The UK is considering spending £450 million a year to give students from the EU discounted university fees, said The Guardian. But it wants access to the bloc’s “Made in Europe” protectionist industrial scheme in return.

What is ‘Made in Europe’?

The European Commission’s proposed Industrial Accelerator Act (IAA) is designed to help stimulate demand for European-made clean technologies, while reducing reliance on producers from abroad, most notably China but also the US.

Covering strategic sectors such as steel, aluminium and cement, electric vehicles, batteries, solar and ⁠wind power, hydrogen technology and nuclear energy, the law aims to use the €2 trillion of member states’ public procurement to shore up struggling domestic industries and push into newer growing sectors. Supporters of the scheme say rivals such as the US, China, and India already have similar rules in place and this would merely bring the EU in line with much of the rest of the world.

“If we do nothing, then it’s quite clear that very soon, 100% of clean tech technology will be ⁠produced in China,” said Stéphane Séjourné, an EC executive vice president, in March. “It’s quite possible that our cement, steel industries will be offshored completely in the next few years.”

Will it work?

The problem is that “EU governments disagree over where Europe ends”, said Euronews. France has been pushing for a strict EU approach while Germany wants a more open model, allowing products made “with” Europe, provided those countries grant European companies equivalent access in return.

Last month, Germany and France reached a compromise that would allow suppliers from non-EU members like the UK, Norway and Switzerland to qualify for “European origin” status.

This is “causing deep concern among other allied carmaking nations” such as Japan, South Korea and Turkey, which will still be shut out from the scheme, said Deutsche Welle. Excluding Turkey, which has enjoyed seamless access to the EU market since the mid-1990s, would also harm European car production rather than strengthen competitiveness against China, said Ayhan Zeytinoglu, from the Turkish think tank the Economic Development Foundation.

Will the UK be able to join?

The “Made in Europe” scheme has become a major obstacle to the UK’s long-hoped-for Brexit “reset” with the EU. Wrangling over rules affecting British businesses has twice delayed a UK–EU summit, which is finally due to take place on 20 November.

Andy Burnham said in September that he would make the case for Britain to be considered a “trusted partner” under the scheme, warning that excluding the UK could damage the British car industry.

The UK and EU have already agreed a draft deal on removing post-Brexit checks from food and agriculture exports. Burnham’s government now hopes the promise to subsidise EU students could be enough to win over EU negotiators in the “Made in Europe” talks.

“We are willing to give the Europeans what they want on fees, but we will have to get something significant in return,” a source told The Guardian. “The biggest prize we are pushing for right now is access to Made in Europe, so there is a deal to be done there.”

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is expected to water down plans to double the length of time foreign workers must wait before they are eligible to settle permanently in the UK following opposition from within the Labour Party.

As originally laid out in November 2025, the proposals would extend the qualifying period for indefinite leave to remain (ILR) from five to 10 years. The lowest-paid workers, including many employed in the care sector, faced an even longer wait, of 15 years. Adding yet more controversy, the changes would apply to migrants already in the UK. Angela Rayner, the housing secretary, said making the rules apply retrospectively was “un-British” while Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh called for more “compassion” in migration policy.

As Mahmood prepares to unveil her revised plans, the prime minister and home secretary are maintaining a united front, said John Rentoul in The Independent, “but we do not yet know what it is that they are united on”.

What did the commentators say?

“Mahmood is tying herself in a large and unedifying knot,” said James O’Brien in The i Paper. Moving the goalposts for overseas migrants already here is a “breach of the metaphorical contract” and sends an “ugly” message that such workers are “irreversibly second class”. By making settlement harder for vital care workers in particular – who do work British nationals consider “beneath them or too poorly paid” – Mahmood would show she been influenced by “immigration rhetoric as opposed to immigration reality”. She is “pandering to feelings built on lies”.

It would be a “grave error” for Mahmood to change her original plans, said The Telegraph in an editorial. The situation Labour finds itself in is “depressingly familiar”: the government insists it supports border controls, but objects to policies to secure them. Indeed, Mahmood may be forced to “retreat” from the “necessary” changes to ILR to regain backbench support. But she must break free from this “Faustian pact. She was right the first time round.”

Given the backlash, the Home Office could compromise by changing the rules only for new arrivals. But that would be “defeating the entire purpose of the reforms”, said David Shipley in The Spectator, which was mitigating the impact of the “ruinous” so-called “Boriswave” of immigrants.

What next?

“The exact shape of the compromise has been fought over for months,” said Rentoul in The Independent. By now, Burnham and Mahmood will have “calculated where to draw the line so that they can be sure that they have a solid majority of Labour MPs behind them”.

Burnham runs a better “ego management programme” with Labour backbenchers than Keir Starmer, and so is unlikely to have a repeat of last year’s backlash over welfare reforms.

The government will also benefit from a divided opposition on the right. As architects of the Boriswave, any Conservative criticism of Mahmood’s plan will sound hypocritical, while Reform UK “is finding it increasingly hard” to compete with Restore’s more extreme positions on immigration.

The triple lock is a guarantee on pensioner incomes, and was introduced by the coalition government in 2011 to address high levels of old-age poverty: it was actually a Liberal Democrat manifesto policy and a key demand during coalition talks.

The aim was to halt the atrophy of the state pension. For the 30 years before that, pensions had been tied mostly to inflation, and had fallen relative to wages. The triple lock ensures that each year the payout rises by whichever of three figures is the highest: inflation (based on the CPI measure); the average increase in wages; or 2.5%.

The idea was to increase pensions fast in real terms, whatever the economic conditions, and it has worked. The charity Age UK says the triple lock has “rebuilt the value of the state pension”, and helped “improve the living standards of some of our poorest pensioners”. The state pension increased by 10.1% in 2023, 8.5% in 2024, 4.1% in 2025, and 4.8% in 2026.

How much does it cost?

Spending on pensions is now £16 billion a year higher than it would have been without the triple lock, calculates the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). This takes the total spent on the state pension in 2026-27 to £154 billion. It is by far the UK’s largest benefit, “similar in magnitude to the combined annual budgets of the Ministry of Defence and Department for Education”.

The government spends 4.9% of national income on state pension outlays: up from 4.3% in 2010 and 3.6% 20 years ago. What really worries fiscal experts though, is future projections. The government’s economics watchdog, the OBR, estimates that the triple lock has already cost “around three times more than initial expectations”, because of economic volatility.

But it is impossible to put even a ballpark figure on it long term, given the vagaries of inflation and earnings growth. By 2050, retaining the triple lock could cost “anywhere between £5 billion and £40 billion” a year. “At some point”, says the IFS, a government will have to move “towards a more predictable and less costly way of uprating the state pension”.

Why has this not been done?

The huge popularity of the triple lock, in an electorate tilted towards an elderly demographic, made it politically untouchable as the big “boomer” generation passed into retirement. The upshot, argues The Economist, is that “Britain became a dictatorship of the pensionariat”. State support for working-age groups has been squeezed, while support for the elderly has been protected. When Margaret Thatcher left office in 1990, 40% of pensioners were in poverty, after housing costs. Today, only around 15% of pensioners are in poverty (post-housing), compared with 19% of working-age adults.

So is the pension generous now?

Not on the face of it, no. At around £12,500 a year, the current “new state pension” is the lowest in the G7 – and is impossible to live on without additional private provision or benefits.

In 2024, the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association calculated that a single person needs £14,400 annually as a “minimum”, £31,300 for a “moderate” lifestyle and £43,100 to be “comfortable”. Pensioners who receive only the state pension and top-ups (about 13% of the total) are very poorly off. This is why the triple lock is supported by the Labour Left, and by unions such as Unite.

However, the international comparison isn’t quite fair: income from occupational and personal pensions is a relatively important part of pensioner income in the UK, unlike in many other countries where state provision is higher.

But will private pensions hold up?

The IFS Pensions Review in 2023 found that work pension schemes had become less generous, and many private sector employees were not saving enough to fill the gap. The situation has been improved by pension “auto-enrollment”, introduced, like the triple lock, by George Osborne. Unless they opt out, all workers over 22 earning more than a set salary (currently £10,000) are enrolled into a company scheme that saves 8% of their income: 3% paid by the employer, 4% by the employee and 1% in tax relief.

A British worker on a median wage might amass a £400,000 pot after 35 years: enough at today’s rates for a £25,000 annuity. This state-subsidised system will do more of the heavy lifting as the years pass and might, in time, serve as a “replacement for the actual state pension”, says Merryn Somerset Webb on Bloomberg. But the costs to the Treasury are large: tax relief on individual contributions grew from £33 billion in 2011-12, to £84 billion last year.

What is Andy Burnham’s plan for the triple lock?

Starting from 2030, a re-elected Burnham government would not entirely abolish the triple lock, but would “adjust” it to a “double lock” – by removing the automatic annual link with average earnings, which in recent years has been highly volatile. The PM’s plan is to use the “significant savings” generated to help fund the creation of a new National Care Service, free at the point of use.

Could this cause him problems?

Burnham admits that he could “pay a political price” for the proposed reforms, but says “someone has to go through the pain barrier and rip the plaster off”. All the main opposition parties are committed to keeping the triple lock. Reform UK’s Nigel Farage accused the PM of “launching an offensive against our elderly”. And even those who would happily cut the triple lock might disagree with Burnham’s intention to divert the savings to social care, as opposed to reducing UK state spending, or using it in a way that benefits Britain’s youth, instead of the elderly.

Heated debate will continue. The state pension remains a very emotionally charged topic: recent years have seen fights in Italy’s parliament and riots in France over the issue. In the meantime, next year’s pension rise will be 3.9%, equating to an increase of around £500 a year.

Leading scientists have called on the government to cancel cuts to the UK’s science budget that could force the closure of the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, home to the world’s third largest telescope.

The Lovell Telescope – the brainchild of Bernard Lovell, the British physicist who worked on the government’s secret radar programme during the Second World War – became operational in the 1950s.

Since then it has offered up scientific breakthroughs beyond its creator’s “wildest dreams”, said A.S. Ganesh in The Hindu. "From quasars to black holes, and pulsars to gravitational lenses”, the Jodrell Bank Observatory has “played a crucial part in our better understanding of the universe”.

Why is the observatory under threat?

In July, UK Research and Innovation, the government’s non-departmental public body responsible for science funding, announced that Jodrell Bank would not be prioritised for further investment after its existing agreement ends in March 2028.

UKRI said it had to channel investment towards projects that deliver “the greatest long-term impact”. The agency has an annual budget of nearly £10 billion, but the government wants to make “substantial savings after cost overruns as a result of soaring electricity and staff costs at UK facilities”, said The Guardian.

Under the current arrangement, Jodrell Bank receives around £2.8 million per year. If it cannot secure further funding, it will have to cease scientific observations from April 2028. As well as risking the loss of 28 jobs at the site, closure would also affect nearly 3,000 scientists who use its observations in their research, said the BBC.

The scientific community’s reaction?

Scotland’s astronomer royal, Professor Catherine Heymans, spoke for many in the community when calling the decision “a real act of national self-harm”.

Last week, leading scientists including physicist Brian Cox, professor at the University of Manchester, which hosts Jodrell Bank Observatory, warned Chancellor John Healey that the threat to the UK’s largest telescope is “just the tip of the iceberg”, said The i Paper.

In an open letter, they argued that planned funding cuts of up to 30% for the wider particle physics, astronomy and nuclear sector will “cause lasting and possibly irreparable damage to the UK’s scientific capabilities”.

Will the government intervene?

The government has said it is “exploring” long-term options for Jodrell Bank. Earlier this month, Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds told the House of Commons that he had recently met staff at the University of Manchester to explore potential solutions. Scientific decisions must be “made on the basis of the science”, he told MPs, “but that still doesn’t mean there isn’t a future for Jodrell Bank as an asset”.

Andy Burnham has also pledged to find a way to save the telescope. Attention now turns to Wednesday’s Budget to see if Healey will pull a surprise announcement out his red briefcase to secure the facility’s future.

The government has put energy security at the heart of today’s decision to approve drilling at the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea. Climate campaigners have immediately condemned the decision, and Green Party leader Zack Polanski has called it an act of “climate vandalism” that “is a betrayal of all our futures”.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham said it is “right” to look at “maximising the existing energy reserves we have in Britain” , while remaining committed to achieving net zero by 2050. Jackdaw “will start to supply gas to British homes and businesses from as early as the end of this month”, Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh told the BBC. But, although it will mean we use less imported energy, it “won’t lower our energy bills this winter”.

What did the commentators say?

“Militant opposition to further drilling in the North Sea is a futile hill to die on at the best of times,” said The Telegraph’s world economy editor, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. It’s pathologically stupid to do so “in the middle of a global energy crisis”. When successive British governments “wrote off” North Sea gas as a “short-term cash cow with no future”, the world’s shipping lanes were all open, “the US was still behaving like a friend and global supply seemed assured”. Circumstances are different now.

That may be true but the “general assessment” from green campaigners is there is only a small amount of fossil fuel left to be “sucked from a largely-depleted North Sea basin”, said Politico London Playbook. Greenpeace, and the other NGOs that originally challenged drilling at Jackdaw, estimate that the gas field “will provide just 2% of the UK’s gas over its lifespan, doing ‘next to nothing’ to reduce reliance on foreign gas imports”, said Hettie O’Brien at The Guardian.

“The most persuasive arguments for Jackdaw are that it will boost UK tax revenues, stem the loss of jobs from North Sea oil” and have “no meaningful impact on UK emissions”. But “ultimately, approving more gas production at Jackdaw means the global supply of fossil fuels will increase”.

Is Andy Burnham “living in a parallel universe? One where we haven’t just endured our hottest summer on record, with droughts, wildfires and, in all likelihood, the most heat-related deaths on record?” said Danny Gross, of Friends of the Earth, in a statement. “Jackdaw won’t make a jot of difference to energy bills but it will fuel the climate chaos already unfurling in front of us.”

What next?

“Broadly speaking”, Jackdaw has cross-party support, and the majority of Labour MPs are “comfortable with endorsing” it, said the BBC’s political editor Chris Mason. But the same can’t be said for drilling at Rosebank, a new oilfield 80 miles off the Shetland coast, which is still awaiting government approval.

Jackdaw “was always going to be an easier sell than the far larger Rosebank, which would produce seven times the carbon emissions” if it were to be approved, said O’Brien at The Guardian. Some environmental campaigners “regard the sole approval of Jackdaw as an acceptable compromise”.

The government is going to announce more “everyday fixes” to ease financial pressures for Britons and show that it can “rectify some of life’s little nuisances without needing to bust the budget”, said Politico.

Andy Burnham promised in his first cabinet meeting that there are “things that can be done, big and small” to help with the cost of living. He is now “lining up” more “feel-good announcements”, including today’s “crackdown on public transport ‘headphone dodgers’”.

What policies has the government announced?

Burnham has been busy making minor policy tweaks since he came into power. In July, he removed VAT from electricity bills and capped single bus fares across England at £2 from January. A month later, he announced restrictions on high-street vape and betting shops, revoking the Gambling Act’s “aim to permit” rule to make it easier for councils to refuse them.

Since then, Burnham’s team have brought forward a ban on auto-renewed subscriptions, planned to tackle misleading sale prices from retailers, and are introducing price displays for fuel on Google Maps.

New rules have also been introduced for air travel. In a post on X, Burnham announced airlines will be required to seat children under 14 next to an accompanying adult without any additional charge. Passengers will also be able to fix any name errors on their booking for free. To reduce the “stress” of flying, the government will make it easier for airlines to ban “disruptive” flyers flagged by other carriers.

Today, under a new “share the carriage, not the noise” campaign, the government announced that councils will be able to issue £100 fixed penalties to bus passengers if they play loud music, litter or vape while travelling. “Headphone dodgers” who refuse to turn down the volume on trains face penalties of up to £1,000.

Will the measures be effective?

With the Budget nine days away, the prime minister wants to “assure weary voters that the government has their backs” without making “too much of a dent in the chancellor’s spreadsheet”, said Politico.

This Budget will already be “difficult”, said The Guardian. Inflation and “soaring” borrowing costs, exacerbated by the Iran war among other factors, have “blown a £12 billion hole in the public finances”, which could force John Healey to consider tax rises and “spending cuts to fund plans to ease the cost of living”.

Some government special advisers “admitted they had some qualms about the drumbeat of small interventions”, with one unnamed source telling The Guardian “we risk looking twee”. The smaller fixes “might not, on their own, amount to very much”, said the paper, but Downing Street hopes that added together they can “make a difference and show the government is trying”.

Could more be in the pipeline?

Consumer campaigner Martin Lewis has launched the apolitical Small Ideas Initiative, designed to fix “life potholes” by informing government policy. Lewis has invested £175,000 of his own money in the project, and will ask the public for “simple, inexpensive and broadly uncontroversial changes that could make Britain work a little better”, said The Times.

With the help of the public and a “broad political panel”, he will present a shortlist of ideas to the government and local authorities, and campaign to get the proposals adopted.

Andy Burnham’s making his “first substantive visit” to Scotland since becoming prime minister, and the timing “appears purposeful, if not provocative”, said the BBC’s Scotland political editor Glenn Campbell. The avowedly pro-Union PM is turning up north of the border just as the Scottish National Party gathers for its conference in Aberdeen, and “that’s surely not a coincidence”.

