A firm Andy: what are new British PM’s plans?

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1:11Rosie Blau:Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Rosie Bloor.

1:21Rosie Blau:Today on the show, can Syria be rebuilt after years of strife? and how street markets have changed New York.

1:37But first...

1:47Thank you so much, friends. What a moment. And what backing you've given me.

1:56Rosie Blau:Today Andy Burnham becomes Britain's new Prime Minister The man known as King of the North will meet a real king, Charles III Then officially replace Keir Starmer and move into 10 Downing Street All that comes after Friday's appointment as leader of the Labour Party 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. I am ready. He's sounding full of confidence. I know what I want to do working with you all. I have a plan. Question is, what is Andy's plan? Andy Burnham says he's been planning to become Prime Minister for a year now, but we still actually know very little about what he's planning to do when he gets there.

2:57Rosie Blau:Hugo Jai is our Britain political correspondent. The identity of most of his cabinet has been kept under wraps. He's said very little about some of the biggest issues in politics, like immigration and foreign policy. The one thing that we know he's really big on and plans to do is to devolve power away from Westminster and towards other regions of the country. So let's take this ascendance to Prime Minister one step at a time. What happens next? What does Burnham do in the next few days, possibly weeks? Well, so the very first thing he does after becoming Prime Minister is to sign a slightly terrifying letter which declares what Britain's nuclear submarines should do in the event of a nuclear war.

3:42But once he's got that out of the way, the first thing he'll need to do is to appoint his cabinet. So the most important position there will be Chancellor. They're the person responsible for the economy and the public finances. Rachel Reeves, the incumbent, is expected to be leaving. It's rumoured now that Shabana Mahmood, the current Home Secretary, is going to take over as Chancellor. She would be something of a compromise choice. Ed Miliband was previously seen as the frontrunner, but he's maybe regarded as a bit too left-wing, might spook business, spook the markets. Then there was Wes Streeting from the right of the party, but he would alienate the left.

4:20So Shabana Mahmood is neither too left-wing nor right-wing, although Burnham did say when he became Labour leader last week that he plans to draw on all wings of the Labour Party as he puts together his cabinet as a whole. You will see it reflects all parts of our party, all communities, and it will reflect your own place within this great party of ours. a stronger, more united Labour Party, lifting up a stronger and more united Britain. And on the economy, what he has said so far is more what he won't do than what he will do. So he won't raise any of the main taxes. That's keeping to a promise that was made by Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves.

5:04He won't change the massively expensive pensions policy that means we spend more and more on pensions each year. He has said he's going to revisit the issue of whether to drill for oil in the North Sea, but that's relatively minor in the grand scheme of things. So if he does have big economic plans, he's keeping them pretty secret so far.

5:24Rosie Blau:And Hugo, two of the big issues facing Burnham and facing Britain are, as you say, migration and foreign policy. How will he deal with either of those? We really don't know much at all about either of those. On migration, he said one thing he's not going to do. He's ditching a plan for digital ID cards, which had been dreamt up by Keir Starmer and was pitched as, among other things, a way of cracking down on illegal migration. Burnham is seen as coming from the left of Labour broadly, although some of his mentors, such as former Home Secretary David Blunkett, are more from the right. So Burnham would say that's a strength that he can draw on all wings of the party and all traditions of the party.

6:12But the risk is that he ends up looking a bit muddled and not really taking a strong stance at all. On foreign policy, obviously, the very biggest issue is how he deals with the US, how he deals with Donald Trump. He said that he will meet Trump where he's at, whatever that means. I think he's going to clearly try and have a constructive relationship with the White House, which he has to do. but there is maybe a sense that he's going to be slightly less close to Trump than Keir Starmer thought to be.

6:41Rosie Blau:Other prime ministers have talked about trying to devolve some power away from London, and many have done a bit of that. But Andy Burnham seems to want to take that further. What are his plans there? His big announcement that he made a couple of weeks ago is that he's split the Downing Street operation between London and a new office in Manchester, which he's calling Number 10 North. This has attracted a bit of criticism because he was the mayor of Greater Manchester. And so there was a bit of grumbling about, well, why is he just trying to move everything from London to Manchester? But he has said that it's not just about Manchester.

7:18It's not just about the north of England and that he wants to govern in the interests of the UK as a whole. I will be a leader for the North, the South, the East and the West, for Scotland, Wales and for Northern Ireland. Whether this is going to work, though, is pretty unclear. There have been previous attempts at devolution and their record of success is somewhat mixed. I mean, certainly just taking an institution and moving it from London to somewhere else can backfire. For example, the Office for National Statistics was moved to Newport in Wales, which is a decision now seen as a pretty catastrophic mistake in some ways.

