Andy Burnham was officially declared the leader of Britain’s governing Labour Party on Friday, marking the completion of his final hurdle to becoming prime minister on Monday.
The center-left party announced the outcome of a leadership contest to replace the departing Prime Minister Keir Starmer, with Burnham as the sole contender.
The announcement was largely anticipated after Burnham secured nominations from 379 out of the 403 Labour lawmakers in the House of Commons by Thursday night.
In his inaugural speech as leader, Burnham expressed his gratitude and emotional readiness for the responsibility that lies ahead. He emphasized the importance of restoring hope to the nation.
Burnham, the former mayor of Greater Manchester, has been prime minister-in-waiting for weeks, but he has revealed little detail about his policy priorities. He will arrive in Number 10 Downing Street largely unknown to voters outside Manchester.
After winning a special election for a seat in Parliament a month ago, he pledged to build a politics “based on unity and hope” and an economy that spreads growth evenly across the country.
He has held no press conferences and given few interviews, and will arrive in Downing Street largely unknown to voters outside Manchester.
Burnham brings a more relaxed style of leadership than the rather stern Starmer, and is regarded as one of the Labour Party’s 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.
Burnham began sketching out some of his priorities in his first speech as Labour leader, and will say that he will have the “courage to fix the big things that politics has neglected,” his office said.
He will highlight plans to focus on economic renewal, more public control of key sectors and creating new modern industrial jobs, arguing that Britain took “a series of wrong turns in the 1980s” when “political power was centralized and economic power privatized.”
That’s the decade when Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher oversaw policies of privatization, deindustrialization and political centralization that transformed the U.K. economy.