Burnham is scheduled to deliver a speech 150 miles away in North Lanarkshire but there’s little doubt he’s crashing the SNP conference in all but name. First Minister John Swinney has responded good-humouredly – by inviting Burnham to join him in Aberdeen for talks on a second Scottish referendum. “Bring it on,” said SNP minister Stephen Flynn. “We are winning the argument” for Scottish independence.

What did the commentators say?

This “thinly veiled attempt to overshadow the SNP gathering” shows that Burnham has Swinney in his sights, said Patrick Greenfield and Eve Livingston in The Guardian. The SNP leader was the only politician from a rival party – “apart from Margaret Thatcher” – name-checked by Burnham in his Labour conference speech. Unlike his predecessors, who “paid little attention to Scottish internal affairs”, Burnham has decided to “loudly make the case for union on Scottish soil”. Swinney and his party “may regret” their part in shining a spotlight on his visit.

Burnham’s “carelessness and thoughtlessness” in his flat-out refusal last month to countenance a second Scottish referendum has led this supposedly pro-EU, devolution-friendly prime minister into a “political cul-de-sac” from which “he has no option but to reverse course or be condemned for double standards”, said former Labour MP Tom Harris in The Telegraph. Yes, he could deny the SNP a referendum while offering the UK a chance to rejoin the EU but this is “inconsistent and perhaps a little dishonest”. Burnham is taking a “grotesquely reckless approach” to governance.

“I hae ma doots” about Burnham’s motivations, said Lesley Riddoch in The National. The prime minister’s representatives say he’s not trying to “muscle the SNP off the stage” but if the timing of his trip was an “oversight by busy people”, and not a “calculated snub”, then it’s clear that, “for the King of the southern North”, Scotland is “nowhere that really matters”. If it is, indeed, a deliberate “salvo against Scottish independence”, that could backfire. Burnham’s advocacy for devolution in the form of regional English mayors triggers the questions about “devolution as Scots mean it – more powers for Holyrood”. Either way, he will need “good luck to avoid stirring hornets’ nests”. Perhaps “it’s not too late to call off sick”.

What next?

“There is an unwritten rule” that party leaders don’t step on each other’s toes in conference season, said LBC’s Scotland political editor Gina Davidson. So the PM choosing to derail the SNP’s “annual shindig” only proves Swinney’s belief that he’s “got into Burnham’s head”

If Labour is to hold on to its 37 Scottish MPs, Burnham needs to approach the country “not with panic but with a plan”. He needs to offer “tangible action that Scots will feel” on the cost of living crisis, on fuel bills and on security. And if he really wants to “put John Swinney’s gas at a peep”, he should “announce the go-ahead for Jackdaw”. Otherwise, this visit will grab Scotland’s attention but it’s not clear Burnham will “be able to keep it”.

Just hours after Andy Burnham sent the Labour Party faithful “into raptures” over his conference speech, his remarks about the Manchester City football scandal triggered a “whiplash mood shift”, said The Mill.

Asked about the Premier League’s conclusion that Man City had broken its financial rules for nearly a decade, the prime minister – and former Manchester mayor – told the BBC’s Chris Mason he would be “really concerned” if the club’s UAE owners decided to sell up. They had been “such a huge partner in the building of modern Manchester”. Within minutes, social media was buzzing with outrage at Burnham’s apparent sympathy for Man City’s situation, and questions about how close he’d become to big-time foreign investors. Downing Street began a frantic back-pedal.

This was Burnham’s “biggest self-inflicted tangle since he arrived in Downing Street in July”, said the BBC’s Mason. No. 10’s “jitters and discomfort about this were there for all to see”. Football-loving Burnham has got himself “caught up in one of the biggest domestic stories of the year, and one that is only just beginning”.

‘Football blokeyness’ undone

Relationships between politicians and wealthy foreign businessmen are much “easier to navigate as the mayor of a big city” and “a lot harder when you’re prime minister”, said RTÉ’s Sean Whelan. Burnham now has “a big opposition and noisy, nosey media watching every move”.

There is a wild irony that football, which is “so tightly stitched into Burnham’s own story” is now gripping him with “its great, dripping, bloody fingernails”, said Barney Ronay in The Guardian. He rode the “horse” of “football blokeyness” all the way down to Westminster, and now that horse is “threatening to run right over the top of him”. Yes, he benefited hugely politically from Abu Dhabi investment in Manchester but he needs to “stop thanking the UAE so profusely”. They didn’t do him a favour; it was a “business deal, with something very clearly going back in return”.

Burnham has “tied himself in more knots than when Scotland tried to play out from the back against Brazil”, said The Times’ chief football correspondent Jonathan Northcroft. His “mealy-mouthed” intervention only “muddied the process of upholding” the Man City verdict. Abu Dhabi is reportedly now “threatening to cut billions of pounds of UK investment in umbrage” at the Premier League’s decision. It makes you wonder if “outside elements sticking their spoons into football is the path to salvation after all”.

‘Inseparable’ UK-UAE relationship

This was a “clumsy episode”, said Adam Crafton on The Athletic. It “felt revealing” that Burnham’s “first instinct” was to laud the ownership group, rather than empathise with the “masses horrified” by apparently systematic breaches of football’s financial rules.

But City and Abu Dhabi are seen as “inseparable”, emblematic of a broader UK-UAE relationship that “is considered crucial across security, investment and trade”. That any subsequent harsh sanctions handed down to the football club by the Premier League could damage Britain’s economic prospects only underlines the “uneasy realities of governing the UK in 2026”: having left the EU, we are “working overtime to entice investments from Gulf nations”.

Burnham was “probably right” to turn attention, briefly, away from mismanagement of a football club and on to the “more important” issue of Manchester and its inhabitants, said Simon Kelner in The i Paper. His remarks were “a welcome change of tone”, countering “the general opprobrium” with an appreciation of how “good” the UAE has been for the city.

As mayor, he had welcomed the “hundreds of millions of pounds Abu Dhabi ploughed into the area around” the Man City ground, turning “one of the most deprived and desolate quarters of the city” into a thriving economic hub. Now he’s prime minister, no doubt he felt he was “being true to his sense of fair play in illuminating” those benefits but, in future, it’s best that he “keeps well clear”.

The Conservatives have kicked off their conference in Birmingham in a buoyant mood. Four years on from the Liz Truss mini-Budget that shredded the party’s economic credibility, and a mere two years since the party’s worst general election result in history, Kemi Badenoch has “a modest spring in her step”, said Politico’s Noah Keate.

The Tory leader “can point to disarray” in Reform’s ranks, “decent personal ratings” and the establishment of “clear dividing lines with Labour” as “reasons to be cheerful”. But “it’s still a massive road back” for Britain’s “once-dominant” centre-right party.

What did the commentators say?

Last year’s conference “marked a low ebb for the Conservatives”; they were “in a fight for relevance and, perhaps, survival”, said Rob Ford, Sky News’ election analyst. A year on and “things are looking up at last”. The public have “warmed to Kemi Badenoch, soured on Nigel Farage” and the party has hauled itself “back into polling contention”.

Key to this turnaround has been the Tory leader’s stance as the “common sense” candidate, combining low-tax economic policies with a disdain for identity politics and a promise to put “foundation conservative values” at the heart of her offering to the public. Although 50% of voters still do not see her as a prime-minister-in-waiting, her net favourability rating is up 20 points from this time last year, according to YouGov polling in August

“Reports of the death of the Conservative Party now look premature,” political scientist Tim Bale told Agence France-Presse. Yet despite attempts by the Tories and their allies in the media to “create some momentum”, it’s still “too early to talk about a ‘Kemi-naissance’”, with the party itself far less popular than its leader and still four points below its disastrous general-election showing in 2024.

There has been “one clear message” from Badenoch’s public announcements: “that Britain must get off benefits and back to work”, said Robin Ashenden in The Spectator. She had framed this as a moral crusade, saying that a life of work, rather than dependency, is not just “better for society” but “better for the soul”. Badenoch’s lean into Thatcherite “Victorian values”, along with “her customary war-cry of ‘What a lot of nonsense!’ may have increasing voter appeal”.

With its talk of benefits scroungers and repealing the Human Rights Act, the party “the country still regards as toxic is determined to double down on its toxicity”, said John Crace in The Guardian. Badenoch seems “desperate to track ever further to the right and abandon its centre right to Labour and the Lib Dems.” This “feels like madness” but “this conference is all about Kult Kemi”.

What next?

Badenoch has released a 30,000-word treatise, “The Right Way” outlining her core principles. This is “the sacred text of the Badenoch project, designed to underpin this week’s Tory conference, the manifesto and – she hopes – a return to government”, said The Times’ political editor Ben Riley-Smith.

With unfavourable economic headwinds likely to limit Andy Burnham’s ambitious reform agenda, there’s now a question Labour strategists “dare not ask”, said Keir Starmer’s former speechwriter Alan Lockey in Arguably: Has Kemi Badenoch managed to turn her party round like Keir Starmer did his? “Is she, after two years of patient preparation, finally ready to make her move?”

Energy prices are expected to rise sharply in January, with a typical UK annual bill forecast to jump by 16% – amounting to £276 – impacting millions of households at the coldest time of the year.

Successive UK governments have launched a series of schemes to support bill payers in recent years, and now Andy Burnham is under pressure to go further still. The prime minister and Chancellor John Healey must come up with a fresh package of measures to curb rising energy costs, an anonymous Labour MP told The Guardian. “Without it, the vibes will end.”

Here are some of the options at the PM’s disposal – although all come with a cost.

GB Grid

Burnham is proposing a publicly owned body that would bring electricity distribution under greater public control and ownership. The government-backed GB Grid would work with the private sector and power networks to increase competition, drive down costs and speed up delivery of much-needed new infrastructure.

However, its £4 billion funding represents “a fraction of the £70 billion investment expected over the next five years” by the networks themselves, so its “level of ‘control’ is likely to be limited, too”, said The Guardian.

More direct financial support

Another option is for the government to target direct financial support at households struggling the most by expanding or temporarily increasing schemes such as the Warm Home Discount. Around 5.5 million low-income households benefited from the scheme last year.

But “virtually everybody agrees it is inadequate for the bills on the way”, said Nils Pratley in The Guardian. Existing help “misses swathes of households who would fall within a better definition of ‘vulnerable’”, including those with “high energy needs for health reasons”.

Industry body Energy UK told the BBC that on top of those receiving the Warm Home Discount, another 2.5 million customers need help with high bills linked to a medical condition or energy-inefficient home.

Cut taxes

The government has already removed VAT from domestic electricity bills between October and March. This will save households “an average of £45 per year” and offer them some “breathing space”, said the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. Further tax cuts could further reduce energy bills, but the Treasury would have to find the money to pay for these from elsewhere.

Use less energy

The government could increase schemes offering improved insulation, heat efficiency and the replacement of old heating systems. Unlike a blanket subsidy, the benefit can continue after wholesale prices fall, reducing household energy bills over the longer term. The government’s £15 billion Warm Homes Plan has already set out to upgrade up to five million homes by 2030.

These are potentially more durable approaches than repeated emergency payments, although, once again, funding would need to be found from elsewhere.

An energy guarantee

An affordable energy guarantee would provide a portion of cheaper energy to all households. It would be designed to cover a typical household’s basic energy use, with higher levels of usage being charged at the market rate.

The UK government’s Energy Price Guarantee capped typical household energy bills at £2,500 a year starting in October 2022, but this ended in 2023.

The New Economics Foundation think tank is among a group of campaigners urging the government to bring in a national energy guarantee.

Andy Burnham has promised to “undertake the most ambitious review of Brexit since Britain left the EU”, said Jon Stone in Politico. And, “for now at least, he’s keeping all his options open”.

With different figures within his party arguing in favour of joining the single market, joining the customs union or rejoining the EU altogether, the prime minister is keeping his powder dry, saying only that he hopes to “find consensus” around one option at the UK-EU summit later this year. With nothing yet ruled in or out, there’s “plenty of space for interpretation” about the direction he might take.

What did the commentators say?

Burnham’s pledge undoubtedly marks a “turning point in the story of Brexit”, said Denis Staunton in The Irish Times. He’s signalling a “readiness to rip up Keir Starmer’s red lines on Europe”, which included no return to the single market or the customs union and no unrestricted freedom of movement.

Burnham’s “dramatic shift on Brexit” comes after EU leaders warned him to “tone down British demands to be included in the bloc’s Made in Europe policy”, said Arj Singh, The i Paper’s deputy political editor. The UK’s push for inclusion, in exchange for lower tuition fees for European students, “sparked anger in Brussels” and “underlined the limits” of Labour’s red lines. Days later, Burnham has “used his conference speech to say he was now prepared to drop” them.

The prime minister risks “reopening the bitter division” that followed the 2016 referendum, said Reuters. His “desire to find a consensus will test his political skill in a nation still scarred by the tumult” of Brexit. But the timing makes sense: Donald Trump’s geopolitics are “reshaping alliances around the globe”, and the “threat of war in Europe” adds weight to an argument for a closer UK-EU relationship.

A commitment to stronger ties with the EU is “vital” for the Labour’s chances at the next general election, said Tom Brufatto of campaign group Best For Britain, on Politics Home. Voters would “resoundingly reward” any parties “who take the plunge”, increasing support by 7%, according to a Best For Britain/YouGov poll.

Rejoining the EU would first require another referendum and then “potentially years of de-Brexit negotiations”, said The Guardian. And Brussels would want “cast-iron guarantees that the UK wouldn’t just walk out again”.

It would create a “decade of trading chaos”, said Matthew Lynn in The Spectator. Any discussions will “take a long time”, and require Burnham to win at least one election while they are ongoing, and the EU would almost certainly demand “tough terms”, including signing up to the Euro. Then, in all likelihood, “all our other trade agreements will have to be cancelled”. The last thing that the British economy needs is a “decade of wrangling over the issue all over again”.

What next?

It’s obvious that none of this can be “rushed,” said The Independent’s editorial board. Even in the Labour Party, most recognise that “rejoining is no simple matter”.

There have been calls for Burnham to make reversing Brexit his top policy pledge at the next election but it would not be “right or sensible to try to fight an election on a single issue”. Labour’s next manifesto needs “imaginative solutions” and “now is the time to open up the debate” and “start clearing the way forward from Brexit”.

The prime minister announced military support to Saudi Arabia in a bid to avoid further disruption to global energy supplies, which could have a knock-on effect on the cost of living at home.

He made the decision ahead of his first meeting with Donald Trump in New York, as a statement from the Ministry of Defence said an RAF Voyager air-to-air refuelling aircraft is to be deployed to bolster Saudi “defensive activity in support of the legitimate government of Yemen”.

Why is the UK getting involved?

The conflict between Iranian-backed Houthis and Yemen’s Saudi-backed government has reignited in recent weeks, with the rebels aiming missile and drone attacks at Saudi Arabia itself, including on the capital Riyadh over the weekend. Having seized the strategically vital port city of Mokha in Yemen earlier this month, they have also declared a blockade on Saudi shipping in the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb Strait, through which around 12% of global trade passes.

Last week The Associated Press reported that Saudi was running low on missile interceptors and had “turned to regional and Western allies for assistance”. With the US’ missile stockpile depleted by its war against Iran, France, Britain, Pakistan and Egypt were asked to step in with air-defence assistance to help defend against missile attacks by the Houthis and other Iran-backed groups.

UK Defence Minister Luke Pollard told Sky News that the UK was stepping up “for national security reasons in support of our own national security”, but Andy Burnham alluded to another reason closer to home.

The Bab el-Mandeb Strait has been used increasingly as an alternative route for oil exports, bypassing disruption in the ⁠Strait of Hormuz. Any blockade would drive up global energy prices even further.

“On cost-of-living pressures and acting to secure the interests of Britain and the wider region … we need to keep those pathways open,” said the PM.

Could the UK get dragged into a wider conflict?

The use of the RAF Voyager, normally based in Cyprus, is expected to start within days and will be time-limited. The initial agreement is believed to be for a matter of weeks, but Burnham said it will be kept under review.

It is understood to be focused on defensive capabilities, “but could include shooting down drones, which is considered a defensive measure”, said The Independent.

The support builds on the UK’s existing military contribution to Saudi Arabia’s air defence, including the deployment of air defence equipment and UK personnel helping to protect against missile and drone attacks.

Addressing the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Tuesday, Burnham chose to focus less on ongoing tensions in the Middle East and instead target Russian disinformation and the threat posed by AI.

On the Iran war he told reporters, “the message is that we want to see an end to the conflict as quickly as possible and we stand ready to play our part”.

Andy Burnham, stateside for the United Nations General Assembly, is meeting Donald Trump for their first in-person talks today in a stronger position than Keir Starmer was as a new PM. Trump is increasingly unpopular at home, and preoccupied with the Iran war and looming midterm elections, while the UK has been strengthening its ties with Europe and Canada. “It’s completely different this time,” one official told Politico. “There’s no drama about having to stay in his good books.”

But Trump has previously called Burnham “extremely liberal” and dismissed him as the “mayor of a town”. And if his past meetings with world leaders are anything to go by, there’s still plenty of potential for drama.

What did the commentators say?

In 2024, sucking up to Trump was the “medicine required”, one UK diplomat told Politico. Burnham, however, has inherited “an established relationship” with no need to lavish praise. His job is therefore to “fix the mess of unresolved threads left behind” – and “avoid a barrage of abuse on Truth Social”.