7:59So he's going to have to, I think, take a more sophisticated approach than just take Department A and put it in City B and really sort of look at these things in the round if it's going to be a success.

8:10Rosie Blau:Now, Hugo, you've talked about the different wings of the Labour Party. Keir Starmer lost his role as Prime Minister, partly because he lost the support of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Can Burnham bring Labour together? Well, on paper, it looks like he's done that. As part of the Labour leadership contest, in which he was the only candidate, he won the nomination of well over 90 % of Labour MPs. So, in theory, it looks like he's got support from pretty much everywhere. The thing is, British politics has been incredibly fractious, incredibly divided for the last decade now. That includes the Labour Party.

8:51Keir Starmer, as you say, was dethroned by his own MPs less than two years after winning a massive general election victory. Once Burnham has to start making decisions, he is going to make one wing of the party or another unhappy. And I think it's very much sort of TBC if he can keep that sort of broad support that he's benefited from so far.

9:16Rosie Blau:And we may not know a lot about Burnham's plans. We know a lot about Britain's challenges. What are the problems that Burnham's really going to need to try and find solutions to? Britain is not in a very happy place at the moment. We've got an economy which is growing very sluggishly. that feeds through to crumbling public services, even though both taxes and borrowing are at more or less record highs, leaving pretty much everyone unhappy. There are huge challenges and potentially opportunities coming down the track. The rise of AI is perhaps the biggest one. To the average British person, devolution or the rise of AI or foreign policy are much less important than can they see a doctor?

10:03Can they get a dentist? These are issues that Burnham does, I think, appreciate the importance of. He talks a lot about how he wants to be on the ground and talk to ordinary people and stay plugged in in a way that he did when he was mayor. But it's going to be tricky. Being prime minister, you get a million things thrown at you every day. And I think from today and every day after that for as long as he's prime minister, he's going to have to juggle a lot of things to make his premiership a success.

10:35Rosie Blau:Hugo, thank you very much. Thank you.

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12:05Rosie Blau:Syria is a country destroyed. Since the Arab Spring in 2011, it suffered a brutal civil war. Violent crackdowns by the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the rise of ISIS and intervention by foreign armies. Demonstrations are taking place in cities across the country demanding that President Assad stand down. Violence against civilians in Syria has reached alarming heights. We're getting information that the US has launched strikes against the ISIS in Syria. This is the US President Donald Trump's response to the deadly ISIS attack. Even recently, explosions struck central Damascus. Yet the war is mostly over.

12:47Rosie Blau:Since Ahmad al-Shara gained power 18 months ago, Syria is more peaceful than it's been for years. Many hope that the country could soon begin to function properly once again. But ending the war is only the beginning. Rebuilding Syria is a mammoth undertaking. Gareth Brown is a Middle East correspondent. And that takes more than peace. It takes politics. It takes confidence. Most importantly, it requires money and lots of it. and gareth what exactly is that money needed for everything you can think of from roads and rebuilding houses to rebuilding the telecoms infrastructure water infrastructure energy infrastructure the list is so long i can't really do it justice

13:41so when you drive around jobar which was once a pretty wealthy prosperous middle-class suburb of Damascus, you really get a sense of the scale of the reconstruction requirements.

13:54You see the sort of skeletons of houses, apartment blocks. You look closely at them and you see it's literally just bricks and mortar. There's nothing else there. There's bullet holes. And then you sort of notice that not only have these houses been damaged and abandoned, but they've then been scavenged. So some of them don't have doors. There's no stairs going up to the second floor. or all the wiring and metalwork has been stripped out. These houses and these buildings are beyond repair. They have to be knocked down. There's no coherent sense of a community or a society or a place that can be inhabited.

14:30And these are not small corners of the capital. These are like vast, vast suburbs, which were the beating heart of Syria's middle class. They're just gone. And that's in Damascus when you go north, when you go to the northeast when you go to places like aleppo and homs the devastation is even worse and you know i imagine being a syrian and looking at this area and thinking where on earth do you start imagine an empty plot of land which then you had to you know not only build a house on but also connect it to the water and the power and the electricity and the internet network well Well, Syria is even worse than that because you don't have empty land.

15:11You have mountains and mountains of rubble.

