Britain's Prime Minister Andy Burnham delivers a speech as he visits social care organization Jewish Care in north west London on July 29, 2026. Photo by Kirsty Wigglesworth/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

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Black-clad and tie-less like Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whom he met with this week, new British Prime Minister Andy Burnham says he’s dropping former prime minister Tony Blair’s target of getting half of young Brits to attend university. And he wants to destigmatize the trades. Good for him! All hard, honest work should be honoured.

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After 40 years of university teaching I do still believe in the mission: getting people to think critically — especially, these days, about “critical theory,” which is causing so much trouble in our politics. But prolonged post-adolescent study is not for everyone. And it’s no longer, if it ever was, a guarantee of an interesting, high-paying job. So let a hundred education pathways bloom.

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The danger is that Burnham replaces pro-university policies with pro-trades ones. You hear lots of people saying, as he does, that AI means the trades will be even more important in future. Maybe, maybe not. The thing about fundamental social transformations is that although everything about them is crystal clear in hindsight, those living through them, i.e., us with AI, haven’t any real clue how it will all work itself out. (Hands up if, 20 years ago, you saw “influencers” coming.)

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It would be hard for them, I know, but policy-makers should admit they’re clueless, keep labour markets flexible, make sure national statistical agencies provide good data on who’s making how much under what working conditions, and help people finance — but don’t pay for outright — the education or training that gets them where they themselves choose to try to go. If the trades really do flourish under AI, that will show up in trades’ incomes, which young people looking for income will notice and pursue — so long as income taxes don’t eliminate the gains from working hard.

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Apart from Burnham’s basic black, another current fashion choice in Britain is aluminum. It’s being worn by Count Binface, a political satirist whose real name is Jonathan Harvey. “Bin” is English for “garbage can,” which is what Harvey dresses as. He is the principal opponent of Reform UK Party Leader Nigel Farage in a byelection in Farage’s riding of Clacton, in Essex, northeast of London. The byelection was prompted when Farage resigned so as to let his voters decide whether various charges about unconventional financial contributions should disqualify him from sitting in parliament. When the other major parties decided to deny him a publicity platform by not running candidates against him, Harvey emerged as the main challenger.

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Satire’s great, obviously, but for Canadians what’s really interesting about this byelection is that Farage resigned his seat July 7 and the vote is Aug. 13 — just 37 days later.

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We’re having three byelections on Aug. 31. They are 55 days, 87 days and 123 days after the events that precipitated them (which were, respectively, an appointment to the Senate, a resignation and an appointment to an ambassadorship). Yes, we’re a larger country than the U.K. and so much of our communication still takes place by pony express, but why can’t we do things as promptly as the Brits do? Our rules say the government can wait up to six months before calling a byelection. Why not require it be done right away? Prime ministers have so much power to manage politics in their own interest couldn’t we at least remove this little bit of discretion about timing?

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In the U.S. they say “money is the mother’s milk of politics.” In Canada, the upcoming byelections show, politics is the mother of milk money. The Liberal candidate in the Chicoutimi-Le Fjord byelection is, as Catherine Lévesque reports, a dairy farmer who served as president of both Les Producteurs de lait du Québec and Les Producteurs de lait du Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean. Meanwhile, the Bloc Québécois candidate in the riding of Saint-Hyacinthe-Bagot-Acton, whose MP announced his resignation May 29, effective June 19, though a byelection still hasn’t been called, is a former executive for the International Dairy Federation and the Dairy Farmers of Canada.

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Given these candidates, and given Liberal ambitions in Quebec, how likely is it that Ottawa makes even the slightest concession on supply management as it tries — very, very hard, it keeps telling us — to get a CUSMA deal with the Americans, who, quite understandably, don’t like our triple-digit tariffs on dairy products? Quebec dairy farmers clearly know where their butter is bred: politics. The cows aren’t the only dumb animals they’ve been milking.

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Finally, in British politics, I read in London’s Daily Telegraph that Prime Minister Mark Carney took time out of his busy travel schedule to tweet congratulations to County Mayo, his ancestral seat, on having finally won the All-Ireland Football (i.e., soccer) championship after 75 years of a supposed curse against it.