Don’t believe Andy Burnham’s PR machine
As his empty Gaza apology clearly demonstrates, he will not bring the radical change Labour really needs. On Monday, former Mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham
As his empty Gaza apology clearly demonstrates, he will not bring the radical change Labour really needs. 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. One of the main issues that has torn Labour apart for over a decade has been Palestine. On July 9, before his confirmation as the new prime minister, Burnham decided to address the issue in a video posted on social media, saying Labour “didn’t get it right” and needs to “do better” on Gaza. So will he indeed “do better” on Palestine and everything else that Labour has gotten wrong over the past decade? Unlikely. That is because complicity in Israel’s genocide is deeply entrenched in the British political infrastructure. It requires radical change – something which Burnham is not offering. 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.
The BriefWire