He is “not expected to take a big list of deliverables or policy goals”. His aim, according to senior UK officials and MPs, is: “Get in, smile, press the case for Ukraine, and try to leave without a major upset.” Officials are hopeful that he will encounter a “more pro-Ukraine atmosphere” in Washington, after the House of Representatives approved a “sweeping Russia sanctions bill”. Burnham hopes to persuade the US to increase the deliveries of air defence interceptors – but it’s unlikely that Ukraine is even in the top five of Trump’s priorities, said Daniel DePetris in The Spectator.

Burnham’s more assertive approach seems to be working so far, said Reuters. His team pointed out that Trump “did not push back” against Burnham’s ban on imports from illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. But Trump is a “notoriously fickle and unpredictable” man who “spreads trade tariffs like confetti”, said The i Paper. Burnham will have to avoid the “minefield” of some of Trump’s “fixations”, such as North Sea oil and defence spending.

There is “no suggestion” Burnham will go further and emulate “the more combative approach” of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, said The Guardian’s Pippa Crerar. Nor would it be wise to; Trump is still angry the UK didn’t join him in strikes on Iran, and recent comments on the Falklands and Irish unification “suggest his displeasure has not abated”. The meeting will be “fraught with tension” with “potential for further clashes”. The US president might be weaker domestically, but he’s still in office for two more years. For now, “the power still rests with Trump”.

What next?

Even if Trump and Burnham hit it off, the meeting itself “isn’t the most important event”, said DePetris. “What truly matters is the follow-through.”

The Iran war remains “a dark storm cloud hovering over US-UK relations”, and with Houthi rebels continuing to advance, effectively controlling Yemen’s Red Sea coastline, Trump could grant Saudi Arabia’s request for military intervention. In that case, “you can be almost certain the Trump administration will expect the UK to get involved”, and Trump could slam Burnham’s government for insufficient defence spending in next month’s Budget. Remember, things were fine between Trump and Starmer – “until they weren’t”.

The British glass industry could become “No. 10 North’s first major test”, said the Financial Times. A new government green levy introduced last year has put thousands of jobs at risk in the “heavily northern-based sector”, creating a headache for Prime Minister Andy Burnham.

‘Polluter pays’

The Extended Producer Responsibility scheme is based on “the ’polluter pays’ principle to help local councils with the cost of recycling”, said The Times. It makes businesses responsible for the collection and recycling costs of the goods they put on the market, including packaging. Because the fees are calculated according to weight, glass is facing disproportionate costs compared to cardboard and plastic.

The policy, drawn up by the Department for the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs, is expected to raise around £1.6 billion a year. But it comes at an “acute time” for the glass sector, industry body British Glass told The Times.

The policy is making the British glass industry more expensive than the cheap imports from China and Turkey which are flooding the market. Five of the six main glass packaging manufacturers are based overseas, so the UK “has to be attractive to foreign owners as an economy but also from a policy point of view”, a spokesperson said.

Call to reconsider

Breweries and the pub industry have “long urged a rethink” on the levy, which they claim offers a perverse incentive for retailers to opt for less sustainable plastic packaging, said the Financial Times. There is also support for amending the scheme within Labour: the Business Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, is among the cabinet ministers who have “privately been pushing for changes to the policy”.

“Too many take glass for granted”, wrote Brian Leishman, the Labour MP for Alloa and Grangemouth, on Politics Home, but this is a £1.3 billion industry “supporting well over 100,000 jobs”, and it’s “hugely important for the government to reconsider pressing ahead” with these worrying regulations.

Action needs to come swiftly, said Labour List. “Stand next to a glass furnace for a few minutes, feel the heat, listen to the noise and one thing becomes obvious”: this is not an industry “that can simply switch off at the end of the day” or “wait for market conditions to improve”.

The first ministers of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland will meet today to affirm their right to seek independence from the UK, with SNP leader John Swinney warning Andy Burnham he “must now be facing up to the idea that he will go down in history as the final prime minister of the United Kingdom”.

In what The Telegraph called an “unprecedented summit” in Cardiff, Plaid Cymru’s Rhun ap Iorwerth, Swinney, and Sinn Féin Vice-President Michelle O’Neill are expected to “put pen to paper on a joint declaration demanding the right to hold independence referendums”.

Labour was routed by Plaid at May’s local elections, the SNP maintained its dominance at Holyrood and Sinn Féin, which won Stormont elections in 2022, is widely expected to do so again when the nation votes next year.

“For the first time ever, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are led by pro-independence first ministers,” said Swinney. “There could be no clearer sign that the status quo is not sustainable – and that Westminster must prepare for a post-UK future. The momentum behind serious constitutional change is undeniable.”

What did the commentators say?

Already boosted by talk of further devolution of powers away from Westminster, two seemingly off-the-cuff interventions last week gave fresh impetus to independence movements ahead of today’s meeting. First, Burnham was forced to row back on comments at PMQs on Wednesday when he suggested he would authorise another Scottish referendum if there were a “clear consensus” in favour of one, wrongly stating that the trigger for a separation vote was “exactly the same situation in Scotland” as Northern Ireland, where the Good Friday Agreement provides for a referendum on Irish unity when there is evidence that a majority would support it.

“Burnham has not read his brief and doesn’t seem to know the basics of the UK Government’s position on the Union,” a source close to Swinney said. “If I was a Unionist I would be very worried.”

Then there were Donald Trump’s comments on Saturday, when he said he would “love” to see a united Ireland, and called the idea of reunification “fantastic”. In so doing, the US president “cast aside decades of White House neutrality”, leading “officials on both sides of the dispute” scrambling to “tamp down the fallout, leverage it or just make sense of Trump’s latest diplomatic curveball”, said Steve Hendrix in the Washington Post.

Trump’s remarks may have been quickly dismissed by No. 10, but they matter because they “potentially change how political actors calculate what can be demanded, defended or negotiated”, said Grace Russo Bullaro on VNY: La Voce di New York, a US Italian English news site.

And in a UK “already arguing over who has the right to determine its constitutional future, his finger on the scale can bear consequences”.

What next?

The legal significance of the so-called Cardiff initiative “lies in the contrast between a shared political claim and three different constitutional positions”, said Edmarverson A. Santos on Diplomacy and Law. “Self-determination, legislative authority to hold a referendum, and a legal entitlement to secede are separate questions.” Scotland and Wales currently require consent from Westminster, while Northern Ireland already has a consent-based mechanism governing the possibility of Irish unity contained in the Good Friday Agreement. “That distinction is essential to understanding what claims of a ‘right to decide’ mean in legal rather than purely political terms.”

Latest polling suggests only around a third of voters in Northern Ireland would currently back reunification, with a similar percentage in Wales supporting independence. Support for Scottish independence is stronger, hovering around half of decided voters. In all three cases, however, support is substantially higher among those aged 45 and under, meaning time is on the side of those seeking the break-up of the UK.

“There seems to always be a troubling aura of delusion and ignorance when it comes to Unionists,” said Steph Brawn in The National. But “whichever way Burnham looks, he should be on edge about a UK that is falling apart around him”.

Andy Burnham will give England’s mayors the power to introduce an uncapped tourist tax. This will be set as a percentage cost of accommodation – rather than a flat fee – at the discretion of regional leaders. Housing Minister Angela Rayner chaired a virtual meeting at No. 10 North today to discuss the tax.

The plans were initially announced under Keir Starmer’s government at the last Budget and outlined in the King’s Speech in May. In his first speech as prime minister, Burnham committed to starting the scheme towards the end of the 2027-28 financial year.

This tax could “raise hundreds of millions of pounds” for local public services, said The Guardian. But it could also be a “blow for the hospitality industry”, already “squeezed by tax rises and extra employment costs”.

Where would the money go?

A tourist tax would allow mayors to “prop up crumbling local authority finances and invest cash back into the area”, said The Telegraph.

Local authorities are already facing a financial “crisis”, with a “record 35 councils now relying on £1.5 billion of emergency government financial support to balance their books”. This would also allow the 14 regional mayors in England a new “revenue-raising stream”, especially when they are unable to raise council tax bills, which is still a council-level decision.

This is part of Burnham’s “wider devolution agenda”, said The Times. He has also been a long-standing supporter of overnight levies, implementing a “city visitor charge” in April 2023 while he was mayor of Greater Manchester. It consisted of a £1 per room per night fee, which was designed to “pay for measures aimed at attracting more visitors”.

Does this happen elsewhere?

A tourist tax, or overnight levy, already exists in some parts of the UK. After Holyrood passed a law permitting the levies in 2024, Edinburgh introduced a 5% overnight rate this summer, capped at five nights. Glasgow also has a 5% rate, while Aberdeen’s is 7%. However, these rates are at the discretion of local authorities, with no central cap.

In Wales, a capped levy of £1.30 per person per night will be introduced in April 2027. This is reduced to 75p for hostels and campsites. The cities of Manchester and Liverpool also have voluntary schemes, of a £1 and £2 per room per night charge.

Across the world, major cities such as New York, Amsterdam and Rome all employ variations of a tourist tax. Berlin also applies a 7.5% tax on accommodation costs, while Paris has a tax based on the type of accommodation. For an overnight stay in a two-star hotel, for example, there is a €3.25 (£2.86) charge, and for a four-star hotel the rate is €8.45 (£7.43). Lisbon, however, levies a flat rate of €4.00 (£3.52), up to a maximum of seven nights.

How will it affect the hospitality industry?

Implementing these taxes is “not going to be painless”, Allen Simpson, chief executive of UKHospitality, told BBC Radio 4’s “Today” programme. He claimed it would add roughly £100 to £120 to the average cost of a family holiday, and feared that by devolving only one tax-raising power, mayors would “pull that lever until it snaps”.

Simpson’s trade body also claimed the move would cost 33,000 jobs and cause a £2.2 billion hit to the UK’s GDP. Other global destinations with a cap on their tourist charges have much lower VAT rates than the UK.

New Conservative shadow chancellor Andrew Griffith said that an uncapped tourist tax would be “hugely limiting for the chances of the young people who might otherwise be employed in tourism and hospitality”. It would also be “utterly wrong” to use the funds for “propping up dodgy town hall finances on the back of even higher youth unemployment”.

However, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan welcomed the proposal, arguing that a “well-designed, modest” overnight visitor charge would “raise and invest funding locally”.

John Healey has said Britain’s economy is finally “turning a corner” as he set out his mission to “make Great Britain growth Britain” again.

In his first major speech as chancellor, Healey sought to reassure the markets by pledging to stick to Labour’s tax and spend fiscal rules, while trying to present a more optimistic view of Britain’s economic prospects. But only days ago a global bond sell-off saw UK yields hit their highest level since the 2008 financial crash, further increasing the cost of borrowing for the UK government.

But Healey “begins with a credibility problem that is not entirely of his own making”, said Simon French in The Sunday Times. He is the eighth chancellor in 10 years, so many businesses, households and investors are “fatigued and sceptical” about yet another new vision for growth.

What did the commentators say?

“A glance at the news could easily reinforce the gloomy impression” that the UK economy is in dire straits, but some key indicators are “telling a more cheerful story – one of growth”, said James Moore in The i Paper.

There is a “surprising level of optimism” among businesses in the services and manufacturing sectors, with overall GDP growth expected to beat Bank of England forecasts for the third quarter, boosted by warm weather and the men’s football World Cup. The data shows “that UK plc is more resilient than anyone really expected in the face of the strong headwinds that it is battling against”.

There are tentative signs that “consumer confidence has also improved”, said Delphine Strauss in the Financial Times. Private new car registrations are up by almost a fifth compared to last summer, while earlier figures from the Bank of England show growth in consumer credit.

UK recruiters also saw hiring pick up in August for the first time in four years. It adds to “evidence that the UK’s weak jobs market was stabilising and business and consumer confidence were improving – albeit from a low base – before a renewed rise in gas prices and sovereign bond yields that again threatens to hold back the economy”.

Most members of the public who describe the economy as broken “put its condition down to poor political priorities rather than to other reasons, such as global shocks, immigration or failings on the part of individual citizens (such as not working hard enough)”, said Anoosh Chakelian in The New Statesman.

Andy Burnham and his chancellor are constrained by costly rising debt – interest on debt costs more than the defence, Home Office and justice departments combined – rigid fiscal rules, and Labour’s manifesto pledge not to raise the three main taxes. But they need to find a way to pay for their ambitious policy platform “that commands the confidence of markets – and a public more and more convinced that the economy is broken by design”.

What next?

While the underlying numbers look positive, were the Bank of England to raise interest rates later this month, or Healey to announce tax rises in the Budget at the end of October, things could turn sour very quickly.

For now, the chancellor is trying to strike a more upbeat tone than his predecessor. After the equivalent speech in the last two years since Labour returned to power, the public has been “left with a clear message of tough times, and significant tax rises ahead”, said the BBC’s economics editor Faisal Islam. Today was different.

The chancellor is “trying to nurture some fragile early signs that confidence is returning” but “the burning question is how to fill multi-billion gaps in public finance plans before the Budget, in a way that minimises the economic impact.

“While vibes are important, policy matters more.”

“We hate the French! We fight wars against the French! Did all those men die in vain on the fields of Agincourt?” What would Edmund Blackadder think to see Emmanuel Macron and King Charles cosying up in front of the Bayeux Tapestry?

The tapestry, as Andy Burnham said at its unveiling at the British Museum this week “shows a new leader emerging from a northern territory, travelling to the south of England in search of the crown. Something clearly that couldn’t happen today.”

Macron has now become the first EU leader to visit Burnham at No. 10. This week of renewed bonhomie between the British and the French comes as Donald Trump’s America “is threatening to leave Europe to fend for itself”, said The Economist. So that might be one reason why France is “being so nice to Britain”.

What did the commentators say?

Another reason for this French “love-bombing”, as The Economist put it, is that “it costs France very little and buys it so much”, said the UK’s former Brexit negotiator David Frost in The Telegraph.

Much of the British establishment loves this kind of thing and it does so “because it sees diplomacy primarily as a matter of personal relationships and symbolism”. But that belief “generates the besetting sin of British diplomacy: the wish to be liked rather than respected” and sadly “nowhere is that truer than with France”.

But “in these fractured times, the enduring appeal of this 11th-century artefact speaks of a need for a national story”, said The Guardian. The Bayeux Tapestry is a “devastatingly human saga” and, with war raging in Europe, “this medieval masterpiece is a reminder of conflict’s brutality, human suffering and the importance of collaboration between countries”.

Indeed Macron himself “played an instrumental role over nearly a decade in pushing for the tapestry loan”, said France24, and it “is viewed as another step towards healing the rancour of the Brexit years”.

On a political level there is “no shortage of common ground” between Burnham and Macron, said Le Monde, “particularly regarding their policies on the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East”. The French president praised Burnham's recent trip to Kyiv, but also highlighted that, while Paris and London “collaborate in vital areas such as defence, nuclear energy, space or artificial intelligence”, they “do not always agree on everything”.

What Macron “seems to be saying is that despite Brexit, despite Donald Trump, or perhaps because of both, France and Britain need to stick together now”, said The Economist.

A new Charles De Gaulle biopic “not only evokes nostalgia for an age of unimaginable bravery” but “also speaks to modern worries about national sovereignty, dependence and democratic values”. The film “carries another message too”: that “the dark forces of nationalism can be beaten”. With Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage on the rise, the new-found affection from Macron could signify that “this battle is yet another that Britain and France are in together”.

But “what did the love-in between Andy Burnham and Emmanuel Macron actually achieve?” said The Sun. “For a start, don’t expect the small boats to stop any time soon” as it remains in “France’s interest to let migrants set sail and wait for British border forces to rescue them – especially as we pay £1 billion for the privilege”. And Burnham was “gushing over France’s role in another terrible idea: helping him achieve closer ties to the EU”.

What next?

“To move forward on all these issues and put the entente amicale to the test,” said Le Monde. A French-British summit is due to take place later this year, Burnham confirmed, but he did not give a date.

Zack Polanski will need to reverse his party’s faltering fortunes if he is to win the Holborn and St Pancras by-election created by Keir Starmer’s decision to leave Westminster.

Membership of the Greens has more than tripled since Polanski was elected leader almost exactly a year ago and they won their first Westminster by-election in Gorton and Denton in February. Now the leader has said he wants to stand in the vote to replace former PM Starmer in the London constituency and become his party’s sixth MP.

But the Greens have also been dogged by accusations of antisemitism, while Polanski has been criticised for a series of gaffes. There have been questions over his tax affairs, his “inflated CV and ever-presence on social media”, said Pieter Snepvangers in The Telegraph.

What did the commentators say?

Polanski’s likely candidacy “makes what was expected to be a Labour hold into a much more interesting race, with Green activists already flooding [the] constituency”, said The Guardian’s political editor Pippa Crerar on X.

With Andy Burnham riding a wave of optimism as the new prime minister, the Green Party’s popularity has “plunged to its lowest level ever recorded”, said Snepvangers. A YouGov poll carried out in July put its net approval rating at -23, down 28 points from last August. A majority of the public (56%) has a negative view, up from 39%.

Polanski is “easy to dislike”, said Eliot Wilson in City A.M.: there is something “preposterous and confected about him”. He demonstrates “armour-plated self-belief”, even when he’s declaring “the most implausible silliness”.

But many voters still “like what they’ve heard”. And party leaders compete now not to be the most popular, but to be the least unpopular – Polanski is far less unpopular than Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage. But “the party’s position has begun to slide” and its policy platform is “uncompromising yet unrealistic”. The question now is: “How is the Green Party to stop this leakage?”

