LONDON — Britain’s new prime minister spent his first statement to parliament promising to “bring back hope.” Over 204 minutes he demonstrated just how many of those hopes could ultimately be dashed.
Taking 125 questions in the Commons Tuesday, Andy Burnham made, hardened or reiterated a dizzying flurry of commitments that would radically alter the British state — if he manages to see them all through.
The man who became PM just 43 days ago suggested he will scrap Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system before 2034 if a majority of parties pledging reform — such his own Labour Party plus the centrist Liberal Democrats — win “consensus” at the next general election, due by 2029. He hinted that he could cap individual U.K. donations to political parties or block those from abroad entirely in future (though as POLITICO revealed, he has declined to do either in the short term).
He pledged to shake up England’s privatized water sector as part of a “10-year plan” this fall. He promised to impose his predecessor Keir Starmer’s social media ban on under-16s “at pace.” He repeated his long-held vows to radically reform the social care system, move powers and officials out of Whitehall, release public land for a wave of house-building and “end” rough sleeping — while still bringing down the welfare bill. “Working together to build a new sense of optimism around the country, we can make this next decade better than the last,” he said.
The parliamentary chamber began to empty, MPs turning to other duties and their bladders, as the hardiest stayed behind in the hope they would extract yet another commitment from the prime minister.
As the session wore on, Burnham hinted he could one day scrap England’s system of local taxation, which is based on property valuations from 1991. In the third hour he even promised to save Jodrell Bank, a locally-beloved cluster of deep space radio telescopes near Manchester that has had its funding cut.
The new prime minister was not offering a free-for-all and, like any minister, swerved more invitations to commit policy than he accepted. He insisted he will make tough choices.
Yet he is also enjoying a practical by-effect of being a new leader: He hasn’t yet had to disappoint all the people he will eventually disappoint.
Rhetoric vs. reality
The 125 questions he took showed that the difficulties and trade-offs that come with power are already coming into view.
Burnham dropped a hint that he could raise defense spending to 3 percent of GDP by 2030 — a key demand of his chief finance minister, John Healey, when he quit Starmer’s government earlier this year as defense minister. Burnham said he had appointed Healey “precisely because” of his arguments on defense.
Yet both men have pushed back any decision to a spending review in 2027, and will not face easy choices; the U.K.’s long-term borrowing costs are their highest since 1998, and Burnham declined to rule out tax rises in Healey’s fall budget. On paper, the position did not move on Tuesday.
The tension was summed up in Burnham’s promise to bring “much more substantial change as promised in [our] 2024 manifesto.” Healey last week put the same thing very differently, saying it was a “continuity of a Labour government with a change of leader.”
Contradictions are already emerging within Burnham’s approach.
The new prime minister wants to keep his focus more domestic than Starmer’s, but said he will head to the COP31 climate summit this November. He also promised a statement “very shortly” responding to Israel’s E1 settlement project in the West Bank, which he said “could imperil, if not end, the two-state solution.” That statement will strain relations with Israel and could do so too with Donald Trump, who Burnham is hoping to meet on a U.S. trip in late September.
He said the recent mass fatalities in Nepal, caused by falling glacier ice, were “what the climate crisis looks like.” But with energy prices rising, Burnham hinted his government will soon approve at least one of the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas projects in the North Sea.
Not even the Commons theatrics were immune. Moments after he pledged to avoid point-scoring, Burnham pointed some jabs at the 49-day premiership of former Tory PM Liz Truss.
Past is precedent
Elsewhere, Burnham’s promises to change the way things are done in Britain are butting up against reasons why they were done that way in the first place.
The PM told MPs that Brexit had inflicted “a decade of low growth” and promised to get closer to Brussels ahead of an EU-U.K. summit in the fall. Yet like his predecessor he will be bound simultaneously by the EU’s red lines and his own. Burnham has chosen to continue Labour’s 2024 pledge not to rejoin the single market or customs union.
He appeared tearful when he promised to invest “all” his political capital into reforming the social care model, but even that cannot happen fast thanks to the complexity of the system; his intervention has been to bring forward a review from 2028 to 2027.
He promised to be “relentless” in bringing in more “public control” of the water industry, but as POLITICO reported, his officials are still wading through all the ownership models and could apply several at the same time.
He left the door open to banning all overseas donations to U.K. political parties (saying “we can come back to these issues” before 2029), and to imposing a cap on individual donations (“we do need to go further,” he added). But unions worry their donations to Labour would be imperiled by a cap, and Burnham punted any action to an ongoing taskforce on democracy rather than accepting amendments to a bill this week.
He also left the door open to reforming the council tax system, but made clear that he already knows the danger in expending too much political capital. (When Conservative PM Margaret Thatcher last tried major reforms in 1990, there were riots in the streets; the successor system dating to 1991 has remained ever since.) “I don’t think I can go all that way today [… but] a council tax system based on 1991 valuations is not going to deliver fairness across the country,” he said. “We need to proceed with consensus if we can.”
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch accused Burnham of presiding over “a government swerving all over the place” that is obsessed with Thatcher’s legacy of privatization. “He is living in the past and he wants to take us back to the 1970s,” she said.
For many of his own Labour MPs, Burnham is saying what they want to hear — at least for now. “The grasp of detail is impressive,” said one, granted anonymity to speak candidly. The statement was “good,” said another. (The adulation is not universal; a third Labour MP confessed: “I’ll be honest, I was doing emails and forgot.”)
But as Starmer retreats from parliament — the former PM announced Tuesday that he will stand down from the Commons entirely — MPs are turning their full focus to his successor. At some point, they and the public will expect the many promises to be fulfilled. The question is when they decide that point has arrived.
