London (CNN) — Andy Burnham has been confirmed as the new leader of Britain’s governing Labour Party, and will become the country’s seventh prime minister in a decade of extraordinary political instability when he succeeds Keir Starmer on Monday.
In his acceptance speech, Burnham pledged to give people “hope back” and challenge a political culture and economic model he said “simply doesn’t work well enough for ordinary people.”
Although official confirmation of Burnham’s ascension only came on Friday, he has, in reality, been the party’s leader-in-waiting since he won a crucial by-election last month, allowing him to return to parliament and challenge Starmer.
Labour’s disastrous local election results in May were seen as an indication of what could happen if Starmer – who is widely unpopular despite winning a landslide election victory two years ago – led the party into the next national vote. Burnham, then mayor of Greater Manchester, emerged as the best viable alternative in its scramble for a new leader.
A by-election was engineered, his ally Josh Simons resigning his seat in Makerfield – in the historic Labour heartlands of northern England where the hard-right populist party Reform UK is surging – and Burnham emerged victorious from the closely-watched race.
Despite vowing to remain in his post, Starmer announced his intention to resign days later. By winning in Makerfield, Burnham demonstrated to Labour MPs wary of losing their seats in the next general election that he could take the fight to Reform, who have led national opinion polls for months. The leadership election quickly turned into a coronation as an unassailable majority of the party’s 403 MPs backed Burnham.
He will enter 10 Downing Street on Monday, capping a long career in politics. During his first stint in Westminster from 2001-2017, he served in both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s cabinets, eventually becoming health secretary and twice unsuccessfully running for the Labour leadership.
Shortly after his second attempt, he returned to the northwest of England, where he is from, and ran for the newly created Manchester mayorship in 2017.
There, he carved out a position as a counterweight to Westminster, showcasing the country’s deep-rooted north-south divide, earning himself the moniker “The King of the North.” Manchester’s economy and public transit network flourished under his tenure.
Unlike Starmer, Burnham has a clear narrative – devolving power away from London – running through his policies.
But the traps that felled Starmer lurk in most issues Burnham must tackle. Pledges he laid out in a June speech – like ramping up construction of social housing, reindustrialization and bringing essential utilities under greater public control – must somehow be funded amid the same spending constraints that hampered Starmer.
“People have this underlying sense that the state isn’t working very well right now,” said Simon Kaye, the director of policy at the think-tank Re:State, pointing to a struggling economy, National Health Service (NHS) and social care system.
A key review of ballooning social security costs is scheduled to report in the autumn, likely forcing difficult decisions, particularly for a new center-left prime minister wary of the political costs his predecessor incurred trying to cut welfare spending. And, by a quirk of timing, Burnham takes office just as significant immigration reforms are moving through parliament, forcing him to immediately stake out a position on that most controversial of issues.
Still, while Burnham is operating within the same environment as Starmer, he is considered a better communicator than his technocratic predecessor.
“This is really a live experiment in how important the messenger is,” Kaye told CNN. “The devolution stuff, that’s already underway under Starmer. Burnham’s going to push it harder, talk about it a lot more.”
“The fiscal constraints are going to be the same … So how important is it to the parliamentary Labour Party, to the national mood, if the messenger is just a little bit more charismatic?”
Economic headwinds – including the fallout from Brexit, the Covid pandemic and the energy crisis caused by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – remain as much outside Burnham’s control as they were for Starmer. Years of austerity that followed the 2008 financial crash mean economic growth – and household incomes – have largely stagnated since then.
And the international environment is so unpredictable that attempts at economic revitalization can quickly become unstuck. While the UK is forecast to be the third-fastest growing economy in the G7 this year, high energy prices unleashed by the Iran war could easily affect this.
In many ways, Britain is still coming to terms with its status as a middle power, unable to do much to influence global affairs. Recent budget fights over increasing defense spending, which failed to commit the UK to NATO’s spending targets at a time when wars in Ukraine and the Middle East continue, only serve to illustrate this.
Even the country’s two most important diplomatic relationships – with the United States and Europe – have become difficult for prime ministers to manage through the twin forces of Brexit and the Trump administration.
It’s not just in geopolitics that Burnham will have to navigate a potentially tricky relationship with the Trump administration, of which he has been critical. Tech has already been drawn into it too – Labour’s intention to ban under-16s from social media platforms, most of them owned by US companies, has sparked opposition from the US embassy in London and guaranteeing access to artifical intelligence models could become another flashpoint.
Much like his predecessor, Burnham takes office at a time when Britain is clamoring for change. Delivering that change may depend as much on forces outside the government’s control as on the leader.
The-CNN-Wire
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