Andy Burnham will become British prime minister Monday after the ruling left-wing Labour Party formally declared him its new leader on Friday.
Burnham ran unopposed, with 379 of Labour’s 403 members of Parliament backing his bid, according to CBS News. He replaces deeply unpopular outgoing Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who faced weeks of pressure to quit after Labour’s disastrous showing in May’s local elections.
Starmer will formally tender his resignation Monday.
The Labour Party will get “hope back,” Burnham said in his first speech as leader adding the he “has a plan,” the BBC reported.
The Labour Party did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
“[Britain] surrendered control of the essentials: housing, water, energy, transport, and left the people exposed to higher costs” when “political power was centralized, and economic power was privatized,” Burnham declared in his acceptance speech. “Four decades of the neoliberalism that began in the 1980s have not been kind to the places that built our party, nor to the communities across the UK in rural and coastal areas.”
“If we don’t have sufficient public control over the cost of the essentials, how can we have control over inflation, public spending, and the rest of the economy?” he asked the audience.
Burnham celebrated the Liverpool mayor’s plan to return the region’s entire commuter rail network to public ownership by 2028, which would be “a plan to cut fairs, make trains run on time, and a railway run in the interests of the passengers, not shareholders.” He added that Labour had placed “rail back under public control.”
Burnham served seven years as mayor of Greater Manchester before winning a June special election to return to Parliament with the aim of becoming prime minister, according to Axios.
The Labour Party member describes his economic policy platform — dubbed “Manchesterism” after home city — as “business-friendly socialism.” Widely regarded as to Starmer’s left, Burnham is slated to lead the most-left wing government of the U.K. in about a half century, according to analysts.
In his first post to X after winning the leadership, Burnham vowed to “be a leader for every region and nation in this great country.”
“[T]his Party will be unashamedly Labour in our priorities and in the decisions we take,” he added. “Together, we will set Britain on a new path.”
Burnham argued Britain took “a series of wrong turns in the 1980s,” when former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher privatized state industries, according to CBS News.
He previously accused President Donald Trump of bringing “instability” to the world, CBS News reported.
“The path we’re on, if we are not careful, is a path towards the politics of the United States of America,” Burnham said, CBS News reported. He believes America has”a polarized, poisonous politics where people in communities don’t work together anymore.”
Outrage swept Britain in June when body camera footage from the murder of Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old student who pleaded “I’ve been stabbed” as he bled out in handcuffs after his killer, a U.K.-born man of Indian descent, falsely told the police the teen was the attacker.
Following significant backlash over rampant migrant crime and pressure from the populist right Reform UK, Labour spent more than a year moving rightward on immigration. The party ordered the first-ever publication of migrant crime statistics in April 2025. At the time, deportation orders were pending against more than 19,000 illegal immigrants from other countries.
Residents of Piddington, a small Oxfordshire village, voted overwhelmingly to break away from Britain after the government moved to place some 1,250 male migrants, several times the village’s population, at a neighboring ex-military site.
(DCNF)