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LONDON (AP) \u2014 Andy Burnham was officially declared leader of Britain\u2019s governing Labour Party on Friday, promising to bring hope to the British people and purpose to the floundering government as he cleared his final hurdle to take office as prime minister next week.<\/p>\n
The former mayor of Greater Manchester was the only contender in the center-left party\u2019s leadership contest to replace departing Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who was forced out by a rebellion within his party. Friday\u2019s announcement was a foregone conclusion after Burnham secured nominations from 379 of the 403 Labour lawmakers in the House of Commons.<\/p>\n
Burnham pledged to serve \u201cpeople and places who have been waiting too long for politics to let them hope again.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re going to give them hope back,\u201d he told an audience of lawmakers, party activists and trade union leaders in his first speech as leader. \u201cI am ready.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI have a plan,\u201d he added, in a bid to reassure a party that has seen its popularity nosedive since winning a landslide election victory two years ago. He pledged to end Labour\u2019s factional disputes, saying \u201cwe won\u2019t beat Britain\u2019s new right if we are consumed by infighting and pulling in different directions.\u201d Burnham has been prime minister-in-waiting for weeks, since winning a special election for a seat in Parliament a month ago, but he has revealed little detail about his policy priorities. He will arrive in Number 10 Downing Street largely unknown to voters outside Manchester.<\/p>\n He sketched out some priorities in Friday\u2019s speech, promising to deliver \u201chope in every heart\u201d and \u201cgood growth in every post code,\u201d in part by transferring power from central government in London to local leaders in cities and regions.<\/p>\n \u201cWe will take power back from Westminster and Whitehall and give it to the place you live,\u201d he told the audience. \u201cMore power over life\u2019s essentials so you can make them work better.\u201d<\/p>\n Starmer announced last month that he would resign after two years in office marred by missteps and judgment errors that eroded his standing with his party and the public.<\/p>\n Labour regularly trails behind anti-immigration party Reform UK in opinion polls, and the governing party had catastrophic results in local elections in May, triggering pressure on Starmer to step down that he couldn\u2019t resist. Burnham brings a more relaxed style of leadership than the rather stern Starmer, and is regarded as one of the Labour Party\u2019s best communicators. But he faces many of the same problems as his predecessor, including a sluggish economy, a cost-of-living squeeze fueled by wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and overstretched public services.<\/p>\n And his promises of a new, less divisive politics are not too different to what Starmer pledged when he took office in 2024.<\/p>\n \u201cI will work to build a new politics. The country is crying out for it,\u201d Burnham said. \u201cHow can politicians point fingers when living standards are falling and politics as a whole isn\u2019t working for them? It infuriates them and makes them switch off.\u201d<\/p>\n He said he would have the \u201ccourage to fix the big things that politics has neglected,\u201d such as tackling the patchy access to social care for those who need it because of age, illness or disability. It\u2019s a pressing issue in a country with an aging population, and one that has foxed previous Labour and Conservative governments.<\/p>\n Burnham says he\u2019ll reverse 40 years of bad decisions<\/strong><\/p>\n He highlighted plans to focus on economic renewal, more public control of key sectors and creating new modern industrial jobs, arguing that Britain took \u201ca series of wrong turns in the 1980s\u201d when \u201cpolitical power was centralized and economic power privatized.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s the decade when Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher oversaw policies of privatization, deindustrialization and political centralization that transformed the U.K. economy.<\/p>\n \u201cSlowly, at times imperceptibly, over four decades, political and economic power drained away out of our communities in every region and nation of the U.K.,\u201d Burnham said, calling Britain\u2019s change of prime ministers \u2014 for the sixth time in a decade \u2014 \u201cthe most significant change moment in our politics for 40 years.\u201d<\/p>\n Starmer will remain prime minister until Monday, when he formally tenders his resignation to King Charles III. The king will then ask Burnham to form a government.<\/p>\n Britain\u2019s parliamentary democracy allows governing parties to change leaders, and thus prime ministers, without the need for a general election. The next national election doesn\u2019t have to be held until 2029.<\/p>\n New prime ministers have come with increasing frequency in recent years. Burnham will be the U.K.’s seventh leader since 2016.<\/p>\n He faces strong and sometimes conflicting pressures.<\/p>\n Unions welcomed his focus on living standards but said the test would be whether he can deliver. Business group the Confederation of British Industry praised his emphasis on economic growth, but also aid that \u201cthe challenge is execution.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Andy Burnham was officially declared leader of Britain\u2019s governing Labour Party on Friday, promising to bring hope to the British people and purpose to the floundering government as he cleared his final hurdle to take office as prime minister next week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":1525569,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1502,1504],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1525568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-abc-heads","category-abc-world-news"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-07-19 14:33:01","action":"change-status","newStatus":"trash","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1525568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/65"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1525568"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1525568\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1525570,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1525568\/revisions\/1525570"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1525569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1525568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1525568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1525568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nThe prime minister in waiting is about to take office<\/strong><\/p>\n
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\nBurnham deemed a better communicator than Starmer<\/strong><\/p>\n