Andy Burnham appears to have received something of a popularity boost this week, for refusing to give interviews to the Sun.

And given the newspaper’s history with Liverpool, Hillsborough and the Labour movement, it’s not surprising that Burnham’s reported decision has been greeted with enthusiasm, particularly in Merseyside.

It also comes as the government’s communications director, former Sun editor David Dinsmore, is preparing to leave his Whitehall post after just over a year.

As first reported by the Observer, Burnham has refused to be interviewed by the Murdoch-owned tabloid, placing him in the company of just one other Labour prime minister who deliberately refused to cooperate with the paper, Jim Callaghan, half a century ago.

Callaghan’s relationship with the Sun became particularly notorious during the 1979 general election campaign, when the paper famously turned his remarks at a hastily convened airport press conference into the headline ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’

What Callaghan had actually said was: “I don’t think other people in the world will share the view that there is mounting chaos.”

Burnham’s reasons for keeping the Sun at arm’s length go back to one of the darkest episodes in recent British political and media history. Hillsborough.

In late August, it was reported that Dinsmore is to step down as the government’s communications director on September 30, after just over a year in the role.

Dinsmore was appointed by then prime minister Keir Starmer in July 2025 with a brief to overhaul communications across Whitehall. Before entering government, he had edited the Sun between 2013 and 2015 and subsequently became chief operating officer at News UK.

His appointment to such a senior government position was controversial among some Labour figures, particularly in Liverpool, where the Sun remains widely boycotted because of its coverage of the Hillsborough disaster.

Liverpool City Region Mayor Steve Rotheram, who is a close friend of Burnham’s, described Dinsmore’s appointment as “insensitive” and said he “shouldn’t be anywhere near a senior government role.”  He said the appointment “sent shivers down my spine.”

Dinsmore’s departure has reportedly been agreed by “mutual agreement.” While there is no evidence that Burnham’s reported refusal to cooperate with the Sun played any role in Dinsmore’s exit, the two stories nevertheless expose an uncomfortable tension between the current government and the newspaper.

The Sun’s relationship with Liverpool has, of course, never recovered from its coverage of Hillsborough.

Its infamous front page headlined “The Truth,” falsely accused Liverpool supporters of urinating on police, stealing from the dead and attacking officers as the disaster unfolded at Sheffield Wednesday’s stadium in 1989, when 97 people died.

The claims were false and subsequent investigations and inquests exposed the extent of the failures by the police and other authorities, while Hillsborough families spent decades fighting for the truth to be recognised.

The Sun has apologised repeatedly for its coverage. But in Liverpool, those apologies have done little to repair the damage.

For Burnham, Hillsborough has become a defining part of his political career.

As a minister in Gordon Brown’s government, he helped drive the creation of the independent Hillsborough Independent Panel in 2009. He has since remained a prominent campaigner for Hillsborough justice and a champion of the Hillsborough Law.

As a member of Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet, Burnham was among the Merseyside MPs who criticised Miliband for posing for a publicity photograph holding a copy of the newspaper.

When Burnham entered the contest to replace Miliband as Labour leader in 2015, he made clear that he had not forgiven the Sun for its Hillsborough coverage. He also said he would not give the newspaper interviews if he became leader.

So perhaps it’s unsurprising that his latest reported decision has been welcomed by people who do not necessarily agree with Burnham on everything else.

“Good on him. Morals, scruples. 1989 changed mine and many others lives. The victim’s families, LFC, Kenny, Steve Rotheram and Andy Burnham actually did things to expose the cover up,” one person commented.

“Good for Andy. Nobody should be reading that muck spreader,” said another.

“Haven’t made my final opinion on him yet but agree with you here. Well done, @andyburnham,” another wrote.

And another summed up the enduring sense of betrayal felt by many Liverpool supporters: “He played his part in helping the families getting justice and no doubt, like nearly all Liverpudlians and others like me around the country will never forget or forgive what this scummy rag published in April 1989 so fair play to him.”

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In a marked departure from his predecessor, Prime Minister Andy Burnham plans to refuse interviews and article requests from the right-wing Sun Newspaper, because of the way it covered the 1989 Hillsborough disaster.

The Observer reports that three seperate sources close to Burnham have told the paper that he ‘intends to maintain a stance of granting the tabloid “no special favours’.

The paper goes on to report: “His position is understood to be causing “consternation” within the headquarters of the newspaper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch’s News UK, where executives have long since been used to the Sun getting access and securing influence at the very highest level of government.”

That means Burnham will become become the first Prime Minister in 50 years to refuse ‘full cooperation’ with The Sun, following in the footsteps of James Callaghan.

When the Sun covered the Hillsborough disaster it ran a front page story headlined “The Truth”, which falsely blamed Liverpool football fans for a crowd crush that caused the deaths of 97 people, which is now recognised as having been part of a concerted cover-up of policing failures. Ever since, the newspaper is still widely boycotted in the city.

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You might expect that, with a greater awareness of mental health, legal and reputational risks, and changing industry standards, broadcasters would use more trigger and content warnings in 2026 than they did in 1964.

You might also expect a national newspaper to have more important things to report than a trivial warning attached to one television programme.

But this is the Sun we’re talking about.

According to the Murdoch tabloid, ITV bosses are a ‘woke joke’ for placing a content warning on a celebrated British television documentary series.

