ANDY Burnham is set to be crowned Labour leader on Friday morning as questions remain over how his agenda will differ to Keir Starmer's.
The former Greater Manchester mayor, who returned to Westminster as MP for Makerfield, is set to take up the helm shortly after 12pm on Friday in a special conference, before officially becoming prime minister on Monday.
Burnham was the only candidate to get the required support to replace Starmer as party leader after his resignation last month.
He was backed by 369 of the party’s 403 MPs, far surpassing the 81 needed, and secured the support of eight of the 11 unions affiliated with the party.
Yet it is unclear exactly how Burnham's government will offer an alternative to Starmer, with policy and cabinet announcements kept largely under wraps.
In a speech on Friday, Burnham is expected to say that his government will have the “courage to fix the big things that politics has neglected” and the “conviction to argue for our plans”.
Burnham will set out plans to focus on economic renewal, more public control and reindustrialisation.
And it is understood he will say that Britain took “a series of wrong turns in the 1980s” when “political power was centralised and economic power privatised”.
Making the economy work for people across the UK will require “a new path to the one we’ve been on for the last 40 years”, Burnham is set to say.
He will promise that the party under his leadership will be “unashamedly Labour in our priorities and in the decisions we take, putting people and places at the heart of everything we do”.
He will pledge to make the party more united under his leadership and pay tribute to Starmer for returning Labour to government, while praising the achievements his party has made so far since 2024, including on workers’ rights, the NHS and the passing of the Hillsborough Law.
Burnham had previously vowed to increase devolution across the UK – including the devolved nations – with plans for a "Number 10 North" based in Manchester to redistribute power.
Yet he faced a wave of criticism after saying that people in Dundee and Bangor "feel just as distant from Holyrood and the Senedd as they do from Westminster", with First Minister John Swinney saying the comments demonstrated "Andy Burnham's lack of knowledge about Scotland".
Elsewhere, Burnham is already said to have rejected a second Scottish independence referendum.
Zack Polanski, Green Party of England and Wales leader, accused Burnham of offering a "semi-skimmed" version of Green policies.
He told Sky News: “What I think we’re seeing now in speedrun is what does a Labour government look like with supposedly their best leader?
“And I think we’re still going to see a party where inequality gets wider, where we’ve seen them apologise for Labour’s history in Gaza, but he’s still not signalled that he’s going to stop selling arms to Israel.
“So I think again and again we’re going to hear rhetoric which is more in line with what the Green Party are saying.
“But why have semi-skimmed when you could come to the Green Party and actually have the full version, where we’re both saying and doing things?”
