Post by Council on Foreign Relations

As Britain's 7th prime minister in a decade, Andy Burnham enters Downing Street with a cooler disposition toward Washington than his predecessor—and an agenda of reindustrialization, argues CFR expert Matthias Matthijs and Research Associate Benjamin Harris. As mayor of Greater Manchester from 2017, Burnham built a policy record on buses, housing, and homelessness that made him Labour's most popular politician in the polls. "Burnham has pledged to reverse nearly 2 decades of low growth since the 2008 financial crisis by harnessing public and private capital for transport, housing, and infrastructure. This, in essence, is his mayoral playbook scaled nationally," they write. The new prime minister described the U.S. relationship merely as “critical”—rather than the standard “special”—and is reportedly not prioritizing an early trip to Washington. Burnham's UK “sovereign capabilities” agenda mirrors the EU's own strategic autonomy debate, and a less U.S.-centric approach to AI and critical technology will push London toward friendshoring with European partners on critical minerals, cloud, and payments infrastructure, Matthijs and Harris write. In an early sign of his agenda as prime minister, Burnham promised in his first speech outside 10 Downing Street to “build a new economy where we put life's essentials back under stronger public control.”