To be fair, a fifth of the country still likes Polanski, said Ben Walker in The New Statesman. But “a lot more people now feel negatively towards him”, especially voters over 35. “This may not be down to any missteps on his part. Rather, the Greens may have just reached their natural ceiling.” But the prospect of winning power “looks far away”.

True, the “unexpected resurgence of hope” in the Labour Party poses “an unmistakable threat” to Polanski, who previously “had a virtual monopoly on such things”, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. Newcomers to the Green Party are now “squarely in Burnham’s sights” as he apologises for the way Starmer handled the Gaza war. But it would be “ridiculous” to assume “this Labour honeymoon can last”. With the Greens “unconstrained by the realities of government”, they will have “the freedom to say whatever Labour won’t”. That could “easily become a powerful weapon”.

At the 2024 general election, the Green candidate came third in Holborn and St Pancras, nearly doubling the party’s vote share in 2019. Meanwhile, Labour’s majority fell dramatically. Hence the “immediate pressure” on Polanski to stand, said John Rentoul in The Independent. I expect Labour will hold it, provided they choose a “solid candidate” – it is “by no means” a safe seat. But Burnham has “calmed the anti-politics rage a little, and I think Polanski will fail to catch the wave at the right moment”.

What next?

Polanski is now under pressure from Green activists to “take more radical left-wing stances to halt the rising popularity of Labour”, said Aubrey Allegretti in The Times. Animah Kosai, a member of the Green Party Council, has tabled a motion to be debated at the Greens’ conference in October. It urges the party to “embrace more enthusiastically the kind of radical policies which excite activists”, said Wilson in City A.M., including the pledge to introduce a wealth tax and attacking Labour for the sale of arms to Israel.

Holborn and St Pancras “has long been a Labour stronghold” and Labour “will throw everything at defending it”, said The Guardian’s Crerar. In the way Makerfield was Burnham’s proof of concept that he could beat Reform, “Holborn and St Pancras will be his test that he can win back progressive voters to the Labour fold”.

For three and a half months, Andy Burnham has been “in campaign mode”, said The Telegraph. He fought and won the Makerfield by-election, “ousted” Keir Starmer as Labour leader and prime minister, and “spent the summer seeking to establish his credentials for the job”. He has been in No. 10 for 42 days without facing the Commons: longer than any prime minister in British history.

But today, “the honeymoon is over”. Parliament reconvenes after the summer recess, and Burnham and his newly formed government face MPs in the House of Commons. Time for him to “stop campaigning and start governing”.

What did the commentators say?

If there’s one thing Burnham’s “friends and enemies can agree on”, it’s that he’s a “nice guy”, said Martin Ivens in Bloomberg. “Niceness is a bankable political asset.” But some allege he’s “too nice: a political chameleon who likes to be liked, lacking the backbone to confront either his party or the voters with uncomfortable truths”.

Burnham’s team denies such charges, saying he will set out a more comprehensive 10-year plan later this year, said Jim Pickard for the Financial Times. But in at least seven areas, Burnham has already “backed away from his original position”. And on vital matters like welfare cuts and increased defence spending, Burnham seems to have inherited Starmer’s “vice of ducking hard decisions”, said The Times editorial board. No fool, he knows that “spiralling working-age health benefits” and the triple lock state pension are “unsustainable”. But he’s “kicked the can down the road” with a Starmer-style “flimsy alibi”: two “interminable reviews”. Burnham is shaping up to be a “new compère for an old and recognisable show”.

So far the public is responding well to Burnham’s “humanity and emotion”, said Isabel Hardman in The i Paper. But this also could be his downfall. To prevent the killers of PC Andrew Harper from being eligible for the early release prisoner scheme, Burnham tweaked the criteria to exclude anyone convicted of manslaughter. Of course politics “should be conducted with humanity and empathy”, but the PM “simply cannot respond with emotion” to all victims, especially given the “profound” consequences for our overcrowded prisons. How will he bear the “roar of thousands of campaigns” and grieving loved ones on other issues?

Don’t underestimate the “importance of sentiment in economics”, said John Rentoul, The Independent’s chief political commentator. Starmer and Reeves failed to grasp that: they overdid “the doom and gloom” before their first Budget, and “allowed the dead weight of negative speculation” about their second to “gain its own momentum, dragging the economy down”.

Burnham and Chancellor John Healey – “Dr Feelgood and his cheerful sidekick” – seem to understand this, and are downplaying the upcoming Budget accordingly. Consumer and business confidence are rising, and (despite the Iran war) there is “no pressing need yet for immediate tax rises”. “Easy to dismiss as ‘just vibes’, the optimism of the new administration matters.”

What next?

Today Burnham will “signal fresh measures to help voters with the cost of living”, said the Financial Times, “drawing a clear dividing line” with the newly reshuffled Conservatives, whose leader he will face at Prime Minister’s Questions tomorrow.

Ultimately, Burnham will be called to take “decisive action” on the economy, said The Times. Britain’s national debt is almost £3 trillion: equivalent to about 94% of GDP, and costing more than £100 billion a year in interest to service, and this “mountainous liability must be tackled”. In the end, said The Telegraph, Burnham will be forced to make decisions that “will make him unpopular among potentially large swathes of the population”.

“Leaked diplomatic correspondence” shows that Andy Burnham is “embroiled” in a row with Cuba over Britain’s “looming ban” on cigars, said The Telegraph.

Cuba’s former president Fidel Castro, who was often photographed puffing away, said the cigar “made our country famous” and gave “prestige” to Cuba. But now the island’s cigar industry is facing a perfect storm of existential challenges.

Unjustified barrier 

The Cuban ambassador in London has been writing to the UK government since 2024 to express concerns about plans for a “smoke-free Britain”, according to the leaked correspondence. Diplomats from Honduras and the Dominican Republic have also weighed in.

The incoming generational smoking ban brought in during Rishi Sunak’s reign will “disproportionately impact cigar-producing countries” and amounts to an “unjustified barrier to trade”, they said. Cigars “neither contribute to youth smoking initiation nor share the same public health profile as cigarettes”.

The rift is thought to have “deepened” after the UK government opened a consultation on extending the ban to premium cigars.

National pride

Cuban cigars have “held an unrivalled position at the pinnacle of the cigar world”, said Simply Cigars. They are “renowned for their heritage, craftsmanship and distinctive terroir”.

They are a “valuable export” and a “draw for many visitors”, as well as a “historic national industry” and a “point of national pride”, said CBC. The Cubans who farm tobacco are a symbol of “nationalism and resistance”.

But it’s getting harder to farm tobacco in Cuba, because climate change has made growing conditions “increasingly unpredictable, with a longer and wetter rainy season, and more intense storms”, including hurricanes.

Other challenges facing Cuba’s tobacco farmers include “finding workers and making their product financially viable”, as “falling global demand” for cigars means “lower prices for the leaf”.

But since the US imposed a “de facto oil blockade on the island, the Cuban cigar industry is facing its greatest challenge yet”, said Al Jazeera.

Since the start of the year, precious “little oil” has entered Cuba and the resultant energy crisis has “complicated the cultivation” of tobacco crops. The shortage has been worsened by the US seizing oil shipments from Cuba’s long-standing ally Venezuela.

Manufacturing has also been hit. Dried tobacco leaves are driven to Havana, where they are hand-rolled in state-run factories, but the “scarce supply” of petrol makes transportation “difficult”, and the “lack of electricity” to provide lighting for the factories “complicates production”.

In February, Cuba’s “iconic” annual cigar fair was postponed, said The Associated Press. Tabacuba, a state-run tobacco company, blamed “the complex economic situation” that the island is facing, due to the “intensification of the economic, commercial and financial blockade” imposed by the US. The organisers did not set a new date for the 26th edition of the cigar fair.

Speculation is rife with just a couple of months to go until the first Autumn Budget for new Prime Minister Andy Burnham and Chancellor John Healey.

“It’s an unusual high-stakes moment,” said Coutts, as Burnham has only just returned to Parliament as an MP and Healey is “fresh to the chancellorship, succeeding Rachel Reeves”. The Budget will be delivered to Parliament on 28 October.

It will come at a time when public finances are “expected to be gloomier than forecast at Rachel Reeves’ spring statement”, said The Guardian, when the Iran war had only just started.

Burnham has already announced a “handful of cost of living measures”, said Which?, which include a £2 cap on bus fares, the removal of VAT from electricity bills and a business rates tax cut for pubs and clubs.

There are plenty of clues on further cost of living support but no certainty yet on what will be announced. Healey has said, however, he wants to move “power and money out of Westminster, and into every postcode around Britain”.

Here is how the Autumn Budget could impact your finances.

Tax threshold tinkering

Burnham has committed to keep Labour’s manifesto pledge not to raise income tax rates. But during the Makerfield by-election campaign he did hint at “revising the personal tax allowance”, said Which?, to amend when people’s earnings move into different tax bands.

Wealth taxes

Former chancellor Reeves unveiled a mansion tax in her final budget, which Healey is expected to “push ahead with”, said The Sun.

Other wealth taxes are still “much discussed”, said BDO, but there are fears that a straightforward wealth tax would lead to the wealthy leaving the UK. Other taxes on wealth, such as raising the capital gains tax rate, “might prove better at raising revenue”.

Property tax changes

Burnham has previously described the UK's property tax system as “outdated”, said Fidelity, and has “expressed support” for a land value tax to replace stamp duty and council tax. However, he did say during the summer that there were “no immediate plans” to abolish either one.

Social care strategy

One “bold idea”, said The Independent, is to scrap inheritance tax and replace it with a social care levy. But tax moves to fund a social care overhaul “may simply be delayed until a future budget”, added BDO, as Baroness Casey’s independent commission on adult social care is not due to report until summer 2027.

Pensions

Get set for “another period of speculation on pensions”, said Saxo.

The previous two Labour budgets had all kinds of speculation about limits being cut, such as pension tax relief, “leading to withdrawals and investors pulling money out of portfolios”.

Healey is “broadly expected”, said The Sun, to continue with plans to add pensions to estates for inheritance tax from April 2027.

Burnham has already committed to keeping the state pension triple lock but there is “persistent speculation about cutting the tax-free pension lump sum”, said WealthR. Trimming pension tax relief “could also be on the radar”.

Andy Burnham’s plan to impose tougher sanctions on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank risks becoming “a de facto boycott of all of Israel”, a group of Labour MPs and peers has warned.

The Times reported the PM wants to take a more “robust” approach when dealing with Israel than his predecessor, Keir Starmer, with a senior government source saying he is expected to approve plans for a trade ban and the sanctioning of individuals involved in settlement activity.

It comes after the Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband, said Israeli plans to open tenders for the controversial E1 settlement east of Jerusalem would effectively cut the West Bank in two and destroy any hope of a two-state solution.

What did the commentators say?

Having already pledged sanctions against Benjamin Netanyahu’s government over plans to build thousands of new settlement homes, a trade embargo would “risk further harming relations, which have already deteriorated” since Burnham took office, The Telegraph’s senior political correspondent Dominic Penna said.

UK officials warn that a ban would bring “significant practical difficulties”, The Times reported. “Distinguishing between goods from the settlements and goods from Israel would be challenging” while a ban on services would be “impractical”. There is a risk that “legitimate” Israeli businesses “would be hit by the ban” which risks “undermining trade with Israel more broadly”. There are also concerns Palestinian businesses in occupied territories could be hit by the sanctions.

That may be true, but having apologised for Labour’s response to Gaza, Burnham “must ban settlement trade” to show he “meant it”, said Ismail Patel in Middle East Eye.

Unlike Ireland, which outlawed settlement imports in late July, Britain merely labels settlement goods, “a policy that acknowledges they come from stolen land while inviting shoppers to buy them anyway”.

According to The House of Commons Library, UK trade with the occupied Palestinian territories was worth around £38m in 2025, compared with total UK trade of around £1.95 trillion.

The UK, by contrast, is a “tremendously important” trading partner for Israel, said Jo-Ann Mort in Prospect, meaning if the British government really wanted to intervene, “it has weight” and “leverage available”.

What next?

Around a third of Labour MPs have signed a letter calling for a ban on trade with illegal Israeli settlements, with supporters also preparing a motion at Labour’s annual conference next month.

The PM is expected to set out steps to introduce a trade embargo before then “as he looks to avoid the issue overshadowing his first party conference as leader”, said the Daily Mail.

But the move still risks splitting the party.

Labour Friends of Israel, which includes senior Labour MPs and peers, said it “strongly opposes” the Israeli settlements and supported “calibrated steps against extremist settlers and extremist settler groups”. But, it added, “a boycott of trade with settlements is practically impossible and will become a de facto boycott of all of Israel, which would be deeply damaging to the UK national interest, the British Jewish community and Palestinian workers”.

Imagine being thrown into No. 10 Downing Street and being forced to contend with a “public that is always fuming, a press that is consistently hostile, a cabinet that behaves badly, and backbenchers who never stop moaning about something”, said GQ Magazine. No, it’s “not one of Starmer’s recurring nightmares,” but a mobile game that has “skyrocketed in popularity”.

In the last fortnight, the average daily userbase of “No. 10: Full Confidence” has “leapt from 300 to 21,000”, propelling it to near the top of the UK paid-games leaderboard. “Absurd, nihilistic, so-tragic-it’s-hilarious – the perfect allegory, you might say, for British politics in 2026.” And its popularity, along with other similar apps, reveals a lot about the “current political mood in the UK”.

‘Close to the bone’

The game – which costs £2.99, with the option to pay extra for a “special adviser pack” – suggests that “becoming prime minister isn’t the difficult part, it’s staying one that’s tricky”, said Metro. The current average term achieved by players is two years and 11 months (in game time), which is “longer than the last three real prime ministers, and only a little shorter than the reigns of Theresa May and Boris Johnson”. Released in May, in a case of “excellent if accidental timing”, the “jury’s still out on whether this will make people more sympathetic to former PMs” such as Keir Starmer, but historical precedent suggests it seems “very unlikely the new incumbent will be able to beat the game’s high score in real-life”.

The app’s creator and developer Benjamin Brewis told GQ that the game is meant to focus on “satire rather than political advocacy”. All 350 potential scenarios are tailor-made, and some are influenced by real events, from both sides of the political divide. “Scarily”, when I speak to people in politics or the civil service, they say how “close to the bone it is”, Brewis said. Especially in scenarios where decisions need to be made quickly, and “chaos just ensues and then nothing gets done in the end”.

The first decision is selecting a chancellor. Players must decide between Harriet Voss, a “former investment banker who has ‘never expressed a political opinion in public’”, or Reginald Forthwright, who advocated for “a flat tax of 3% on everything” and “has written a book described as ‘dangerously coherent’”. While people tend to only last a couple of years, the record is “1,885 months, which is a long time. 157 years”, said Brewis. And at that point, “that’s no longer a democracy at all”.

First among equals

“Full Confidence” is not the only game based around Westminster “wheeling and dealing”, said the BBC. “Fantasy Parliament”, designed by Evan Roberts, is a “browser-based game”, where players can draft a “fantasy league” of real-life cabinet ministers and MPs, who score points based on their real-world media coverage. And later this year, Black Cannon Games is scheduled to release “UK Politics Simulator”, which is “built on real UK data down to ward level”.

The success of such apps suggests that the “dramatic recent ebb and flow of Westminster may have inspired a popular new sub-genre”. Dr Russell Foster, a lecturer in British and International Politics at King’s College London, told the broadcaster that the “churn of prime ministers” and “growing presence of politics on social media” could also explain the burgeoning popularity of such games.

This game shows us the “depressing” environment that has been “co-created by us, the unforgiving voters”, said Zoe Williams in The Guardian. Prime ministers are “evasive” because they don’t trust the reaction of the electorate, who in turn “lose trust” in their figurehead.

“Westminster hasn’t been so united by an app since the early 2010s, when everyone was trying to figure out what David Cameron saw in ‘Angry Birds’.” But “Full Confidence” is also a “useful corrective”, challenging dissatisfied voters to put themselves “in a prime minister’s shoes”.

In his first speech as prime minister, Andy Burnham pledged to “bring back hope”. One month on, he told The Times’ Patrick Maguire, that message has already been “replayed back to me a lot” by the public. “What they’re saying is: we need that positivity. Can you keep it going?”

Favourable polling for the new PM suggests that “this country is at least intrigued by the possibility of visiting that place called Hope”, said Maguire. But “hope is one thing”: fulfilment of those hopes “is quite another”.

‘Excessive expectations’

If there’s to be a “new dividing line” in British politics, said Maguire, Burnham would like it to be “hope versus despair, hope versus anger, hope versus learned helplessness” and “all the other stodgy, unappetising staples” served up by his predecessors.

The new PM’s “abstract emphasis” on optimism “sits comfortably” alongside his “concrete focus” on the cost of living, wrote Matthew Barnfield, Department of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London, on The Conversation.

If he can successfully sell voters the idea that “marginal relief” on energy bills and bus fares represents “just the first step on the road to making life more affordable”, they may be able to “look beyond” the gloom of monthly expenses and “start hoping for meaningful improvements” in living standards.

There is a virtuous cycle effect, too, said Barnfield. My research shows that “positive polling”, like that Burnham is currently enjoying, encourages not only existing supporters but also “those who are otherwise low in psychological hope to get on board”. And perception is all-important at the ballot box: “creating the impression that the Labour party is best placed to beat Reform will be essential to winning the next election”.

But beating the drum of hope “also often brings problems” of its own, by creating “excessive expectations”, wrote Andy Beckett in The Guardian. Labour’s optimism underestimates the “complexity of changing Britain” and downplays the “enemies and barriers” a Labour government “always faces”.

