Andy Burnham becomes British Labour Party leader

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. The United States is about to mark its 250th anniversary. And so on the Global Story podcast from the BBC, we're telling surprising tales of American influence on the world stage and in ordinary people's lives all across the globe. We have this ability to export our story and a lot of people have bought it. I feel like the American dream is alive but not well. From the BBC, it's the United States at 2.50. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:03Hello and welcome to NewsHour live from the BBC World Service in London. I'm Rebecca Kesby. The United Kingdom is about to get a new Prime Minister. It's seventh in ten years. Within the past couple of hours, Andy Burnham has become the new leader of the governing Labour Party under UK parliamentary rules. That means he will become the next Prime Minister as Sir Keir Starmer steps down officially on Monday. There's been no election process as such. Andy Burnham stood unopposed following his return to Parliament after winning a by-election in Makerfield in June. He inherits a large majority in Parliament, but he will also inherit some of the same problems Mr Starmer has faced.

1:46Very low growth, very high debt. But the mood was positively buoyant as Andy Burnham was announced as the new Labour leader today. There being no other eligibility nominated candidate, It is therefore my honour to declare that the duly elected leader of the Labour Party is Andy Burnham.

2:11Minister Burnham then took to the podium and said his premiership would be the last chance to restore trust in politics. 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 Makerfield, I decided to make a break with this. I said we hadn't been good enough. I told people what I would do to fix it. You know what? People started to listen again. They gave us a fair hearing, as the great British public always do. And then another chance. But let's be honest, everybody, this is a last chance to change and we must take it together.

3:04Well, he set out five promises to bring the Labour Party together, as we heard there, to create what he called a new political climate, to define the party's political direction. He says he wants to decentralise power away from London and unite the whole country. Mr Burnham pledged to create a new future for all Britons. If we want an economy and a country that works for all people and places, which to me should always be at the very core of labourism, then it requires a new path to the one we've been on for the last 40 years. The government I lead will confidently lay that path out starting next week.

3:48And that is why this change today is the most significant change moment in our politics for 40 years. It will take us to a country where life is more affordable and all people and places are lifted from where they are now. So some ambitious plans then. But what do we know of Andy Burnham, the former mayor of Greater Manchester? What are his likely policies and priorities? Here's our political correspondent Rob Watson with the lowdown on the man who will be the next British Prime Minister.

4:29The charming to his fans at any rate, Andy Burnham, is a bit trendier than recent British Prime Ministers. The Liverpool-born 56-year-old dresses fashionably, loves Britpop, has a season ticket to Everton Football Club and plays the guitar. As to his politics, he recently posted on TikTok, where else, that they come from his teenage dislike of the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her privatising government and its effect on the industrial north of his youth. It was growing up in and around these streets that I saw what Thatcher's government did to places like this, the de-industrialisation, the draining away of economic, social and political power.

5:11Andy Burnham is both an outsider and insider. An outsider thanks to his working class upbringing in the North, an insider because after attending the prestigious Cambridge University, he quickly got into politics as one of the bright young talents in the new Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Despite not being that well known, he even tried for the Labour leadership in 2010, campaigning on themes we recognise today, including a claim to be more normal than most politicians. Well, the case I want to put to you and to the wider Labour Party is that I can give Labour something that the Tories haven't got.

5:50And that's a leader that people can relate to, that they can identify with, whose background looks like their own, but also who has the ability to inspire. He failed to win the leadership in 2010 and again in 2015, So he gave up being an MP and headed back up north to run for mayor of Greater Manchester, again sounding now familiar themes. I am standing in this election as Labour's candidate to bring you that change, to make our politics more accountable than it is today, to bring it closer to home, to break the London-centric nature of politics in this country, to close the north-south divide.

6:30I will be a grassroots mayor for all of Greater Manchester, for each and every one of its proud towns, as well as the city centre. He quickly found himself, once elected, having to rally the city after the bombing of a rock concert in 2017 by an Islamic extremist. This was an act of extremism. It doesn't represent any religion, it doesn't represent any community, it certainly doesn't represent Greater Manchester. The spirit of Greater Manchester was those people throwing their doors open last night. At that moment of maximum panic, welcoming people in, driving people away from danger. That is the spirit of this place.

7:11And in the end, it was the best response to what happened. Despite that, and despite confronting central government over lockdowns during Covid, something earning him the title King of the North, he's not massively well known in Britain. and having been crowned as Labour leader rather than challenged in debate, little is known about his politics, beyond his general left-of-centre approval of state intervention and emphasis on the less well-off in society. His only big idea so far, and it's a vague one, is for the transfer of power and money out of London to the regions, or the politics of places, he calls it, and, of course, a plea for a bit more optimism.