15:14Rosie Blau:And how much is it actually going to cost? Well, the figures are eye-watering. The World Bank says that more than$100 billion worth of physical assets in Syria have been destroyed during the war. Some reconstruction costs are estimated to be more than$200 billion. That's more than 10 times the country's GDP in 2024. And it's every corner of life. There are places you go where the bridges over rivers have been destroyed, so you have to get on small barges. And the telecoms network is patchy. Water, energy, people can't heat their homes in the winter. They don't have electricity throughout the day and night.

15:51They can't run a refrigerator. So this is like a holistic demand to rebuild almost from scratch a country, its infrastructure and its institutions.

16:01Rosie Blau:With that scale of rebuilding necessary and such a huge amount of money, can it happen? It can happen. And I think there's two strategies. From the government, you see this top-down approach of pursuing big investment deals from foreign partners, the Gulf, Europe, America. And then you also have this grassroots approach. Almost 2 million Syrians have returned to Syria in the last 18 months. And some of them have been in places like Turkey, Germany, even Britain, and they're taking back money. And thanks to them, there's some small scale reconstruction that is actually happening. You know, people go back to a village and they give$5 ,000 or$10 ,000 to rebuild the school or a mosque or a small medical clinic.

16:45But these two things seem a bit disjointed. This is where Ahmed al-Sharrah, this new president, former al-Qaeda militants, interesting, unique, bizarre relationship with President Donald Trump is really something that many Syrians are betting on with the backing of the White House, the administration, that international firms can be comfortable and confident in coming to Syria and helping rebuild whatever part of the country it is.

17:13Rosie Blau:Gareth, the country is, of course, more peaceful now than it was under Assad, but there is still instability. How does that affect things? I think that knocks confidence. I mean, people do need to be reminded that this is still a very unstable country with security threats wherever you look. Now, that could be any number of pro-government militias. It could be the threat of ISIS, which still lingers in the northeastern desert. Emmanuel Macron touched down in Damascus, and this was meant to be a huge moment for Syria to have a big Western leader arrive in the country and spend a night in the capital, only for the morning after his arrival to sort of be plagued by these two explosions.

17:52The fact that that can happen when the French president is in town on this historic visit knocks everyone's confidence. And all this chatter, all this excitement around investor confidence is really knocked when something like that happens.

18:04Rosie Blau:You talk about Alshara reaching out internationally and saying that there are all these investment opportunities. Who's actually taking him up on them and what are they investing in? In the first months after Shara took power, it was really the Saudis and the Qataris who were sort of leading the international interest in business and reconstruction in Syria. The United Arab Emirates, because of Shara's background in al-Qaeda and as a jihadist, were much more standoffish. But now, 18 months in, it seems like the Qataris are the ones that are really rolling up their sleeves. They have spades in the ground.

18:40There's a refurbished airport in Damascus, which is going to open. It's been rebuilt by the Qataris. Their reconstruction efforts have started. Saudi efforts have got a bit more stuck in the country's bureaucracy. But most interestingly, is the last couple of months, the UAE, which was, as I said, quite standoffish, has now really started to engage with Damascus. You have entrepreneurs from Dubai and Abu Dhabi, big construction firms all talking about huge projects. And I think the general understanding in Damascus and indeed the region is it's going to be these Gulf states that do a lot of the rebuilding of Syria.

19:16Rosie Blau:Has there been interest in investment beyond Middle Eastern countries? There has been some. There have been some deals signed by French companies. Some American firms are sort of poking around Syria's oil fields. So there's plenty of interest. But these bombings, they allow that seed of doubt in the minds of big Western firms like Chevron to grow. And that's not an uncertainty that Syria needs at all at the minute. It needs all the outside help it can get. And do you think it will get it? And is al-Shara the right person to lead Syria into a new beginning? Well, I think at the moment, al-Shara is the right person by default.

19:56There's not really another national figure who could maybe pull this all together. And I don't think we can take his survival for granted. There's been a number of assassination attempts. But I think it's key to look at Syria in the regional context now. We have a region, in particular the Gulf, that has experienced for the last 15 years Syria as a failed state, where it's become a haven for drug trafficking, the export of international terrorism. And it's been a disaster for pretty much everyone, not least Syrians. And I think there is a consensus in the region that that can't be allowed to happen again.

20:31So in some regard, Syria has become almost too big to fail for the Gulf Arab states. So whatever the attacks by ISIS or other insurgent groups that do happen in the capital, there's still an insistence from Syria's regional friends, even the United States, that actually this new state project can't be allowed to fail. And by hook or by crook, it has to maintain the support of the international community.

20:56Rosie Blau:Gareth, thank you so much for talking to me. Thanks for having me, Rosie.