‘Hopey, changey thing’

National leaders have often evoked hope during their campaigns and victory speeches, said Philip Johnston in The Telegraph. When Margaret Thatcher first stood on the steps of Downing Street in 1979, she quoted the prayer of St Francis of Assisi “where there is despair, may we bring hope”. In 1992, Bill Clinton said he still believed in “a place called Hope”, a reference to the name of his hometown in Arkansas.

But the “most prodigious user” of the word was Barack Obama, who had it “emblazoned in capital letters” on campaign posters and titled his memoir “The Audacity of Hope”. The former president was later mocked by Republican Sarah Palin for relying on a fuzzy optimism she called “that hopey, changey thing”.

Hope as a concept has been “almost entirely colonised by the Left”, which creates the “danger that those on the Right will feed this pernicious agenda by overdoing the gloom and catastrophism”. While “fear and alarmism” may “play to a particularly jaundiced political audience”, more broadly such rhetoric is “corrosive and feeds extremism”. If they are to truly convince voters a brighter future is a conservative one, “politicians on the Right need to reclaim the idea of hope”.

The UK will continue to support Ukraine despite the “outrageous threats” made by Russia, said Andy Burnham in Kyiv on the 35th anniversary of the nation’s independence.

On his visit to Ukraine, his first overseas trip as prime minister, Burnham will also be giving his hosts blueprints for building long-range missiles, which can strike “around 150 miles (241km) into Russia”, said the BBC.

Last week, following reports that drones made by British companies were being used to attack targets within Russia, Moscow’s embassy in London said that the UK’s “actions will inevitably carry consequences for which it will have to answer”.

“Blustering” threats have been directed at the UK before, said Owen Matthews in The Independent. But now, with Russia growing “restless” amid a fast-evolving geopolitical landscape, the UK is antagonising Vladimir Putin more obviously than ever before.

What did the commentators say?

The relationship between the two countries has “already sunk close to rock-bottom”, said Jonathan Singh and Will Hazell in The i Paper. Moscow withdrew its ambassador to the UK last month, reflecting a deepening trend with both nations of “reducing staffing in their respective embassies and expelling each other’s diplomats”.

“Most Britons have little grasp of just how much their country is hated in Moscow,” said former diplomat Andy Pryce on the Centre for European Policy Analysis. In “Kremlin demonology”, it is “Britain that wears the Devil’s face”.

But curiously, Russian media outlets also “mock the UK, at some length”. Britain may be the “organising hand behind Russian failure, especially in Ukraine”, but its “army is too small, its navy overstretched” and its economy is “exhausted”. But this contradiction in propaganda is not a “flaw”: it presents the UK as “large enough to hate and weak enough to be worth threatening”.

But Britain has long been on the receiving end of “regular, blood-curdling warnings” from Russia, said Matthews in The Independent. Supplying Storm Shadow missiles and more recently “BAE-made Nyan drones” to Ukraine is the latest provocation for the “Kremlin’s attack dogs”. Putin believes Britain can be “kicked about with impunity” whereas his “complicated on-again, off-again relationship” with the Trump administration tells of very different priorities.

There were arson attacks in 2024 in Leyton and Birmingham that were both thought to be orchestrated by Moscow. A thwarted attempt by a “gang of dim-bulb Eastern European crooks” to assassinate journalists and activists, and the arson attacks on Keir Starmer’s former home also point the finger at Russia. The success of this “aggravated hooliganism” has been somewhat limited, but one thing is clear: Britain is becoming “extremely vulnerable and unprepared for attack”, whatever form it will now take.

Now is “as good an opportunity as any for the Kremlin to make a political point”, said Dan Sabbagh in The Guardian. Any effort to “undermine public confidence” in the UK, with Parliament in recess and “less domestic political news to crowd out the embassy’s remarks”, is vital for Putin’s agenda. As its economy suffers, and with Moscow being in range of Ukrainian drones, Russia is more vulnerable than ever. What would be concerning is if, now that it feels cornered, Russia’s “brinkmanship” spirals out of control.

What next?

Russia is unlikely to launch direct missile or armed drone strikes on the UK, said David Blair and Roland Oliphant in The Telegraph. Their first port of call would be to “intensify the existing campaign of sabotage, drone incursions and cyberattacks”. Disruptive incidents – like the recent drone attack in Leipzig – cyber attacks and sending drones to “loiter” near airports will all become more regular. Attacking British military targets in Ukraine, whether personnel or equipment, would also be a “straightforward way of retaliating” against the UK.

But, more broadly, Nato has a “deterrence problem”, said Katia Glod in Prospect. The alliance has “formidable mechanisms” to prevent a full-scale armed attack on its member states, but Russia can “operate precisely where those mechanisms become less automatic”, effectively in a “grey zone” where it knows there won’t be a response.

Deterrence will work only if the Kremlin believes there will be proportionate “consequences”. Nato, therefore, needs to “make activity below the Article 5 threshold more costly” to its adversaries, providing stronger protection of military logistics, communication, better counterintelligence and “graduated responses to hostile activity”. The objective should be to deny Moscow the “freedom to operate below the threshold of war”. Nato must “balance between avoiding an unnecessary war with Russia and ensuring that fear of one does not become a weapon Russia can use against us”.

There’s no mistaking the message of this summer’s wildfires, said Rebecca McQuillan in The Herald. It’s that we need “to stop procrastinating and cut emissions, fast”. But is Britain ready to accept this fact of life and act on it? We’ll soon get an answer to that question when the government announces whether or not it’s giving the go-ahead to the development of two oil and gas fields in the North Sea.

Both projects – the Jackdaw gas field off Aberdeen and the larger Rosebank oil and gas field west of Shetland – were approved by the previous Tory government. But they had to reapply for development consent after a court ruled that ministers had to consider the lifetime carbon costs of the developments, not just the emissions generated during extraction. Consultations on that issue have now closed, leaving the final decision in the hands of Andy Burnham and his energy secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh.

Climate ‘hysterics’

Reports suggest that a decision is expected next month, said Kathryn Porter on UnHerd. Climate campaigners have presented it as a choice between exploiting new fossil fuel reserves or stopping using oil and gas, but that’s misleading. Given that the UK is still many years away from being able to rely purely on clean energy, it’s really a choice between developing these North Sea resources during the transition to net zero or just relying on imported oil and gas, which generally involves higher emissions. Burnham can allow new oil and gas production to protect jobs and the UK tax base. “Or he can cave in to the hysterics, harming the economy and the planet in the process.”

Questionable benefits

The prime minister is pitching himself as a “pragmatist” on this issue, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. He “isn’t swayed by expensive fossil fuel lobbyists”, but he is sensitive to the arguments of oil rig workers, car manufacturers and those like the eco-entrepreneur Dale Vince, who say that if we need oil and gas from somewhere, we might as well get it from our own backyard. But Labour voters are looking for more from Burnham than mere pragmatism. They want him to be the sort of leader who can face up to the challenge posed by climate change and “sell difficult answers”.

If Burnham gives the go-ahead to developing one or both of these North Sea fields, he’ll do a lot of damage to his reputation and lose many of the voters Labour has won back from the Greens, said Hannah Martin on LabourList. And for what? The new fields wouldn’t generate huge amounts of tax, and Jackdaw would “only create 27 direct full-time jobs in total”. The economics of new North Sea drilling is questionable. The politics is even worse.

Following his reforms in Manchester, Andy Burnham “enters No. 10 understanding what drives the crisis” of rough sleeping, said Jennifer Williams in the Financial Times.

To fund his A Bed Every Night scheme – 600 new beds across shelters in each of Greater Manchester’s 10 boroughs, open 365 days a year – he donated 15% of his own salary, and used the media to draw attention to the issue. And in the region, rough sleeping numbers are 25% below where they were in 2017.

But crucially “in the almost-decade Burnham was mayor he never ended rough sleeping in Greater Manchester”, said email newspaper The Mill. And that’s why there remains a healthy dose of scepticism about his pledge that every person sleeping on England’s streets is to be offered somewhere to stay this winter. “Ever an optimist” it could be that Burnham “feels that with the power afforded to him as prime minister he can finally make good on the promise”, said The Mill. But regardless, “it is still an incredibly bold one to make”.

What did the commentators say?

He may have failed to meet the Manchester target, said the FT, but he “galvanised a fragmented local system to focus on the crisis, while experimenting with a series of local policies, some of them successful”. But a growing group of long-term rough sleepers are now emerging from the asylum system.

This policy raises “all sorts of political questions” when it comes to homelessness, said Britain editor Anoosh Chakelian in The New Statesman. Primarily, “regarding ‘no recourse to public funds’”, which bans migrants without settled status claiming most benefits. This condition is a “significant cause of hardship and rough sleeping”, and is only getting worse through the “closure of asylum hotels” which is “contributing to more visible destitution on Britain’s streets”.

Burnham’s pledge to end rough sleeping by Christmas echoes the success of the Everyone In scheme undertaken during the Covid pandemic, said the BBC, which saw “thousands of rough sleepers housed in hotels and temporary accommodation”. In total, around “37,000 people were helped by that scheme”. But currently, according to government data, an estimated 4,793 people were sleeping rough on a single night in autumn last year, which is a 96% increase since 2021.

“The Christmas pledge is a major test for Burnham’s key day-one promise to tackle homelessness,” said Vicky Spratt, housing and society correspondent in The i Paper. And “it is possible that not all councils will welcome being asked to work towards this goal”. Currently in England, more than 1.3 million households are “languishing on local councils’ social housing waiting lists”, and addressing this issue with local authorities is “non-negotiable” for Burnham and Minister for Housing Angela Rayner.

This is one of the “hardest-to-achieve” pledges in office, said Caroline Hug in Politico. His announcement of an additional £102 million gives his “big rough-sleeping pledge some meat”, but it is light on detail. “It still doesn’t set out a route to zero or say when the government actually expects to get there.” And while highly effective efforts during the Covid-19 pandemic show a solution is possible, it is “harder to make that solution stick”. This policy will test Burnham’s resolve on devolution, as he “has not given his government control over all the levers to achieve it”. And it could backfire: “if shop doorways empty over Christmas but fill again in spring, who will the public decide is responsible?”

What next?

The issue is not whether ending rough sleeping is “desirable or achievable”, it is figuring out why “previous attempts have collapsed”, said Jo Richardson, professor of housing and social inclusion at Nottingham Trent University, on The Conversation. Even if enough homes were built, the “biggest fear” for rough sleepers is not being able to provide rent, it is “being alone behind a locked door”. “Any serious homelessness strategy needs to fund social connection as deliberately as it funds bricks and mortar.” This requires a dedicated support workforce, and integrated partnerships across health and social care: a “bigger, more specific commitment than five years of funding alone can achieve”.

Is the honeymoon over already?

After a confident start in No. 10, Andy Burnham is facing his first real test as PM over his handling of the controversial prisoner early-release scheme.

Having already bowed to public pressure once to stop rapists and child sex offenders being released early, the PM this week insisted he was “increasingly confident” that the scheme can be adapted to exclude the killers of PC Andrew Harper.

Keen to find a line of attack that sticks, his critics have branded Burnham a “people pleaser” and a flip-flopper who does not want to take difficult decisions.

What did the commentators say?

The “conundrum” of how to manage the early release of prisoners required to free up much-needed prison capacity is an “acute example of the tricky political decision-making that inevitably comes with power”, said BBC political correspondent Jack Fenwick.

But Burnham’s choice to focus on the type of crime, rather than the length of offenders’ sentences, has “caused a political storm of its own” which has left the government scrambling to stop Harper’s killers being set free ahead of time.

His shifting position, and the decision to go on holiday while the row snowballed, is “his first serious mistake on the job”, said The Independent’s political editor John Rentoul. He has “belatedly realised that the politics of the problem are simple” and his premiership “would be over almost before it had begun if those two killers were let out early”.

But “the question posed by this course correction is whether the initial mistake was simply down to inexperience”.

While many politicians “seek to avoid the suggestion that they are swayed by public sentiment, Burnham has leaned into the idea that he is responding to Britons’ outrage”, said Lucy Fisher in the Financial Times.

U-turns are not necessarily a bad thing if they are judged to be the result of a government listening to the public’s concerns, as long as they don’t become a habit. Just ask Keir Starmer.

What next?

The row over exactly which offenders may or may not be eligible for early release “masks an uncomfortable reality”, said Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman: “our criminal justice system fails to keep people out of prison once they have left”.

If we were prepared to have a genuine debate about the issue, the “political fury” currently aimed at the government would instead “be directed at our dangerous reoffending rates” and how best to bring them down.

In place of that, the Home Office is pressing ahead with its aim to build 14,000 more prison places by 2031. In the meantime, in a Facebook post, Burnham has suggested removing foreign offenders more quickly, tackling the “long-running injustice of IPP sentences”, which have kept many minor offenders locked up for decades, and re-purposing some women’s prisons for male offenders, as ways to expand prison capacity.

But these are medium- to long-term solutions. The immediate task facing the government is trying to find a way to keep Harper’s killer behind bars without making a similar exemption for all manslaughter convictions.

Downing Street will hope its efforts over the past week “will be remembered as a PM who has forced the system to do what he wanted”, said Fenwick. They will “fear that the lasting impression could instead be of a misstep that’s left victims’ families in anguish”.

Andy Burnham has said his radical plans to devolve power away from Westminster will “increase the case” for a written constitution.

The lack of a codified constitution “disempowers” areas that have suffered from deindustrialisation and decades of neglect by central government, said the new PM. A desire for equal standards of living across England’s economically disparate geography must be the “cornerstone” of any constitutional settlement.

‘Crisis of trust between citizens and state’

The UK’s current unwritten constitution is made up of a “a vast and contradictory morass of legal statutes, court precedents, codes of conduct, scholarly opinions, treaties, traditions, gentlemen’s agreements and unwritten rules”, said George Monbiot in The Guardian. It is about “as easy to follow as a fishing line washed ashore after months at sea, bundled and ravelled in weed and tar”.

This “allows great scope for interpretation, which ruthless operators readily exploit”. Without a clearly defined constitution, there is nothing to stop a government with a safe majority from turning the UK in a “blatantly authoritarian” state.

Codification would help “redistribute authority”. But it would need to be debated “alongside the wider settlement on electoral reform, a regional second chamber and executive accountability”, said an editorial for The Burnham Programme, which tracks the PM’s plans for “national renewal”.

Constitutional reform is “unlikely to be a hot topic or a big vote winner at the next election”, said Lucy Jolin in the Cambridge University alumni magazine CAM. But while “it might sound very removed from the reality of our lives”, the process of agreeing a new constitution “could, in fact, be a tool to address a very obvious crisis that governments across the world are facing: a crisis of trust between citizens and state”.

‘Virtually nothing is off the table’

Recent crises – from Brexit to the attempted prorogation of Parliament by Boris Johnson to Covid – have put the UK’s constitution into the spotlight. But, “far from being inadequate, irrelevant or even damaging”, it has “performed adequately – if not admirably at times”, said Brian Jones in a 2023 paper for the Institute for Government and Bennett Institute for Public Policy.

If anything, the UK system does a better job of allowing and incorporating change than most written constitutions. These codified systems “either take items off the table or make it more difficult to update constitutions”, whereas “in the UK virtually nothing is off the table”. As such, it is better suited to adapting to “political, legal, economic and cultural change”.

The “flexibility” of the British constitution means Andy Burnham, “having never won a general election and with no mandate or manifesto to call upon, can simply announce a whole series of reforms to devolution in England”, said Lee David Evans, a historian of the Conservative Party, on UnHerd.

If the UK had a written constitution, where the “relationship between devolved and central authority was much more rigid, his recent policy announcements would be much more difficult – perhaps even practically impossible”.

“Andy Burnham vows no early general election before 2029” was Metro’s take-away headline after a recent interview between the PM and the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg.

His aides have been “adamant, consistent and emphatic” that there will be no snap election, said The Spectator’s political editor Tim Shipman. But Burnham’s obvious hesitation when answering the question “was that of a man calculating the trade-off between survival now and long-term freedom of manoeuvre”.

What did the commentators say?

Burnham spent his first two weeks as PM in a “blitz of hyperactivity”, said The Guardian’s deputy political editor Jessica Elgot. “Bus fares, business rates, energy bill cuts, defence, Ukraine and devolution – he has been everywhere,” and brought a “renewed sense of optimism” among Labour MPs, buoyed by a series of polls that show the party leading Reform UK for the first time in more than a year.

For all his denials, a part of Burnham’s brain “will be furtively wondering whether it might become feasible to go to the country this autumn or early next year”, said Andrew Rawnsley, associate politics editor at The Observer. If “the bounce does get bouncier” then “the risk-reward ratio could begin to look more enticing”.

The Burnham bounce is “real”, Dylan Spielman, who led Labour’s data science team through the 2024 general election, told The Guardian, “but not yet big enough to put Labour back on course for a majority”.

More in Common’s voting intention tracker puts Labour on 28%, ahead of Reform UK on 24%, which, while a marked improvement from polling under Keir Starmer, would still likely mean a hung parliament if an election were held tomorrow.

The problem is that “so far the recovery has mainly come from reuniting the progressive bloc” who had drifted towards the Greens. while Labour is still “making much less progress winning back Reform voters and Conservatives who are pivotal in marginal seats”.