7:52Imagine what things could be like if we succeed. Imagine what it would feel like to live in a country wired to work for ordinary people rather than against them. Imagine if we could bring down the cost of energy for people and businesses and the good things that would come from that. Imagine good growth in every postcode and hope in every heart. Rarely, though, has someone come to high office with so little really known about them, leaving many unsure as to whether he's a likeable lightweight or Labour's great northern hope. Our political correspondent Rob Watson with that report. Well, Simon Ofer is a Labour MP for Stroud in the west of England.

8:34He was one of the 349 Labour MPs out of 403 to back Andy Burnham to be the next leader of the party and therefore, as we mentioned, Prime Minister. Welcome to the programme, Simon. Thank you for coming on. Today, Andy Burnham was in front of a home crowd, wasn't he, at that Labour conference? But he's got to convince the country, rather divided country at the moment, that he is the right leader. Keir Starmer, people criticise him, but he did win that landslide a couple of years ago. And Andy Burnham wasn't even an MP in that election. Does he have a legitimacy problem? I don't think he has a legitimacy problem because, I mean, the way British politics works is the leader of the biggest party in Parliament becomes the prime minister.

9:23So that's the way it is. He's just won a very decisive by-election in Makerfield. And Makerfield was very heavily skewed towards the Reform Party, which is a very right-wing party, in the previous elections in May. And he managed to swing that round behind him. And I think he represents a real hope for Labour of getting people behind him and able to defeat reform. I think one of the things about him is that he vows to end this sort of neoliberal experiment, which actually has just made the rich a lot richer and left the working people behind. So I think he's got a lot of he's got a lot of tudos and he's certainly inspired a lot of optimism in this country, particularly in the Labour Party.

10:10He is going to face some of the same problems that Starmer did, though, isn't he? And chief among them is the fact that the country's very poor, it's got no money to spend, and many problems that need money to fix. Absolutely. And we're not, I don't think he's belittling the cost of living crisis as we have it. I mean, he has vowed to make life a bit more affordable for less well-off people. That's around sort of reducing the cost of power, which will help ordinary people and business. But, you know, also reducing the cost of water. Water is privatised in the UK and he's vowed to look at that and bring it out of privatisation and give better value to people.

10:52But more than anything else, he represents a change in what's going on. He's looking at social care in this country is in real crisis as well. And he's also looking at this idea of devolution, about giving power to the regions as a way of making them better off. And I think that's a really interesting idea to take forward. So I think, you know, I think he has inspired things in this country. Let's get on to the foreign policy, though. He wrote an article recently saying that defence was going to be a priority for him. He supports NATO. He wants to stay close to the United States as the most important strategic partner.

11:27But what is that relationship going to be like, the Burnham-Trump relationship? because Mr Burnham has been pretty critical of President Trump, recently describing American politics as polarised poisonous and where communities don't work together anymore. Well, I think he's a very straightforward man, Andy Burnham, as a lot of Northerners are in the UK, and he'll say it how it is. I think he believes in the NATO alliance. He believes in being a very strong ally to the United States and to Western Europe as well. Interestingly, he also apologised for the UK's position on Gaza. I think that is significant because in the UK, there's very strong feelings that we've got it a bit wrong on Gaza.

12:13And the way the Palestinians have been treated has been wrong. And he aims to sort of change our position on that, which is, I think, really encouraging. Ukraine, he very strongly backs Ukrainians and Zelensky, which isn't too far away from America either. So I think he takes up a very similar position to Keir Starmer. And Keir Starmer actually was quite straightforward with Trump, wasn't he, as well? He did manage to charm Trump, though, Keir Starmer. And is Andy Burnham going to be able to do that? I mean, for one thing, he's taking criticism in the UK, Andy Burnham, for not taking questions from the press at any point during this election process to get him as the new prime minister.

12:56I mean, he posts on TikTok, but he doesn't like answering questions. And that is one thing that President Trump loves to do. Yeah, no, I think the reason for Andy, I mean, I think, you know, Andy's just forming his government now. And if he goes to the press, they all ask him who's going to be chancellor, who's going to be home secretary. He doesn't want those sort of questions. At the moment, he's forming his government. He will answer questions in good time. But look, I think it's one of the interesting things going forward, how he will get on with Trump. One thing about Andy Burnham, he's a charming man, as your music at the beginning of the piece showed.

13:31And he is very, he's quite affable. He's strong will, but he's also very willing to get on with people and also work across political divides as well. Well, let's see how he gets on. He will be the seventh prime minister in the past 10 years, Simon Ofer. Thank you very much for giving us a rundown of why you support him. Thank you for joining us.

