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Andy Burnham Is Not to Be Trusted

The UK’s new prime minister has promised sweeping change. But his first week in power saw him going down the same failed paths as his predecessors.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham is shown the driver’s area on a FirstGroup bus at the bus station during a visit to Bath, England, on July 22, 2026.

Britain’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham, began his tenure last week in a country ablaze.

In the Scottish Highlands, hundreds of villagers were evacuated from the path of a raging fire that started in Cairngorms National Park. In the English midlands, the Tintwistle Moor Fire has been burning for over a month. It’s now the size of a small town and is visible from space. Wales, too, is consumed by fire, from north to south. At the end of last week, the Welsh government activated “crisis management arrangements” because there were no helicopters available to provide aerial support in the country’s remote, rugged terrain—they had already been deployed to England and Scotland.

The fires are the most visible sign of a nation on the ropes—a country stuck in a seemingly interminable cycle of political instability (Burnham, who replaced the widely loathed Keir Starmer, is the country’s sixth prime minister in the last seven years, and the seventh in the last ten years), crumbling living standards, and a lack of direction after decades of immiserating privatization, deindustrialization, centralization, and austerity.  

But you wouldn’t know any of this if you only followed Burnham on social media, where he’s yet to acknowledge the UK’s unfolding climate catastrophe. Instead, we’ve been treated to a video of Burnham ranking pub snacks and footage of a new government office in Manchester—dubbed “Number 10 North”—inexplicably set to the theme song of the US version of The Office. 

These trivialities are not only at odds with the crises facing Britain. They’re also at odds with Burnham’s supposed reasons for wanting to be prime minister in the first place. 

Burnham, who was a long-serving member of Parliament before spending a decade as the mayor of Greater Manchester, says he gets the scale of the UK’s problems—and has proclaimed himself the solution. He has pledged to be “a circuit breaker” for the country, installing “a new political and economic model” to reverse the last 40 years of neoliberalism, devolve power from London to local and regional authorities, and strengthen public control over vital utilities. He’s promised to publish a ten-year plan promoting reindustrialization and social housing later this year.

Yet, so far, Burnham’s action has not matched this ultra-lofty rhetoric. And as his true........

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