Labour candidate Bev Craig’s emphatic win in the Manchester mayoral election will have given Burnham “more food for thought”, said The Telegraph’s John Power. The PM’s coronation has, “for the moment, crushed his Left flank” while the Right is now “electorally split between the Conservatives and Reform”, with the latter struggling to move on from a series of political donation scandals.

The “strategic logic” behind calling an early election, “perhaps after a few more weeks of positive announcements, seems unassailable if the polls continue to trend up”. With no mandate and a reality-checking Budget due at the end of October, the PM’s “political strategy of promising everything to everyone has a natural timespan on it”. Labour sources are briefing that if the government consistently posts poll leads of 5% to 8%, Burnham will be advised to “go for it” and call a snap election.

What next?

In 2007, Gordon Brown failed to quash speculation of a snap election during his No. 10 honeymoon period – and never recovered when he backed out of holding one at the last minute, said Peter Franklin in UnHerd. The lesson for Burnham is that he “needs to reconcile two contradictory objectives: killing the anticipation that a snap election is imminent while leaving himself with the option of calling one”.

If Burnham does call an early election, “he’ll be like a gambler sticking all his winnings on one last spin of the roulette wheel”, said The Express’s Harvey Jones. “My guess is he’ll bank them instead”, but “if the first big crisis sends his poll ratings into freefall, he may wish he’d thrown caution to the wind while Lady Luck was still smiling”.

Rupert Lowe has offered an olive branch to Nigel Farage and claimed the pair could unite the “patriotic right” of British politics in an electoral pact that could threaten Andy Burnham.

“Politics being politics,” said Politico, Lowe, a former Reform MP until being suspended by the party in March 2025, spelt out “five conditions for cooperation”. They included “a referendum on the death penalty and the exclusion of former Tory ministers from any future cabinet”.

Farage responded by saying he wanted the support of people from other parties to defeat the left. He didn’t name Lowe and Restore but said Reform’s potential allies should share his commitment to restoring Britain’s borders. But he stood by his former Tory front-benchers, saying: “I will never turn my back on my team.”

What did the commentators say?

The Greater Manchester mayoral election, won comfortably by Labour’s Bev Craig, has shown the danger Restore could pose to Reform at a future general election. Reform took 21% of first-preference votes, while Restore had 8.7% (Craig won 47.1%). Lowe “appears to have come to a realisation: that Restore is just big enough to prevent Reform victories, but far too small to win itself”, said George Spencer on UnHerd.

The conditions laid out by Lowe show that he is not serious about this offer, said veteran Farage ally Gawain Towler on Substack. It “is a demand engineered to be refused” and the timing of Lowe’s “gesture” comes while Farage is “under scrutiny he could do without”. In speaking out while Farage is under investigation for his financial conduct, Lowe “has chosen the moment of maximum embarrassment to apply pressure and called it generosity”.

But one figure with connections in Reform circles told Politico it was a “tempting offer” for Farage that would stop him “bleeding any more support … but the animosity between the pair is a big barrier”, said Politico.

Surely Farage is a “savvy enough politician to spot that this is not so much a gift as a trap, from a man whom he personally detests”, said James Ball in The i Paper. “Even if he wanted to work with Lowe and went along with his list of demands, this would create new political problems for him”. Among Reform’s voters are “people who aren’t fully signed up to the idea of mass deportations and full-blown Islamophobia”. Rather they are “simply fed up of the status quo and the mainstream parties”.

But “it now appears neither can make the progress needed to nullify the left without the other”, said Giles Sheldrick in the Daily Express. “Many of those closest to the man who almost single-handedly delivered Brexit have said he is driven by ego and ambition.” While Farage denies this is the case, Lowe’s “offer in a bombshell social media post may well provide the definitive answer”.

What next?

It remains to be seen “whether the Burnham bounce in the polls and the dip in Farage’s fortunes mark a decisive shift in momentum in British politics or merely a blip”, said Politico. “What is clear is that the challenges facing Reform are substantial, and growing.”

The ball is clearly now in Farage’s court but the imminent by-election in Clacton and the Labour government’s resurgence mean he “is facing something of a perfect storm,” Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, told Politico. “But while he’s on the ropes he’s by no means on the floor, let alone out for the count.”

In 2019, PC Andrew Harper was responding to a call about the theft of a quad bike in Berkshire when his foot got caught in the tow strap of the suspects’ car as it sped off. He was dragged for 1.6km, suffering fatal injuries. The three teenagers in the car were later convicted of his manslaughter; the two who were passengers were sentenced to 13 years.

Dangerously close to capacity

After that, said the Daily Mail, Harper’s widow successfully campaigned for the killers of emergency workers to get mandatory life terms; but Harper’s Law doesn't apply retroactively, and last week it emerged that those two men may be released on licence early, under the 2026 Sentencing Act. It allows for all non-violent offenders, and violent ones jailed for less than four years, to be released when they've served 33% of their terms, and for those serving more than four years for violent and sex crimes to be released at the 50% mark. Only a few categories of serious offender are excluded, including those serving life terms.

Countless victims of crimes including rape and child sex abuse have been informed that their attackers are to be freed earlier than anticipated. Inevitably, they are appalled and feel betrayed, said David Shipley in The Spectator. Faced with a public backlash, Andy Burnham has paused the Act’s implementation. But it is not clear what he can do. Prisons in England and Wales have been dangerously close to capacity for years. No sooner had Keir Starmer come to office in 2024 than he was faced with warnings that the system was about to collapse, prompting a controversial early release scheme in which many offenders were let out at the 40% mark.

The system needs total reform

People blamed successive Tory governments for bringing in tougher sentences and raising automatic release thresholds, while failing to increase prison capacity: in 14 years, they added just 500 new places. Labour has pledged to create 14,000 more, but even if they manage that, these prisons won't be ready in time to avert a crisis – hence the new Act, which lowers release thresholds again. It also expands the range of offences they apply to, because releasing only non-violent offenders would not free up enough space.

Ultimately, the system needs total reform, said Ian Birrell in The i Paper. Owing in part to a “tough on crime” narrative driven by the media, our incarceration rate is higher than any other country in Western Europe. Yet there is no firm evidence that longer sentences deter crimes – let alone in jails rife with drugs but short on opportunities for rehabilitation or treatment for addiction. Countries like Norway have shown that there are cheaper, more effective ways of tackling crime, but will the public accept them? It will take a bold politician to break this cycle.

What is the best pub snack?

As Andy Burnham and John Healey took up their positions in No. 10 and No. 11 last week, they took a break from running the country to discuss the biggest question potentially facing Brits today. They did so in a video released to promote their announcement of a 20% cut in pub business rates, which racked up two million views across Instagram and TikTok.

The change in government has seen a new media strategy that is already winning much praise. “Labour’s comms has been in another league this week compared to what went before,” said The News Agents’ Lewis Goodall on X in response to the pub snacks video.

“That is certainly true,” said Gareth Roberts in The Spectator, but it’s “a bit like saying that a packet of Scampi Fries is, as a pub snack, in another league from a handful of gravel.”

What did the commentators say?

In 2026, “TikTok and Instagram are the most important stages that any politician who cares about reaching Gen Z, who don’t read newspapers or listen to the radio, must master”, said Issy Clarke on LBC.

Many of Burnham’s critics “will be precisely those who decry the lack of political engagement among Gen Z”, all the while “forgetting that the best remedy is to meet young people where they are”. Burnham “is the first British PM who has managed to do it”.

When it comes to his social media output, it has an “authenticity” to it, Bruce Daisley, the former boss of Twitter in the UK and Europe, told The Times. “And he is getting the cut through as a result.” Burnham is a politician who gets it and uses “a template of frequent, human communications”. In a way “it’s almost over-communication, but that way the message gets across”.

After years of gloom, “the chirpy bonhomie can’t help but appeal”, said Roberts in The Spectator. “Here is somebody saying that Britain isn’t broken, isn’t collapsing, and look, here’s a few little extra pennies for you.” It is the reason the polls are shifting effectively because “it’s so nice to see somebody with a smile on their face, even a gormless smile that defies reality”.

Yet the new PM’s “apparent openness to people he meets on the street has not, so far, been extended to lobby journalists”, said Keir Starmer’s biographer Tom Baldwin in The Guardian. “Aides insist there is no deliberate effort to avoid scrutiny and can point to how he spoke at length to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg”, but in hoodwinking the lobby over the appointment of Healey as chancellor “there appears to be more than a little satisfaction about the lobby’s humiliation within the prime minister’s wider circle”. It is a dangerous tactic “from a new administration that will need to be trusted by the more responsible end of the Westminster media when, inevitably, the going gets rough”.

What next?

Burnham’s social media output is a “good way to signal to a large audience that the Labour government has changed”, said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. But “while it allows the prime minister of the day to evade direct scrutiny and difficult debates, it also makes it harder for them to put their opponents under the microscope”.

It also means “neither Burnham nor his opponents are guaranteed a proper comeback when a rival is speaking”. Effectively, we are heading towards “a highly polarised country where political advertising is almost inescapable and neither side can be guaranteed the pain of scrutiny or the consolation of a rebuttal”.

Labour looks set to pass its first test with voters since Andy Burnham took over as prime minister, with the party’s candidate the favourite to succeed him as Manchester mayor in today’s by-election

The race to replace Burnham has been somewhat “overshadowed by events in Westminster” over the past week. But the region’s two million voters go to the polls today to take part in “the biggest by-election in British political history”, said The Guardian.

Who’s running?

Bev Craig, current leader of Manchester City Council, is standing for Labour against Reform UK councillor for Baguley, Sian Niamh Astley, in what has been a heated contest between the two parties.

Other names throwing their hat into the ring include Altrincham councillor Geraldine Coggins, representing the Green Party, Bowdon councillor Phil Eckersley for the Conservatives, and Didsbury West Liberal Democrat councillor Richard Kilpatrick. Marlon West is standing for Restore Britain, with former mayoral candidate Marcus Farmer running as an independent.

How does the vote work?

UK mayoral elections use a system known as supplementary voting that gives voters the option to choose their first- and second-choice candidate.

If any candidate secures more than 50% of the first-choice votes, they will automatically be elected mayor. If no candidate receives more than 50% of the first-choice votes, the contest moves to a second round between the two candidates who received the most first-choice votes. All other candidates are eliminated, and ballot papers are counted again factoring in second-choice votes.

What do the polls say?

When Burnham declared his intention to return to Westminster, “the prospect of Labour losing control of Greater Manchester was used as an argument to keep him in post”, said Dan Haygarth in The Independent. After the mayoral by-election was announced, some bookmakers even made Reform the early favourite, but polls suggest that Labour will retain the mayoralty with “relative ease”, leaving Reform and the Greens to battle it out for second place.

YouGov polling from 17 July had Craig on 38% to Astley’s 24%, with Coggins in third on 17%. But in a second-round run-off, the Labour candidate would trounce Reform’s 62% to 38%

With both the Greens and Reform offering radical alternatives to a deeply unpopular Starmer government, this election could have been “a mighty close battle and very difficult for Labour to hold on”, Jon Tonge, professor of politics at the University of Liverpool, said in The Independent. But now voters are less likely to be “looking for an alternative to Labour; they’re prepared to support Labour, for now at least, across Greater Manchester”.

What’s at stake?

The winner of Thursday's race will take control of the biggest mayoral authority outside London, with a £3 billion budget and wide-ranging powers across housing, health, policing and transport. But the race also has deep implications far beyond Manchester.

Professor Rob Ford, of the University of Manchester, said in The Guardian that the real mark of success would be whether Labour was able to push back the Green tide in Manchester and close the gap in Reform-leaning areas such as Wigan and Bolton.

Whatever the result, Greater Manchester will be “very close to the heart of power given the location of Number 10 North”, Professor Andrew Russell, from the University of Liverpool, said on the BBC. “Not for the first time of late, all eyes will certainly be on the city.”

“From today, Britain will value the hard hat every bit as much as the graduation cap,” wrote Andy Burnham in The Times. The prime minister’s new government has unveiled “fundamental changes” to England’s curriculum and education system.

From the age of 14, pupils will be able to combine technical subjects like manufacturing and AI with core subjects like maths and English. They will also be able to get experience with local employers, to give them a clearer pathway into work. “For too long, we’ve built a school system around the idea that there’s only one route to success: university, a degree, a desk,” wrote Burnham. But in “the age of AI”, practical and technical skills have “become more valuable than ever”.

‘Westminster will be less involved’

Burnham is “on a mission” to reduce the number of young people not in education, employment or training (Neets) – more than one in eight of the UK’s 16- to 24-year-olds: the highest level in more than 12 years. This overhaul “doesn’t actually do anything about Neets, in that it will not be of any benefit to them”, said The Times’ sketch writer Tom Peck. But in theory, it will help “prevent the emergence of the next generation of Neets”.

It also “gives Burnham a chance to distance himself again” from previous politicians, said Politico’s London Playbook. Because “we’ve heard this type of thing a lot over the last few years”. But the difference now, Burnham argues, is that “Westminster will be less involved”; the new routes will be shaped by local mayors, schools and employers.

It’s modelled on his Greater Manchester Baccalaureate, or MBacc, which he launched as mayor in 2024, said the BBC’s education correspondent Hazel Shearing. The MBacc “may well be scalable”, but “there will be challenges”. Will kids living in deprived areas, without thriving industries, have fewer options?

Neets ‘downstream of economy, not classroom’

I agree that England “has never built a technical education system worthy of the name”, said Joshua Vallance, vice principal of Trinity Academy, Brixton in Schools Week. But should children “begin sacrificing a broad academic education at 14” to get one? “As a Labour member and teacher, I think they should not.”

Telling kids to organise their curriculum around a “presumed occupational destination” means we “narrow their field of possibility before either they or we can know what they might become”. Plus, one of “the beauties of our education system” is “common academic entitlement”: that children at a Brixton academy “have access to the same knowledge as the children at Eton and Harrow”: a “great leveller in society”.

In Burnham’s system, more well-off children at independent or selective schools will still study languages, history and sciences “before deciding what to become”. Poorer children will be “asked to decide first”, with “fewer options”.

England’s education system isn’t perfect, but “the focus on a knowledge-rich curriculum” has led to “better outcomes for most pupils”, said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. We’ve climbed international rankings in both literacy and numeracy, and the proportion of kids getting good GCSE results has risen while grade inflation stayed “relatively low”.

Unless John Healey “does something very radical in the Budget”, Burnham’s overhaul has to be “balanced by cuts elsewhere in the schools budget”, which imperils a “genuine public policy success”, but “to no good end”. Because the Neet problem is “not a consequence of our education system”: it’s “rooted in the labour market”.

Kids are “twice as likely to become Neet in the northeast of England than the southwest”, not because schools in the southwest are better at tailoring education to “the needs of local businesses”. The rate of young people who become Neets is “downstream of the strength of their local economies, not the curriculum”.

“Overlooked and underfunded” adult social care has become “the Cinderella service of our wider welfare system”, said Labour List. Now Andy Burnham, whose father has Alzheimer’s and lives in a care home, has told the BBC that he will put “whatever political capital I have” into fixing it.

He is not the first prime minister to vow to tackle the issue. But “successive governments have come undone when faced with the tricky reality” of adequately funding state support to help older people live safely and independently, said The Times.

What did the commentators say?

There have been 22 botched attempts to the reform the English adult social care system in the past 30 years. And those successive failures carry “a heavy political cost”, said Chris Smyth in the Financial Times: long-term underfunding has made pay and conditions in the sector so unattractive to British workers that “visa rules were loosened after Brexit” and care workers arriving from abroad became “the single biggest reason why net immigration to the UK rose to all-time high”.

Now, as Britain’s “demographic centre of gravity” tilts towards retirement, social care is reaching its “most painful financial pinch point” yet, said The Telegraph's editorial board. In 50 years, more than 25% of the population could be over the age of 65, according to the Office for National Statistics. The “best solution” for funding social care on that scale would be an “insurance-based system, where Britons would be encouraged to pay into a fund that would cover their own care in old age, should they need it”.

But Burnham has said social care should be delivered “on an NHS basis”. This implies “a public service free at the point of delivery and funded by some form of taxation”, said The Guardian’s editorial board. When Burnham was health secretary in 2010, he proposed a “national care service” to be funded by a deferred levy on dead people’s estates. Other options could include “a new form of social insurance” or “a combination of private and state payments”.

A more “ambitious” solution would be take responsibility for funding social care away from local councils, whose “revenues don’t map neatly on to local care needs”, and simultaneously reform council tax as a central tax that better reflects current property values and generates revenue for a national social care service, said Ben Zaranko in The Observer. That would “create losers, be complicated and take time but the course of true radical social care reform never did run smooth”.

What next?

Burnham is scheduled to deliver a speech on adult social care on Wednesday. In it, he will “stop short of unveiling” any concrete plans, said the BBC, instead announcing that he is speeding up Louise Casey’s independent review of possible solutions for the system.

Yet “the veteran Whitehall troubleshooter on whom Burnham is relying to come up with answers” has already warned there is no quick fix, said the FT’s Smyth. Earlier this month, she said “we cannot keep pretending that a few tweaks will fix adult social care, or attempt major reform without the public’s backing”.

As Andy Burnham steps into his new post at No. 10. Downing Street, his family has inevitably been brought into the limelight alongside him.

Throughout his political career, Burnham has spoken openly about his upbringing and parents, but has been “generally private about his wife and children”, said Kasia Delgado in The i Paper. He has preferred to allow them to “get on with their lives away from the spotlight” – but his latest career move has made this less likely.