13:59Coming up later, why has Japan upheld its long-standing ban on female monarchs, despite overwhelming public support for an empress? The problem, I think, is Japan's conservatives, who are very powerful in the country's politics, and what they say is that traditionally Japan has had almost always a male emperor. More on that to come and our headlines this hour. Kuwait says Iranian strikes have damaged a power plant and water desalination stations as Washington and Tehran continue to trade blows over the Strait of Hormuz. And hundreds of foreign nationals are gathering outside embassies in South Africa seeking to help to return home as an immigration crackdown continues there.

14:59This is Rebecca Kesby with NewsHour live from the BBC. Now it's just about six months since President Trump launched his Board of Peace initiative to great fanfare on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos in January. One of its main stated objectives was an ambitious reconstruction plan for the whole of Gaza. Now it seems that that plan has been scaled right back to a small project in the south of the Strip. Let's get the details with the BBC's international editor, Jeremy Bowen. This is a major reduction on what was promised. What's gone wrong? Well, most things, as a matter of fact.

15:35First of all, while it's been a ceasefire, there's still a very high level of Palestinian casualties inflicted by Israel. More than a thousand people killed, including many children. I think essentially the process, this so-called Trump peace plan, which he ballyhooed as the greatest thing to happen in the Middle East in 3000 years, I think he said, clearly hyperbole even then. But the way that Donald Trump operates is that he likes making a plan and then he likes moving on. And the very complicated equation upon which all this was built, and the equation is essentially one in which Hamas agrees to disarm and Israel agrees to pull out of Gaza, that would have required very assiduous diplomacy by the Americans and by others.

16:25And it hasn't happened. Yeah, I mean, the UN, Jeremy, is saying that the cost of reconstruction for Gaza is going to be at least$70 billion. I think Mr Trump got$17 billion pledged for this peace plan. But it doesn't seem as if any cash is actually materialised, not in any great number. Well, that's because the countries that might give cash and the ones that really matter because they're rich are the Gulf oil countries. There's been a lot of other stuff going on, which is another reason why Gaza has been literally on the back burner, which is not least the war in that the Israelis and the Americans started on the 20th of February against Iran.

17:09and also there's a sense I think about not putting good money after bad because there have been many reconstructions in the past, not clearly on this scale, which in subsequent wars has been re-rubbleised, if you like. For a while the official in charge of this, who's Mr Mladanov, and the Israelis have been talking about the idea of getting something small and under control for them inside the Rafah area. And that's something that most Palestinians have seen as a total no-no. The former Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, has called these sorts of projects concentration camps in the making. While there is no political horizon for Israel pulling out and Hamas demilitarizing itself, and it's not going to do that while Israel is still in Gaza, all these plans are going to go nowhere.

18:03Yeah, I mean, that is the thing, isn't it, Jeremy? Because it's all been overshadowed really by the international agenda. But what is the humanitarian situation like in Gaza at the moment? How desperate is the need? They're getting more food in. It's not necessarily the right kind of food for people who rely mostly on handouts, but it's food. It means that people aren't starving to death in the way that they were during the war, when Israel, for a while, imposed a total blockade. But Israel still puts enormous restrictions on what gets in. Of course, most people in Gaza, that's more than 2 million, in fact, getting on for 2.5 million people, live in tents, makeshift tents.

18:44It gets very hot there in the summer. They're in close proximity. There's horrible illnesses are being passed around. There have been plagues of vermin, rats, weasels, snakes, ants. Horrible, horrible places for people to live. I don't think it's any exaggeration to say that in Gaza, and largely these days, thanks to the lack of bandwidth and people getting involved in other things, including journalists like ourselves, looking at the Gulf and things like that. It has become, as far as I can tell, because, of course, Israel doesn't let journalists like me into the place, it is a dystopian hellscape, an absolute scandal and a disgrace.

19:25And, of course, underlying all of this, many people believe, many Palestinians and others believe, is the far-right Israeli agenda to make Gaza so unlivable that Palestinians will leave. In other words, a kind of forced ethnic cleansing. That's the BBC's international editor, Jeremy Bowen, there.

19:47Now, the Commonwealth Games gets underway in Glasgow in just under a week's time. 3 ,000 athletes from 74 nations have started to arrive in this city already, which is currently undergoing a big regeneration programme. Scotland's largest city stepped in after the state of Victoria in Australia dropped out. It's had less than two years to prepare and the City Council says it was always known that work would still be going on as the Games took place. BBC's Lorna Gordon has been speaking to Glaswegians to see what they make of these smaller Games and whether their city will be ready to host them.

