Burnham Declared Labour Leader, Vowing the “Biggest Rebalancing”
Andy Burnham was formally declared leader of the Labour Party at a special conference in London today, the last step before he enters Downing Street on Monday as Prime Minister. The sole candidate, backed by the overwhelming majority of Labour’s MPs and most of the affiliated unions, he used his acceptance speech to promise to “give people hope back” and “good growth in every postcode”, pledging the “biggest rebalancing” of power in modern British history from Whitehall to the cities and regions. He said his government would be “unashamedly Labour”, named social care as a neglected problem he would fix, and paid tribute to Sir Keir Starmer.
The coronation is complete; the hard part begins on Monday. Burnham arrives with a rare mandate from his MPs but an untested one with the public, and his “unashamedly Labour” framing and talk of rebalancing power signal an intent to govern more boldly, and from further left, than the cautious predecessor his own party removed. The promise to devolve power from Whitehall to the regions is the through-line of his political career, the “Manchesterism” his allies have long trailed, but turning a slogan into a settlement will collide with a Treasury that guards central control and a set of public finances with little room. His backing from nearly the whole parliamentary party papers over divisions, between the left that lifted him and the centre he must govern from, that his cabinet and his first decisions will quickly expose. With the Commons in recess until September, he has a summer to form a government. Watch the cabinet he names next week, the fate of the wealth-tax question, and which of the “big things” he moves on first.