‘Active but not showy’

Burnham met his Dutch-born wife, Marie-France van Heel, in 1989 when both were undergraduates at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. They began dating, but took a break when Marie-France “asked him for permission to appear on Cilla Black’s ‘Blind Date’”, said Isaac Bickerstaff in Tatler. She and Burnham married in 2000.

Van Heel, known as Frankie by friends and family, has built up an “illustrious” career as a “marketing maven” and currently sits on the board of directors of Be.EV, a company that “masterminds public charging points for electric vehicles”.

Described by those close to her as “very gentle” and “highly intelligent”, she is “rarely seen in public” but joined Burnham this week at Buckingham Palace for his official swearing-in as prime minister.

In 2010, her sister Claire died of breast cancer, and Van Heel subsequently discovered that she “carried the gene” for the disease, said Jon Craig on Sky News. She decided to have a double mastectomy as a result, and is a donor to Cancer Research UK, “often participating in the charity’s Race for Life”. “Politically active, but not in a public or showy way”, she also sits on the board of Plan International, a charity that supports children around the world.

She and Burnham have three adult children. Jimmy, 26, studied Caribbean and Latin American history at University College London and currently works as an International Policy Officer for the Royal College of Nursing, said The i Paper. Rosie, 24, is a “sales manager at Jägermeister”, and 21-year-old Annie attends Cardiff University, following in her father’s footsteps by pursuing a degree in English literature.

The PM has a close relationship with his children, with whom he shares a love for music. Burnham has mentioned how “his son got him into bands The Strokes and Big Thief”, and regularly attends festivals and concerts with his children.

‘Protective of each other’

Before his move to Downing Street, Burnham lived close to his mother and father in Greater Manchester. Parents Roy and Eileen met while working in Liverpool but raised their three sons in Culcheth, a village near Warrington, Cheshire.

John, the oldest brother, has been chair of the Council of the Sixth Form Colleges Association for the last decade. Youngest brother Nick, born four years after Andy, also went into education, and is currently the principal of Cardinal Newman College in Preston, Lancashire. The brothers are said to be close and “protective of each other”, said Delgado. The “tight” family will “bring him back down to earth” if he gets “too Westminster”.

Their father now suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and lives in a care home. But although he is “unaware” of his son’s new position, he has had a lasting influence on his work, said Aine Fox and David Hughes in The Independent. A lifelong Labour supporter, Roy Burnham felt particularly strongly about a “change in the voting system to proportional representation”, a system his son now publicly supports. “It’s a family achievement,” Burnham said of his elevation to No. 10, in an interview with The Times. “Although he doesn’t know it, it still makes me feel that we’ve kind of done something together.”

In politics, first impressions can mean a great deal and Donald Trump has heaped praise on Andy Burnham for his plans to fast-track oil and gas drilling in the North Sea.

Writing on his Truth Social platform, the president said “the People of Aberdeen” are “dancing in the streets” because Burnham said “he will be opening up, all the way, the invaluable North Sea Oil!” As ever with Trump, this was playing fast and loose with the truth, as Burnham is yet to commit to any new drilling in the North Sea.

But after Trump gave Burnham an initial thumbs-up, “talk in DC turned to Ed Miliband’s role as the most contentious figure”, said The Times’ Katy Balls. Miliband has been an outspoken critic of Trump in the past, which is “likely to put him on the back foot with an increasingly hostile US administration”, said Bloomberg.

What did the commentators say?

There’s an “opening” for a new prime minister who is “liberal, centre-left, internationalist” and who “recognises the world has changed”, said Steve Bloomfield on The New Statesman.

Burnham must “find a way to deal” with the “fracturing” of the special relationship, and having “seen how others have fared”, with Trump, he “should find it easier”.

New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani calls Trump a “fascist” but still works with him on “areas where they agree”, while Mark Carney and Anthony Albanese “took the risk of standing up to Trump” and “subsequently won elections they were predicted to lose”. So “standing up to Trump is not only morally right”, it’s “electorally effective”.

Economic, intelligence and defence ties “run deep”, so many believe it’s “better to stay on the right side of Trump – however tempting it might sometimes be to give him a (metaphorical) kick”, but you don’t want to be a “total toady”, said Anushka Asthana on Channel 4 News.

On energy, Burnham “seems prepared to move the rhetoric” with the suggestion he will green-light two oil and gas drilling projects in the North Sea. He’s promised “help on the Strait of Hormuz” but what if Trump breaches international humanitarian law? Diplomats and advisers know “full well” that the unpredictable president could “change his mind, at any moment”.

Keir Starmer’s relationship with Trump “turned from warm to cold”, said Andrew Buncombe on The i Paper. Burnham will “run into the same problems” on “issues that have created friction”, including Britain’s decision to cede control of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, its refusal to get involved in the war against Iran, and “how far to proceed with drilling for oil in the North Sea”.

The PM “only has a limited way to try and influence how Washington acts” and he should remember that his first call with Trump was “just that – the first talk”. If the “rest are positive”, then Burnham “will turn out to be a very lucky man”.

What next?

Starmer was a former prosecutor seen as a “cool-headed technocrat, unruffled by the insults as long as he was making his case”, said Steve Hendrix in The Washington Post. But Burnham has “honed a warmer, plain-spoken touch” which “could be an asset” with a president who “responds to personal chemistry in ways he doesn’t respond to formal diplomacy”.

The new PM has “made clear that his instincts, and his mandate, are relentlessly domestic”, so the new No. 10 will “have its eyes fixed inward”, not “across the Atlantic”. Trump and the rest of the “foreign policy inbox” is “expected to be substantially subcontracted” to the foreign secretary.

In his first speech as Labour leader, Andy Burnham promised to deliver the “most significant change moment in our politics for 40 years”. Days later, on the steps of No. 10, he pinpointed a “series of wrong turns” taken in the 1980s, including the deindustrialisation of “large parts of the country” that “still haven't recovered”. Under Margaret Thatcher, the new PM said, “political power was centralised and economic power was privatised”; now we need a “circuit breaker” and a “new model”.

Undoing Thatcher’s ‘damage’

Many of the “familiar and formidable” problems Burnham faces can indeed be traced “back to the deindustrialisation associated with Thatcherism”, said Bill Keegan, senior economics commentator at The Observer. Placing reindustrialisation “as a central part of his economic strategy” would help Burnham “go some way to undoing the damage Thatcher wrought”.

There was lower growth in the 1980s than the 1970s, said Andrew Fisher, Labour’s director of policy under Jeremy Corbyn, in The i Paper. And any “proceeds of growth” were only felt at the top of society: “inequality increased by a third, homelessness grew and unemployment soared above three million. And that was just the immediate impact” of Thatcher’s “disastrous policies”: their legacy still haunts us today in “stagnant growth, higher utility bills, and in deep inequality consolidated by a grossly unfair tax system”.

To address all this, the new PM needs to set a clear direction from the top of government, said Jonathan Freeland in The Guardian. And, ironically, his “model” here has to be Thatcher. During her time in power, “even the most junior official, when confronted with a policy choice, knew what the boss wanted”: “crudely, less state, more market”. Burnham’s Day One attack on centralised political power and privatised economic power “effectively tells Whitehall” that this PM wants “the opposite”: “political power devolved, and a more active economic state, unafraid of public ownership”.

Playing ‘buzzword bingo’

In laying the ills of modern Britain on “40 years of neoliberalism”, Burnham is playing “fashionable buzzword bingo: deregulation, privatisation, austerity, financialisation, trickle-down economics”, said Kristian Niemietz of the free-market think tank Institute of Economic Affairs on City A.M. And he could not be “more wrong”: the UK economy today is “a million miles away from ‘neoliberalism’”. There may be “a sensible centre-left answer” to our economic challenges “but Burnham’s 1980s karaoke will not get us there”.

What we’re really faced with now is a “grotesque blend of the worst of Thatcherism with the worst of Blairism: bad aspects of ‘neoliberalism’ coexisting with bad aspects of bureaucratic statism”, said Jonny Ball in UnHerd. Our key utilities and critical industries are in the hands of profiteers, we’re “addicted to imported cheap labour” and our local and national management structures have amalgamated into a “public-private partnership blob”. Any “genuine saviour” will have “to topple” this “mongrel system we currently inhabit”.

And while the Left hope a “charismatic mayor with a warm smile” can “exorcise Thatcher’s ghost”, they shouldn’t lose sight of “the Reformist Right” that’s still praying “it will one day complete her unfinished revolution”.

What happened

Former Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham took office Monday as the United Kingdom’s seventh prime minister in 10 years, vowing that his government would be a “circuit breaker” after a series of “wrong turns” by successive leaders since the 1980s. “I know people at home are fed up with politics,” Burnham said in a speech outside No. 10 Downing Street shortly after King Charles III officially appointed him prime minister following Keir Starmer’s resignation. “We need to be better. We will be.”

Who said what

Burnham “wasted no time” showing there’s “much more to him than the friendly, folksy image he’s cultivated in public by swiftly banishing Keir Starmer’s closest allies from the Cabinet,” Politico said. The “biggest surprise” was Burnham’s appointment of former defense secretary John Healey as chancellor of the exchequer, putting the U.K. Treasury in a “safe pair of hands” as he moves to decentralize power from London, re-industrialize the country and unwind the privatization of key utilities. The new prime minister also named Ed Miliband as foreign secretary and kept Shabana Mahmood as home secretary, signaling he’s “largely backing her efforts to crack down on legal and illegal migration,” The New York Times said.

What next?

Burnham said he was working on a 10-year plan for Britain and on Tuesday would unveil some initial measures “to give people some breathing space now, some help with the cost of living.” He also pledged to end “rough sleeping,” or homelessness.

Andy Burnham began his premiership in dramatic style last night, with a brutal purge of ministers loyal to his predecessor in a cabinet reshuffle far more wide-ranging than many expected.

Today the new PM welcomes the first meeting of his top team, “spanning the mainstream wings of the party, including key Northern allies and ministers who fell out with Starmer”, said Politico’s UK political correspondent, Sam Blewett.

Who took the top jobs?

Burnham aside, the biggest winner following the toppling of Keir Starmer is the new Chancellor, John Healey. A surprise pick, the veteran MP – who quit as defence secretary last month in a row over funding – first held a Treasury brief under Tony Blair back in the early 2000s. Hailing from the centre of the party, he is seen as a safe pair of hands who, it is hoped, will not spook the markets like some other names who had been tipped to replace Rachel Reeves.

Chief among these was former Labour leader and net zero champion, Ed Miliband, who has instead been appointed foreign secretary. He replaces Yvette Cooper, who moves to the health department in what is technically a demotion. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is one of the few Starmer-era ministers to keep her job, along with Pat McFadden at the Department for Work and Pensions, and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy.

And what about the rest?

Burnham loyalists make up much of the rest of the cabinet, with his right-hand woman and key enforcer Louise Haigh becoming chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, first secretary of state and Cabinet Office minister, tasked with making government run effectively.

Anneliese Midgley, one of the key figures in Burnham’s leadership campaign, has become chief whip, while Miatta Fahnbulleh, another close ally of the PM who has been advising him on policy, takes over from Miliband as energy secretary.

Rounding off a long evening of Westminster psychodrama, former deputy PM Angela Rayner returned to her old job as housing and communities secretary, while one-time leadership contender Wes Streeting becomes secretary of state for defence.

What does the line-up say about Burnham’s plans?

Downing Street has insisted Burnham and Healey have the “same outlook” when it comes to the major issues that the new PM wants to tackle, including re-industrialisation, devolution and the cost of living. While his appointment signals that the new government will prioritise defence spending – perhaps through the issuing of so-called “war bonds” – many see Healey as more of a blank slate than the likes of Miliband or Mahmood, suggesting economic policy could ultimately emanate from No. 10, rather than next door.

In his first speech as PM, Burnham vowed to end rough sleeping, raise the income tax personal allowance, cut VAT on electricity bills and reform social care. Now it’s up to Healey to find the cash and flexibility, within strict fiscal rules, to make these and other ambitions happen.

The elevation of Miliband to the Foreign Office suggests Burnham also wishes to break from Starmer when it comes to international relations, to “focus relentlessly on the domestic”, said Blewett. Having a “big figure from Labour’s left in charge of the foreign brief could help smooth that ride”.

If there is one thing we learnt from yesterday’s appointments it is that Burnham has a “much stronger theory of power – a view about how he wants to use the office and what he wants to prioritise – than his recent predecessors”, said journalist Sam Freedman in his Comment is Freed newsletter.

Unlike Starmer, whose government “looked buffeted by events and U-turns” from day one, Burnham “has indicated not just that he has priorities but that he is willing to make the institutional changes required to make them happen”.

Andy Burnham entered No. 10 today, promising to address the cost of living crisis and put “the right values and the right standards at the heart of government”.

His supporters will be hoping the former mayor of Manchester will be able to revive not just the country but the fortunes of the Labour party. But the rival parties are already looking to spoil Burnham’s political honeymoon.

What did the commentators say?

The most obvious loser in Labour’s shift to the left under Andy Burnham is likely to be the Greens, said Kate Devlin in The Independent Polling experts are predicting a “significant blow” to the party’s “recent surge in support”. Burnham has already “shifted Labour’s stance on a number of issues likely to appeal to new Green voters”, notably including an apology for his party’s initial response to Israel‘s miliary action in Gaza.

“After months of benefiting from voter disillusionment with Keir Starmer’s government,“ Green Party leaders are “now grappling with a new political landscape”, said Zoe Crowther on Politics Home. It’s thought they’re planning “to use Burnham’s first weeks in office to draw political dividing lines” and “challenge him over issues including rent controls, wealth taxation, public ownership and arms exports to Israel”.

They also plan to target Shabana Mahmood, according to an internal Green Party memo seen by The New Statesman. They see her as “an absolute gift to us”. Should she become chancellor, they will accuse her of “fiscal constraint and economic orthodoxy” but, even if she doesn’t, they will mount attacks on her controversial immigration reforms.

This, of course, risks playing into Burnham’s hands when it comes to the fight against Reform in large parts of northern England. As do Nigel Farage’s many months of taking aim at Labour’s “snobby north London approach to politics”, said The Telegraph’s James Frayne. The new Labour leader is an “authentic” Northerner, with a “strong track record and an interested local electorate willing him to succeed”. Burnham “not only makes Reform’s chosen approach more difficult; he potentially turns all this on its head”.

Labour’s new appeal to both Green and Reform voters presents a “rare opportunity” for the Conservatives to occupy the centre, said Kate Maltby in The Observer. But Kemi Badenoch’s insistence that all prospective Tory parliamentary candidates back British withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights and the scrapping of net zero targets is a strong signal that “she has absolutely no intention of doing so”.

“Intriguingly,” said George Parker in the Financial Times, the Liberal Democrats “also seem determined to attack Burnham from the right” in the hope of winning over “moderate One Nation Tory voters”.

What next?

There must be a general election by summer 2029 at the latest, so the “clock is already ticking” as Burnham takes on the “mammoth task in trying to convert his message of hope into government policy”, said Dan Bloom on Politico. But he has already made it clear he will run a more campaign-oriented No. 10 than Keir Starmer did, kicking off with a summer “listening tour” around the country.

If he succeeds and manages to build Labour a consistent lead in the polls, Burnham could choose to go to the country early. “This summer, mental,” one Labour MP told Bloom. “Next year, definitely possible.”

For months, equity markets have been able to treat higher oil prices, higher government bond yields and vast AI costs “as separate problems arriving on different days”, said Stephen Innes on Investing.com. But Wall Street is now finally on “the collision course it had spent weeks pretending would never happen”.

The catalyst was the Strait of Hormuz, where the standoff between Washington and Tehran entered a dangerous new phase, pushing the price of Brent crude up by more than 10% to $85/barrel, the highest in four weeks. For investors, central bankers and governments, the spectre of an inflation shock that many had hoped was behind us has hoved back into view.

No shelter

“I’m left wondering why the smart money failed to hedge against what was always a highly probable breakdown of this fragile ceasefire,” said Andrew Ross Sorkin in The New York Times. “The interim peace deal was clearly resting on a knife’s edge, yet investors chose the comfort of short-term optimism over geopolitical probability. Again.” Iran isn’t the only conflict vexing the oil market, said Javier Blas on Bloomberg. “What matters for Main Street” isn’t the cost of crude, but of petrol, diesel and jet fuel. On that score, the concurrent escalation of the Ukraine War in recent weeks is troubling, given shortages in global refining capacity, in Russia and beyond.

The difficulty investors face is finding shelter from these geopolitical crises, said James Mackintosh in The Wall Street Journal. “In the old investment paradigm, government bonds acted as shock absorbers, with prices rising and yields falling when the economy takes a hit.” But that doesn’t work when shocks are inflationary – particularly “when government debt levels are so high”.

Challenge for Burnham

Bonds have suffered a painful sell-off on both sides of the Atlantic, with prices of benchmark ten-year UK gilts spiking above 5% for the first time since May. Bond yields have broadly tracked oil prices since the start of the Iran conflict, said Mehreen Khan in The Times. And, once again, the UK – highly exposed to global energy and food prices – is vulnerable. Andy Burnham’s economic inheritance as the incoming PM is suddenly looking much more troubling.

“Rising gilt yields eat into the government’s fiscal buffers” by raising the cost of servicing debt, and the unknown identity of the new chancellor is adding to the jitters in debt markets. Some investors are already voting with their feet. Asset manager Rathbones has slashed its gilts holding, as a hedge against potential “fiscal irresponsibility” – out of fear that Burnham “does a Truss”. Given an increasingly fragile fiscal backdrop, more may follow.