The original episode of 7 Up broadcast in 1964. It followed a group of seven-year-olds from different social backgrounds as they discussed class, money, education and their hopes for the future. Intended as a one-off programme, it was later developed by its director and narrator, Michael Apted, into an extraordinary documentary project, with the participants filmed every seven years.

As the group approach retirement age, the series has returned to ITV with the first of a three-part programme aired over three successive evenings.

So, what has the Sun got its knickers in a twist about?

A warning.

Before the original 7 Up episode, ITV informed viewers that it “contains outdated attitudes.” That is apparently enough to trigger the tabloid’s latest bout of culture-war outrage.

And, naturally, the Sun found an ally willing to complain about the complaint. The Free Speech Union’s Lord Toby Young told the paper: “It can’t be a surprise to anyone that a 1964 documentary contains outdated attitudes.”

Indeed, it can’t. Which rather raises the question of what, exactly, the Sun is objecting to. The warning doesn’t prevent anyone from watching the programme. It doesn’t censor the documentary, edit out controversial material or tell viewers what they should think about it. It simply gives modern audiences a small amount of context before they watch a programme made more than 60 years ago.

That hardly amounts to the great suppression of free speech.

Yet this is not the first time the Sun has put ITV bosses in its crosshairs over a content warning.
Earlier this year, the paper took aim at ITV for placing a warning on a repeat of Bob Monkhouse’s 1994 An Audience With…, telling viewers that the programme “reflects the language and attitudes of its time.”

Like the original 7 Up, Monkhouse’s comedy, and the conventions that shaped it, belong to a different era of British entertainment. It was therefore entirely reasonable for ITV to provide some context for a modern audience.

A brief warning doesn’t condemn Monkhouse, erase his work or prevent anyone from watching it. It simply acknowledges the blindingly obvious fact that social attitudes change, and comedy changes with them.

The Sun’s response is part of a familiar pattern. Anything that acknowledges changes in social attitudes can be branded ‘woke,’ regardless of whether anyone has actually been censored, cancelled or prevented from expressing themselves.

It is a particularly curious position for a newspaper that routinely claims to defend free speech. It also ignores the fact that such warnings have been standard practice for years on those channels which earn a crust by recycling ancient television series. The Sun only seems to have noticed when ITV engaged in the practice. Imagine their response if it had been the BBC!

The post Woke-Bashing of the Week: The Sun throws tantrum over ‘woke’ ITV bosses and a simple content warning appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.

The Moonlighter games cast you as Will, a dungeoneer-merchant hybrid, delving into randomly shifting combat arenas by night and selling the treasures you unearth there by day. In the dungeons, you fight various monsters and beasties and are then offered upgrades to your combat build or a handful of relics you must fit in your bag. In the shop, you figure out how to get the best price for these items. And then you spend that money on upgrades that help you to dungeon delve better and start all over again.

All this time, you will be thinking about multipliers.

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DURATÓN, Spain—I'll say it: I'm hooked. Standing in the shadow of the Moon is one of the rarest opportunities to directly sense the mechanics of our Solar System, when the dance between three celestial bodies slides into perfect alignment. It's a mathematical miracle whose rarity and grandeur are made possible by the relative sizes and distances of the Moon and the Sun from Earth. Not every planet is so lucky.

The Moon's shadow crisscrossed the American heartland twice in less than seven years, first in 2017 and again in 2024. I was fortunate to witness both. The experiences left me too impatient to wait for the next total solar eclipse in the continental United States in far-off 2044.

That's what pulled me to the plains of north-central Spain last week. This land of wide open spaces, ancient churches and castles, and vast sunflower fields, all baking under the blinding August Sun, seemed like the perfect location to enter the path of totality. The ongoing drought in Spain has turned the country's fields and forests into a tinderbox, but those conditions made for ideal eclipse viewing.

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© Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

Wherever two fluids slide past each other at different speeds, the boundary between them buckles, then curls, then rolls up into vortexes. It’s called the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, and the physics behind it was worked out in the late 1860s. We know this instability explains why wind causes ripples on the surface of water and clouds shear into a row of curves.

For decades scientists argued the same thing must be happening with plasma on the surface of the Sun, and yet nobody had been able to confirm it. Now, a team led by David Kuridze and Friedrich Wöger of the National Solar Observatory reports that Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities are not just visible on the Sun, but they’re ubiquitous. Their new study proposes that this may change the way we think about how heat, mass, and magnetic energy move through the Sun's atmosphere.

Telescope’s test drive

The reason plasma whirlpools on the Sun stayed hidden for so long is rather trivial: They are very small. Their scale sits below what telescopes with mirrors smaller than 2 meters can resolve. For most of the history of solar physics, that has ruled out every telescope on Earth. This changed when the US National Science Foundation opened the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, a 4-meter instrument in Hawaii and the largest solar telescope in the world. The telescope entered its operational phase back in November 2021.

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© NASA/Goddard/SDO

The concept behind Moonlighter, i.e. you are a shopkeeper except to get your wares you need to venture forth into dangerous dungeons and make it out alive, is always one that appealed to me, but has just managed to slip me by all these years. My problem now is that I have two new reasons not to ignore both it and its sequel The Endless Vault, as the follow-up now has a 1.0 release date, and the original is free for the next few days.

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