentration of rare earths metals. In 2014 it was faced with China's near monopoly of rare earths and price subsidies, lack of awareness in financial markets and the government about the importance of rare earths in manufacturing. It was a period under the Obama administration that after the Bush administration had little grasp of the importance of manufacturing in America and how its decline would affect communities across the Nation, economists trumpeted the virtue of free markets without grasping how China would wrestle control of manufacturing with state subsidies and aggressive pricing and of strategic new technologies.  This included rare earths where the monopoly was close to 100%- if it is 90% today it is because of companies like Lynas. Production processes at Lynas's plant in Malaysia were not sufficiently developed in 2014. When Amanda Lacaze (now 66 years and head of Australia's Minerals Agency) joined Lynas in 2014 the first problem aside from getting Japanese creditors to restructure loans because of aggressive pricing by Chinese firms was to improve manufacturing processes to get 95% quality instead of 48% quality (measured in number of quality rejected product). This was achieved in the first year. To do this she thinned her management ranks and closed offices in Sydney (to cut costs) and moved management to Malaysia where the problems in manufacturing processes would make or break the company. She was able to get creditor Japanese government backed Japan Australia Rare Earths financial institution to renew and extend loans. Had this not happened the company may not exist today. It shows the sheer foolishness that pervaded most of the American industry at that time, the failed economic theory that said America could not support its industry when rivals were supporting theirs, the Bush and Obama administrations that had no understanding of how the industrial competition was takin place in world trade that could substitute other nations for America' s dominance in manufacturing and did little to push back and regain the position for America in world trade. This ignorance continues in some sections of business today that cannot see the plain facts and refuses to see the enormous damage to the Nation from the destruction of its manufacturing base and loss of good jobs in communities across the US. Lynas is now getting contracts from the US government for rare earths and is the only reason China's dominance in rare earths in 90% and not 100% along with MP Materials of the US. Planning was discredited in the crazy euphoria that turned the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Communist Soviet Union, as economists never understood that planning that was used by the Soviets and Chinese in their Five Yer Plans is just borrowed from centuries of basic ways of conducting business that had originated with the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Without planning the growth of the British Navy and the industry that supported it Britain could never have gained the dominance that it did in the 19th century Industrial Revolution. As the Industrial Revolution spread in the US in the 19th and twentieth century every major company had a 1 year Operating plan and a Long Range Plan for 5 Years and 10 Years. The government would have identified rare earths with foresight as one of the newer technologies and the manufacturing infrastructure needed to support its development if these plans were developed at the different levels of government and at the highest levels. This was done under market economy in China. Instead DJT was forced to step back from trade negotiations with China for unfair trade when China held out with a threat to stop export of rare earths materials in 2025, because a huge hole or gap in planning happened at the highest levels of the US government. That happened 11 years after 2014 when Australian rare earths maker Lynas survival was in doubt under a new CEO Amanda Lacaze. This is only one of many misses in American manufacturing and industry, in world trade, that came from misguided economic theory and failure to grasp the basic facts behind the success of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the US. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Small talk at G-8 Les Bains France June 17 2026, that includes Prime Minister Modi of India.

LyrArc Article Gist
Some light hearted moments of G-8 leaders (including India) at Les Bains, France with Giorgia Meloni of Italy. Small talk with Merz, Leyen, Modi, Antonio Costa, Sanae Takaichi, and Keir Starmer.

LyrArc Article Gist
Andy Burham and the road to No.10 -Explained in The Guardian.

LyrArc Article Gist
England team's Jude Bellingham in opening game with Croatia in World Cup Soccer 2026.

LyrArc Article Gist
Most of the media has failed to cover this aspect, yet the Collective agreement is a big, a huge plus on June 17 2026 at the G-7 Summit (G-9 expanded with India and Brazil). There was discussion and effort to convey different points of view which was an healthy aspect of this G-9 meeting in Les Bain, France, near Geneva. German chancellor Merz described the atmosphere as very constructive with lots of open thoughtful discussion- "This is the ​first ‌time since [US] President [Donald] Trump took office that we ‌have issued a joint ‌declaration ​at a G7 summit and found common language on the major ​foreign and security policy issues of our time. ⁠I ​consider that ​a real success."  "This ⁠sets a new tone, including ⁠regarding ​trans-Atlantic unity and resolve." Merz says all issues on the summit agenda were talked about "very openly" and "very constructively." Merz  says he will support a peace deal in the Middle East, including a possible military mission if there is "a lasting ceasefire."  A series of "preconditions that are not yet fulfilled, so there is no immediate hurry." What this means, as most of the media has failed to cover this aspect including NYT, WSJ and Washington Post, is that the US and the EU, India and China, Brazil, the poorer countries  Egypt, Pakistan, Turkey, are now in a lot better positions, coming at it from different angles,  and are all aligned for their own interests, to push hard to support the US effort to get to the Memorandum of Agreement with Iran, and future settlement in Ukraine. The onus is for Iran and the entire Middle East to collectively come to an agreement to live with harmony among the neighbors for the mutual interest- including a nuclear free Middle East that is in their mutual interest- so that the rest of the world's people, a massive 5 billion compared to 500 million in the Middle East can industrialize, modernize, and make economic progress that benefits all the people of the world. ...