Andy Burnham officially becomes British Labour Party leader, replacing Starmer

Andy Burnham was officially declared leader of Britain’s governing Labour Party on Friday, clearing his final hurdle to taking office as prime minister next week.

The centre-left party announced the result of a leadership contest to replace departing Prime Minister Keir Starmer, in which Burnham was the only contender. Burnham secured nominations from 379 of the 403 Labour lawmakers in the House of Commons.

Starmer will remain prime minister until Monday, when he formally tenders his resignation to King Charles. The king will then ask Burnham to form a government.

“We’re going to give them hope back,” Burnham said in his first speech as leader. “This is a proud moment you have given me and my family today, and an emotional one, but it is one for which I am ready.”

Britain’s parliamentary democracy allows governing parties to change leaders, and thus prime ministers, without the need for a general election. The next national election doesn’t have to be held until 2029.

New prime ministers have come with increasing frequency in recent years. Burnham will be the U.K.’s seventh leader since 2016; five Conservative prime ministers preceded Starmer’s decisive 2024 election victory.

Pledges to help struggling communities

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 10 Downing Street largely unknown to voters outside Manchester.

While Burnham has been regarded as one of the Labour Party’s best communicators, he faces many of the same problems as his predecessor, including a sluggish economy, a cost-of-living squeeze fuelled by wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and overstretched public services.

“I will work to build a new politics. The country is crying out for it,” Burnham said. “How can politicians point fingers when living standards are falling and politics as a whole isn’t working for them? It infuriates them and makes them switch off.”

In sketching out some of his priorities as Labour leader, he said he would have the “courage to fix the big things that politics has neglected.”

He highlighted 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 PM Margaret Thatcher oversaw policies of privatization, deindustrialization and political centralization that transformed the U.K. economy.

“Slowly, 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.,” Burnham said.

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.

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’t resist.