20:24Coaching the next generation at Kynock Boxing Gym in Glasgow. Sean Lazzarini won a gold in boxing in Birmingham four years ago. He remembers when the games were hosted in Glasgow back in 2014 and is looking forward to them returning. I was working in a clothes shop. I think I was like 15 or 16. And it was in Suckey Hall Street and I seen all the athletes and that stuff all over the place and people were getting photos and all that stuff from them. And then obviously I ended up winning the Commonwealth Games and winning it.

21:00Justice Abba is number one in his weight class in Scotland. He'll be watching the games this time around, but is hoping to compete at the next. I've lived in the city my whole life and it's like, when it comes to the Commonwealth Games, it's massive. Like, people are going to be coming everywhere. You won't be arrested under section 21 of the antisocial behaviour in Scotland. But the city does have challenges. Antisocial behaviour has led to police dispersal zones in parts of the city centre. there was a devastating fire near Central Station and the city's George Square has become a giant building site.

21:34That and road closures throughout Glasgow, part of a long-running regeneration project which has been causing disruption. Glasgow was asked to step in at short notice when the Australian state of Victoria dropped out. The council says it has always made clear that significant redevelopment work would not be finished before the sport begins. This is an incredibly welcoming, safe city. Phil Batty, who is chief executive of the Glasgow 2026 organising committee, is confident the city and its people will deliver. Glasgow is an incredibly experienced major event city, and when we needed someone to step in and host the Games, there was no other place in the Commonwealth that could do this.

22:16One unofficial part of that makeover is tackling the litter. Ice pole packet there if you want. Pick that up. I'll grab the cigarette butts and the cider can here. Pride in their city, the main driver for Lindy Britz and Scott Martin are among a group of volunteers who head out monthly to clean streets in their neighbourhood. I think that the city centre has gotten a lot of love, maybe around the venues, but I think you can easily take a little wander off into a different street in a little alley and you might not see a very good picture. It's a city that just needs a wee bit of TLC at times. But I think most cities do suffer from that.

23:00There will be fewer sports than in previous games. Bowling made it in.

23:09Martin Gray, Adam Marchbank and Anne Lang out on the greens at Shettleston Bowling Club have mixed feelings about the Games coming back to Glasgow. I just don't think the city's ready for it. I think the state of Glasgow City Centre is a disgrace just now. It's a good thing. After the Tartan Army's exploits in America, you get to see one of the major cities being presented to the world yet again. You going to go? Are you tempted? I'm actually going on holiday, so no. No. You're not going to Melbourne, are you? No. A challenging games in a changing city, but hope that Commonwealth sports will be the winner.

23:49The BBC's Lorna Gordon there reporting from Glasgow and the Commonwealth Games get underway next Thursday.

24:02How did the United States build the largest soft power empire in the world with the help of some tiny metal objects? I'm Tristan Redmond, one of the hosts of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. To mark 250 years of the United States, we speak to Roman Mars of 99 % invisible. This soft power, this influence was an incredible invention. For more, listen to The Global Story on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. What do Beatles member Sir Paul McCartney, YouTube megastar Mr Beast, and former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg all have in common? They're all being discussed in the new season of Good Bad Billionaire, the podcast which explores the lives and fortunes of the world's super rich.

24:47That's Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Listen now and search for Good Bad Billionaire wherever you get your BBC podcasts. The United States is about to mark its 250th anniversary. And so on the Global Story podcast from the BBC, we're telling surprising tales of American influence on the world stage and in ordinary people's lives all across the globe. We have this ability to export our story and a lot of people have bought it. I feel like the American dream is alive but not well. From the BBC, it's the United States at 2.50. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

25:27Welcome back to NewsHour. Let's get more on that headline that Kuwait says Iranian strikes have damaged a power plant and water desalination station as Washington and Tehran continue to trade blows over the Strait of Hormuz. It follows a week of renewed hostilities that have strained the preliminary deal to end the war. Let's get the latest with the BBC's Barbara Plett-Usher, who joins us live now from Jerusalem. And Barbara, first of all, this latest wave of strikes, what can you tell us about what was targeted? Well, as you said, Rebecca, the Kuwaitis are saying that a power plant was hit, also desalination plants.

26:06They said that the, especially the power plant strikes sparked a fire and production was disrupted, although that has been brought under control. They're checking out what technical teams are checking out what other damage there has been. And they've also just said that an Iranian drone attack on army facilities this morning wounded several military personnel in the Gulf state. And then the Iranians really have been reporting quite widespread retaliatory strikes today, not only in Kuwait, but in Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Jordan, and for the first time in Syria. They've also said that the American strikes overnight hit some civilian infrastructure, including bridges, a railway station and an airport, although the Americans only mentioned military targets.