Billed as a coronation, the change in prime minister is “unfolding more like a royal wedding”, said Zoe Williams in The Guardian. “You feel an ambient duty to spectate and even celebrate, but you’d be mad not to stay sceptical”.

Andy Burnham is set to be the seventh prime minister in a decade, having surpassed the “magic number” of 323 Labour MP nominations, making it “mathematically impossible” to challenge him.

The result was “never in doubt”, said The Times. However, he may be in a position of strength, but “beneath the surface there are already seething resentments and jockeying for position”.

What did the commentators say?

It’s hard to shake the feeling that Britain has “fallen prey to some national sickness”, said Tom McTague, editor of The New Statesman. We cling on to the “giants” of the distant past in “Attlee and Churchill, Macmillan and Thatcher”, but our post-Brexit politicians “barely seem to register”. It is up to Burnham to change that. Above all, he needs to create something, anything, “new and memorable” from what has been a “fevered, amnestic past decade”.

Burnham may turn out to be a “lucky prime minister”, said The Times editorial board. Embracing AI in its nascent stages could be “genuinely transformative” for the country’s fortunes. Immigration under “tough” Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is “beginning to come under control”, and despite being unpopular, Rachel Reeves’ tax rises could “ensure a falling budget deficit” in future. If he can make a bold “pro-business gesture”, such as opening up the North Sea, he could definitely “repair the damage of the last two years”. “There is hope.”

It is precisely Burnham’s ability to inspire such hope, regardless of his lack of policies, that is his “key asset”, said Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times. Politics requires a “feel for the country, the ability to tell a story and carry people with you”, and Burnham undoubtedly has a “genial public persona”. Personality stirs voters most deeply, and Burnham represents someone, like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, who would “at last listen to those who feel neglected and failed by politics”. Often overlooked, inspiring hope is neither common nor a “nice-to-have, it’s an essential aspect of leading”, and few before have had it.

It is clear that the “charming and combative” Burnham has cause for optimism, said The Economist. A lot is in his favour, such as “decent ideas” to devolve power and reform property taxes, and his win in Makerfield showed a rare “appealing audacity” on a local and national level. But backbench MPs have “gained a taste for rebellion”, and Burnham has “yet to set out a convincing programme to fix Britain”. If the former mayor believes an “easy manner or an ability to skirt elephant traps is enough” he is mistaken.

What next?

The MP for Makerfield will “have his work cut out for him”, said Bloomberg’s editorial board. His headline mission thus far to devolve power to other English regions could succeed if done “prudently”, but “will take years to bear fruit”. He faces much more “immediate” priorities of stimulating growth and “curbing Britain’s swollen welfare bill”.

He must also initiate “transparent” reforms to VAT, council tax and business rates, while reducing regulatory burdens, expanding apprenticeships, and improving transportation and housing. He will take office with “advantages Starmer never possessed. For the country’s sake, he can’t afford to squander them.”

Because of his “lack of a personal mandate”, Burnham’s appointments will prove pivotal, said associate editor, politics Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. Of those, the most “ferocious jockeying for position” lies in the appointment of chancellor, perceived to be a “case of Ed Miliband versus Anybody But Ed”.

More widely, surrounding himself with economists Jim O’Neill and Andy Haldane, as well as arch-Blairite James Purnell, shows a “pragmatic preference for smart people with an interest in getting stuff done”. Team Burnham have likened their task to “rebuilding an aircraft while it is in mid-flight”. There will be “much turbulence to master” to avoid “plunging” from the sky like his six post-Brexit predecessors.

A “political row” about football’s “drinking culture” is now “in full swing”, said Politico, after Andy Burnham said a ban on football fans drinking alcohol in the stands is “wrong”.

The prime-minister-in-waiting is considering lifting the ban but the current PM is standing by it.

What are the laws in the UK?

After a period of serious football hooliganism in the early 1980s, the Sporting Events (Control of Alcohol etc.) Act 1985 was passed. It banned the consumption of alcohol while watching a football game from seats or anywhere else within sight of the pitch, meaning spectators had to stay on the concourse or in another area where they couldn’t see the playing surface.

Critics say that this curious law means that fans end up drinking more quickly during half-time because they have only around 15 minutes before returning to the stands. This encourages increasing consumption rather than moderating it, it has been argued.

Other sports are more relaxed: you can drink alcohol in your seat at rugby union, rugby league, cricket, horse racing, tennis, darts and other events. A particular oddity is that when a football stadium hosts a concert or rugby tie instead of a football match, fans can often sit in exactly the same seat with a pint in their hand.

What about other countries?

In Scotland, the rules are even stricter than in England. Generally, alcohol cannot be sold or consumed anywhere in the stadium, with limited exceptions in hospitality areas.

In many other countries in Europe, including Germany and the Netherlands, football fans can drink in their seats but rules are often tightened for derby matches and other fixtures that are deemed high risk.

What might Burnham change? 

Burnham said over the weekend that there was “something wrong” with a ban on football fans drinking in view of the pitch, while rugby fans are allowed to booze away. The prime-minister-in-waiting hinted that he might overturn the ban, but the current PM, Keir Starmer, has “pushed back”, said Politico.

“Police chiefs have warned against the relaxing rules of drinking in the stands, and we think that’s sensible to follow,” a spokesperson for Starmer said this week.

“Fans who go to matches in football league can drink before the game, in the concourse during half time and can stay late after the match or head to the pub, so there’s plenty of chances to get a drink,” they added.

Data suggests that football crowds are far less violent than in the 1980s, so there has been increasing debate about whether the law is still justified. The ban has been reviewed by parliamentary committees, football authorities and supporter groups, but the restriction remains in force in England and Wales. A fan-led review of football governance in 2021 called for the law to be re-examined.

Currently, cocaine use is a growing issue at matches, where fans with “glazed eyes” and “queues” for “cubicles at half-time” are commonplace, said Goal. Use of the class-A drug had been described by police as “excessive” and a “bigger factor in violence at matches than alcohol”.

“Hailed as a political genius by some”, Morgan McSweeney was seen as a “Machiavellian puppeteer manipulating a compliant” Keir Starmer on his journey from Labour Party leader in 2020 to prime minister in 2024, said Patrick Cockburn in The i Paper.

Yet in his first interviews since appearing before the Foreign Affairs Committee in April, two months after quitting as Starmer’s chief of staff, McSweeney claimed the party failed to prepare adequately for office, and that one of the hardest tasks in opposition was trying to “persuade people that we could win”.

Emerging from the shadows to speak to the Financial Times and the BBC, McSweeney is presumably trying to “establish a public profile in his post-political life”, said Ian Dunt in The i Paper. “His way of achieving this is to admit to rudimentary errors in political operations as if they were startling insights available only to those with the requisite experience.”

What did he say?

McSweeney was “surprisingly candid” with the BBC’s Nick Robinson on his “Political Thinking” podcast about the Labour Party’s failure to lay the groundwork for government while in opposition, said Ethan Croft in The New Statesman.

“We didn’t prepare enough for what kind of world we were going to,” said McSweeney, and the party didn’t grasp that it was in a “very different era” to when it was last in office. “We didn’t have enough conversations at the top of the party about what that meant, how to prepare for it, what that meant for the state.”

What mistakes were made?

McSweeney believes the “first self-inflicted wound” of the Starmer government was the Treasury’s decision to cut winter fuel payments for “10 million better-off pensioners”, said the FT. This was then “compounded” by the donations scandal involving McSweeney and the Labour Together think tank, and the first budget, which prioritised long-term financial reforms over immediate help for the electorate who voted them into power.

The former chief-of-staff admitted that the government should have been “laser focused on the cost of living from day one”. Voters were “really angry with the state of the country. They thought we promised change and we got distracted.”

Labour quickly lost popular support. Its approval ratings fell from 37.5% in July 2024 to 23.3% in June 2025 – the steepest drop for any government in its first year since 1983, said Shea Ferguson on UnHerd.

Ultimately, it was his role in the appointment of Peter Mandelson as the UK’s ambassador to the US that forced McSweeney to resign. McSweeney had recommended Mandelson for the role, and admitted that “I failed in my job and failed in my duty”. But he denied it was his fault that Mandelson was offered the position. “I hope that one day Mandelson recognises the damage he has done to a Labour government that carried the hopes of millions of people.”

What can Andy Burnham learn?

McSweeney believes Labour MPs were motivated to oust Starmer because they concluded he could not win the next election, “not because they want to scratch some ideological itch”, said the FT. The former adviser also welcomed the idea of Burnham as Starmer’s successor, and approves of the plan to split No. 10 between London and Manchester.

If McSweeney can “serve any function” now, said Dunt, it is to “provide a moral warning to Andy Burnham’s team”. When Labour was elected in 2024, McSweeney and Starmer had a “historic responsibility” to dispel populism and show that mainstream politics could operate effectively. They had spent years attacking Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak for “governing like drunken clowns in a restaurant kitchen”.

But in office, Labour had “no project, no set of beliefs, no plan for what they wanted to do”, and crucially failed to deliver “quick change” to earn the electorate’s trust. Barring a substantial shock, Burnham will become the next prime minister, and he “must not make the same mistake”.

Keir Starmer promised to give his successor as prime minister his “full and unequivocal support” but Andy Burnham must be wondering what Starmer’s definition of “full and unequivocal” is, following this week’s defence announcement.

Starmer announced a £15 billion increase in spending in his £298 billion Defence Investment Plan (DIP). Of the £15 billion, around two thirds will be raised from “efficiency savings” of quangos, and “cutting capital budgets across Whitehall by 1%”, said The Guardian.

However, £4.7 billion remains unfunded, with the Treasury saying it will be allocated in the next budget, creating a defence black hole for the next prime minister and chancellor.

As presumptive prime minister, Andy Burnham will “somehow need to find more money”, said the Financial Times’ editorial board, likely through a series of unpopular savings. Whether he can succeed where Starmer has failed on defence spending “will be a defining test” of Burnham’s premiership.

‘Dirty rotten trick’

Starmer has left the prime-minister-in-waiting a “series of unexploded bombs” in the DIP to resolve in the first months of his expected term, said political editor Steven Swinford in The Times. Numbers aside, there was an “even bigger bombshell”: no date was set for when a Starmer’s pledge to spend 3% of GDP on defence would be met, “or indeed 3.5% for that matter”.

It is “highly unclear” how reforming the civil service – which has “only got bigger” – and “breaking down operational barriers” will be achieved. Even if Burnham navigates Starmer’s legacy safely, it will have “significant fiscal implications for his own plans”.

This isn’t about Starmer acquiescing on defence, said John Rentoul in The Independent. It is about him “trying to blow up Andy Burnham before he’s started”. Starmer had promised in his resignation to work “dutifully” in the interests of the nation and oversee an “orderly transition”: “he didn’t mean a word of it”. This “dirty rotten trick” shows us in public what he has been feeling in private. He feels “betrayed” by Burnham, Wes Streeting and Shabana Mahmood, and has “no intention of making life easy for them”.

“Sir Keir Starmer hasn’t actually sewn raw prawns into the hems of the Downing Street curtains, but he might as well have,” said former Labour MP Tom Harris in The Telegraph. His “two-faced” and “spiteful” actions look “all the more distasteful” considering his upset over inheriting his own £22 billion black hole from Rishi Sunak’s government. “We expected more of Starmer.”

Burnham’s ‘call to arms’

If Burnham is “fazed” by this situation, he “isn’t fit to be PM”, said James Lyons, former Downing Street Director of Strategic Communications, in The i Paper. The near-£5 billion deficit he needs to fill is “peanuts” compared to the £1 trillion-plus that the Government spends. The problem could just “disappear” “at a stroke” with improved forecasts, much like the recent Spring Statement, where estimates for the figure needed to achieve it were reduced from £20 billion to £8 billion. “The bad news is that they could also go the other way.” For any chance of success, Burnham needs to “pick a small number of issues” and “stick to them through thick and thin”.

Now this is a “ding-dong political row”, said James Heale in The Spectator. The DIP’s financial commitments were listed in “vague, euphemistic terms”, meaning Burnham’s selection of a chancellor to resolve the £4.7 billion gap is “the most important decision he makes in the next few months”. Burnham has previously shown “little interest” in defence, but it is likely to be a “staple theme of his in-tray”. “He will need an experienced and effective chancellor by his side.”

The MP for Makerfield should see the DIP as a “call to arms” on public finances, said The Times’ editorial board. By arguing that his hands are tied, Burnham could use Starmer’s “political sleight of hand” to “spur him to take radical action on pensions and welfare” to make up the shortfall. Public spending is “out of control”, and if Burnham is to “break free he must attack the root causes”: high borrowing costs, welfare “profligacy” and the “triple lock”. No one will “challenge the edicts of the messiah”.

In his first speech as prime minister in waiting, Andy Burnham promised he would achieve “good growth in every postcode” and spearhead the “biggest rebalancing of power” in political history.

Keir Starmer announced his own “devolution revolution” in 2024, but Burnham aims to move even more influence away from Westminster towards other regions of the UK to drive more balanced economic growth.

His speech at the People’s ­History Museum in Manchester was “­important in shedding light on a Burnham Britain”, said The Times. As he was championing a “devolution first” attitude, the support of his audience was “not in doubt”. But the “viability of his proposals was”.

How is the UK already devolved?

Manchester has benefited from some of the “most extensive” powers devolved to English cities, said the BBC. It has significant control over local transport, housing and strategic planning decisions.

Northern Ireland and the Welsh Senedd have similar autonomy over health, education and housing policies among others, with the latter also managing local government. In Scotland, Holyrood controls health, education, local government, environment, justice and policing. It can set most income tax rates and has some control over welfare policy, too.

What has Burnham proposed?

Burnham said he would create a “No 10. North”, a new prime minister’s office based in Manchester and acting as the “nerve centre of a rewired Britain”. It would support regional powers in delivering a nationwide agenda of reindustrialisation, regeneration and reform of essential services.

Local authorities would be offered greater control over key utilities such as water, energy and transport. Burnham’s advisers have also “floated ideas” about allowing local authorities to introduce local income tax, and to set and retain business rates to mirror policies in Denmark, Sweden and Canada, said Matthew Brooker on Bloomberg.

The dispersal of power has already begun. The MP for Makerfield has appointed Caroline Simpson as his deputy chief of staff to lead No. 10 North should he become prime minister, said The Guardian. Previously described as Burnham’s “right-hand woman”, the career civil servant has overseen Greater Manchester’s £3 billion-a-year budget since 2024.

What is the aim?

The UK is one of the most centralised economies among developed countries, said Brooker. In 2023, the share of UK tax revenue generated at a subnational level – essentially by regions below the central government – was less than 5%, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. This is compared with 14% for France, 24% for Spain and nearly a third for Germany. “Regions tend to do better when they raise more of their own revenue.”

If Burnham’s devolution policies prove successful, the “big prize” would be a rise in nationwide GDP, said Bloomberg. If the rest of the UK came even halfway to matching London’s productivity levels, the economy would be “at least 4% larger”, according to PwC analysis from 2019.

There has been no indication how Burnham will split his time between London and Manchester, but the decision felt “more significant than the relocation of staff”, said the BBC’s chief political correspondent Henry Zeffman. With a tailored agenda, it could signify a “wider shake-up of the machinery of government is in the offing”.

“Rethinking and reshaping No. 10 is long overdue,” said the Institute for Government. But Burnham’s plans for No. 10 North will only succeed if “he knows – and spells out in public – what a split operation is for”.

Andy Burnham may be on course to take over as prime minister in less than a month, but he “could wreck his administration before it begins with a poor choice of chancellor”, said The Times. If Labour hopes to drastically improve the economy, and curb borrowing and higher spending, it “must change course”. And “that criterion should immediately disqualify” the long-presumed frontrunner for the job, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband.

The prospect of Miliband in the Treasury is already angering the unions and spooking the financial markets, so attention is turning to former health secretary Wes Streeting. He surprised many in Westminster by backing Burnham this week, sparking rumours that he’s struck a deal in exchange for not contesting the leadership.

‘Divisive choices’

There are “good reasons” why Streeting “would be a shrewd choice”, said Gordon Rayner in The Telegraph. Unlike Miliband, Streeting is “part of Labour’s future rather than its past, and is someone whom the City feels it could do business with”. He is also “without doubt one of Labour’s best communicators” and has the skills to construct a Budget telling the story of “how Labour intends to improve lives”. He would prepare the country for what’s to come, rather than “pulling economic policies out of thin air” or conjuring up “supposed budgetary black holes to justify them”.

Both Streeting and Miliband “would, in their own ways, be divisive choices”, said The Independent. Streeting is “deeply distrusted by the left of the party” while Miliband’s “hard line on net zero policies have made him a controversial figure”. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood could “emerge as the compromise candidate”, with the added benefit of providing the new PM with an opportunity to “get her out of the Home Office so he could tweak the immigration policy”.

‘Bulging in-tray’

Whoever enters No. 11 “will have a bulging in-tray”, said City A.M. A new chancellor will have to battle “calls for greater spending on defence”, as well as “manage expectations” on easing employment taxes. The triple lock on pensions is also high on the agenda, while calls for new wealth taxes “risk infuriating investors”. On top of that are potential nationalisation plans for “major utility firms” like Thames Water, and, of course, the “continuing fallout” from the Iran war.