Don’t believe Andy Burnham’s PR machine

By Yara Hawari

This article was originally published on 20 Jul 202620 Jul 2026.

The Labour Party, reeling from a steep decline in public support, will now be led by a figure often portrayed as an outsider to the Westminster establishment.

On Monday, former Mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham is officially stepping into office as British prime minister after public pressure forced Keir Starmer to resign from the post. The change comes at a time when the governing Labour Party is experiencing a massive slump in support.

Burnham has promised to take the party and the government on a new path that focuses on re-establishing internal unity and addressing the hardships of working-class Brits.

A key issue that has divided Labour for more than ten years is Palestine. On July 9, prior to being confirmed as prime minister, Burnham posted a video on social media acknowledging that Labour “didn’t get it right” and must “do better” on Gaza.

Will Burnham truly “do better” on Palestine and other issues Labour has mishandled? Probably not. Complicity in Israel’s genocide is deeply rooted in Britain’s political system, and Burnham is not proposing the radical change needed.

Burnham’s political career began with his election as a member of parliament for Leigh in Greater Manchester in 2001. He went on to serve as parliamentary private secretary to then-Home Secretary David Blunkett, before taking on several ministerial posts.

Between 2017 and mid-June this year, he was mayor of Greater Manchester, earning praise for his stewardship of the local economy and improvements to public transport. Dubbed the “King of the North”, he is being pitched as an outsider to a Westminster establishment long dominated by southerners. Yet, like 75 percent of Britain’s previous prime ministers, Burnham was Oxbridge-educated.

Burnham now inherits a party in disarray, having haemorrhaged much of its grassroots support over its economic, immigration and foreign policy record. As the far right has surged in the polls, Labour has chosen to compete with it on its own terrain rather than offer an alternative.

In the past year, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has pursued cruel immigration policies that include plans to deport “failed” asylum-seeking families using physical force and a “visa brake” barring citizens of Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan from mainstream visa routes.

On foreign policy, Labour’s complicity in the Israeli genocide in Gaza will haunt the party for a generation. Starmer will be remembered for saying the Israeli army has “the right” to cut off water and electricity to a besieged population, and his government – for continuing arms sales to the Israeli regime, including components for the F-35 jets that have caused untold death and destruction in Gaza.

Burnham is not the outsider his PR machine is selling. He has been a member of Labour Friends of Israel since 2015, when he described the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement as “spiteful” and pledged that Israel would be the first country he visited as leader of Labour.

His allies include Josh Simons, former director of the Labour Together think tank that engineered Starmer’s rise and helped purge the party of its pro-Palestinian left flank, often under the pretext of tackling anti-Semitism. The irony is that this same period saw Jewish members of the party investigated and expelled at several times the rate of non-Jewish members.

In May, Simons resigned as MP so that Burnham could run in and win a special by-election for his parliamentary seat, which enabled him to pursue the leadership of Labour and the prime minister’s post. The influence Labour Together figures retain around Burnham tells us that the machinery behind Starmer’s leadership has not been dismantled so much as quietly repositioned.

In recent weeks, Burnham has begun sketching out his priorities: a renewed push for social housing, building on what he considers a success story in Manchester, and a “coalition-building” style of politics pitched as an antidote to Westminster’s divisiveness. The Gaza “apology” was also part of that PR effort.

What he said in that short video illustrates perfectly well why there will not be any change under his government. The premise of the apology is that Britain was simply too slow to call for a ceasefire not that it was and continues to be complicit in genocide. “Not getting it right” is what you say about an underbaked cheesecake, not a policy stance on an ongoing slaughter that has claimed at least 73,000 Palestinian lives. Tellingly, Burnham still will not call what happened and is happening in Gaza a genocide.

Days before that video went out, it emerged that his choice for chief of staff is James Purnell – a former chair of Labour Friends of Israel and, until days before his appointment, chief executive of Flint Global, a lobbying firm whose clients include arms manufacturers, tech giants and big oil companies. For a leader positioning himself as a break from Starmer’s failures on Gaza, installing a pro-Israel lobbyist at the very centre of his operation says considerably more than a video apology ever could.

Clearly, Burnham’s advisers are telling him he needs to look like he is making amends for Britain’s role in the genocide. But the machinery that manufactured British government consent for that genocide, and that continues to supply the weapons that sustain it, has not been dismantled. It has simply changed its spokesman.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Burnham assumes leadership of a party that has lost significant grassroots backing over its policies on the economy, immigration, and foreign affairs. His stance on Gaza and his ability to distance Labour from its previous record will be closely watched. With the far right gaining ground, Burnham's approach to competing without mirroring its policies will shape his tenure.