Andy Burnham, Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade, arrived at Downing Street Monday promising that a bigger, more muscular state can solve the country’s economic woes and restore political stability.
Standing in front of the prime minister’s official residence, Burnham said he was acutely aware that the U.K. had been cycling through leaders at an unprecedented rate. “It requires my generation of politicians to raise our game and rise to the new challenge,” he said. “Britain needs to show the world that we can regain our stability once again.”
The 56-year-old painted a broad-brush vision for the country, where a more interventionist state would roll back what he called 40 years of neoliberalism. Burnham wants to devolve power from London to the regions. He pledged to bring “life’s essentials under state control” and said his first policy would be to end homeless people sleeping on streets. He also promised to present a 10-year plan for the country later this year that would offer “a new political model and a new economic model.”
Burnham Monday officially replaced former Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who earlier in the day handed in his resignation to King Charles III at Buckingham Palace. Labour lawmakers turned on Starmer after just two years in charge when Labour cratered in opinion polls. Despite winning a landslide in 2024, Labour now trails Reform UK, an anti-immigration party.
Burnham, a former mayor of Manchester, was named party leader last week after no other candidates stepped forward for the job.
Labour lawmakers hope that a new leader can unite fragmented left-wing voters ahead of the next general election, which must be called by 2029. But Burnham faces a fine line between appeasing left-wing Labour Party lawmakers and calming financial markets.
Investors are betting that Burnham’s economic pitch will tilt the U.K. further left, with modest increases in government spending funded by higher taxes on wealth and more borrowing. However his room for maneuver is constrained because both the tax burden and government borrowing are already near historic highs. Meanwhile, the economy is predicted to only grow 1% this year.
Burnham will announce his cabinet team throughout Monday afternoon, offering a flavor of how he will govern. Investors say they are reassured amid speculation that the new prime minister won’t name Ed Miliband as treasury chief. Miliband, a close ally who spearheaded Britain’s renewable-energy push, worried investors due to concerns that he could favor higher government spending. Burnham is also expected to lay out a number of policies this week, including scrapping a plan to introduce compulsory ID cards and adding funding for financial support for families.
One area of investor attention is Burnham’s stance regarding North Sea petroleum drilling.
President Trump over the weekend said Burnham would turn the U.K. from a “poverty stricken disaster” to “one of the richest countries in the world” by allowing drilling for oil in the North Sea.
The government must soon decide whether to greenlight drilling off the coast of Scotland, in the Jackdaw gas field and the Rosebank oil field, where licenses were approved years ago but drilling was blocked by a court ruling in a suit brought by climate campaigners. The Labour Party banned exploration licenses for new oil and gas fields in the North Sea.
To strike a new political tone, Burnham paints himself as a working-class outsider from England’s North who can shake up the government status quo. The country’s two establishment parties, the Conservatives and Labour, are shedding voters amid low economic growth, recent record levels of immigration and a cost-of-living crisis that is fueling a sense of malaise among voters who feel that traditional politicians are unable to lift their fortunes.
Born near Liverpool, Burnham entered politics in the 1990s after graduating from the University of Cambridge and went on to work under former Labour Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. He tried and failed twice to become leader of the party in 2010 and 2015. In 2017, he left Westminster to go to Manchester and spent nine years as mayor, far from the increasingly dysfunctional national politics, overseeing a rare feel-good story: Britain’s second-largest city was enjoying a turnaround after years of deindustrialization thanks to a more active local government and rush of private investment.
While Starmer floundered in the polls, Burnham agitated for change. He triggered a remarkably rapid coup after Labour performed poorly in local elections in May. Soon after, Burnham handily won a local legislative election and returned to Parliament. That opened the path for him to formally challenge Starmer, who read the writing on the wall and quit.
“I want to be honest,” Burnham said, speaking without notes. “We have not been good enough and we will be.”
Write to Max Colchester at Max.Colchester@wsj.com