Andy Burnham's blueprint: Unity, devolution and a new direction for Britain

A Blairite, a Brownite and a Corbynite walk into a bar. The bartender looks up, sighs and asks, "What'll it be, Andy?"

It is a joke that has followed Andy Burnham for years, a gentle dig at a political career that spanned three very different eras of Labour under Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Jeremy Corbyn. After being chosen as the new leader of the Labour Party yesterday, the soon-to-be prime minister confronted it head-on and flipped it into a promise. "In future, when a Burnhamite walks into a bar, I want the barman to say: 'Great to see you, we don't like factional politics in here,'" he said, smiling. And he quickly made the more serious point underneath it: that ending Labour's factionalism will be central to how he tries to repair the party.

Burnham looks set to become Britain's 59th PM on July 20, the culmination of a 25-year political career that has taken him from backbench MP to two-time Labour leadership contender to the popular mayor of Greater Manchester. Known to many as the "King of the North," he now takes charge of 10 Downing Street after succeeding Keir Starmer, tasked with pulling together a fractured Labour Party and holding off the growing threat from Reform UK on the populist right.

Burnham takes over a party that has spent recent years at war with itself. Starmer's leadership was defined by repeated clashes with the party's progressive wing, and he was accused, depending on who was doing the accusing, of being either too rigid or too willing to bend. Burnham has taken a different tack, describing factionalism as an "indulgence" the party can no longer afford. He is promising a cabinet drawn from across the party's various strands, though reports that he may prefer Shabana Mahmood over Ed Miliband for Chancellor have already unsettled some on the soft left.

If there is one idea that defines Burnham's politics, it is decentralisation. He has long argued that Britain is an unusually centralised country, one that has concentrated money and decision-making in London for decades while leaving much of the country to deindustrialise and stagnate. His answer is what he calls the biggest transfer of power away from Whitehall in generations, handing regions control over transport, housing and adult education.

The clearest symbol of this ambition is his plan for "Number 10 North," a satellite operation based at a government digital campus near Manchester Piccadilly. The idea is to make sure Downing Street cannot simply forget about the parts of the country that feel left behind, and that policy is shaped with those communities in mind rather than as an afterthought. London has not been left out of the plan either; Burnham intends to offer the capital its own devolution deal covering education, housing and economic development, allowing it to keep functioning as a global economic hub in its own right.

Burnham has been blunt about moving on from what he sees as decades of “trickle-down thinking” and “light-touch regulation”, while insisting his government will still be pro-business. Central to this is bringing services such as water, energy and transport back under greater public control. He points to the water industry as a case study in what has gone wrong, arguing that shareholders have profited while the public has been left to pick up the bill. Rather than pursuing full nationalisation, which would carry a huge price tag, he wants to apply the franchising approach he used to overhaul Greater Manchester's buses more widely. He has also pledged the largest programme of council house building since the immediate post-war decades.

On taxes, his hands are somewhat tied for now. He remains bound by manifesto commitments that rule out raising income tax, VAT or National Insurance. Where he does have room to manoeuvre, he is proposing a 20 per cent cut in business rates for pubs and small high street businesses, funded by a higher levy on the huge out-of-town warehouses used by online retailers. He has also floated longer-term reforms, including replacing council tax and stamp duty with a land value tax, and has not ruled out a wealth tax or higher capital gains tax, arguing the current system taxes work too heavily and wealth too lightly.

Perhaps Burnham's toughest inheritance is the welfare bill, currently 58 billion pounds for sickness and disability payments and forecast to reach 78 billion pounds by 2030, driven largely by a rise in young people claiming Personal Independence Payments for mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions. He has firmly rejected the idea of blunt benefit cuts, instead pushing for an education system that treats technical and academic routes as equally valid. His plan includes guaranteed apprenticeships or work placements for everyone aged 16 to 18, along with free bus travel, aimed at cutting the number of young people who fall out of education, training or work altogether.

Social care is just as pressing, with more than two million older people currently going without the care they need. Burnham has called the system broken and says he intends to spend significant political capital fixing it, with an eye towards a more universal, NHS-style model. He has previously suggested a national care levy as a way of funding this, potentially in place of inheritance tax.

Burnham's career has been built almost entirely on domestic and regional politics, so foreign affairs will be new territory. He takes office with UK-US relations already strained following pointed criticism from Donald Trump, and will need to tread carefully to protect the security and intelligence relationship between the two countries. He has committed to continued support for Ukraine and to maintaining Britain's independent nuclear deterrent, while also needing to find an extra £9 billion a year for defence investment without breaking his fiscal rules. On Europe, he wants a closer relationship with the EU and has spoken of eventually rejoining, though in the near term, his focus will be on building on existing agreements rather than reopening the Brexit question.