In a speech after being confirmed as the next leader of the Labour Party and incumbent prime minister, Andy Burnham today [July 17] promised to be pro-business.
Speaking after being confirmed as leader of the Labour Party at a special conference, Burnham also promised to give back control to communities and spread economic growth across the country, ahead of taking the role of prime minister on Monday.
Referring to his time as mayor of Manchester, Burnham said his government would be pro-business.
“I will be a pro-business leader of the Labour Party as I was a pro-business mayor of Greater Manchester,” he said. “We turned places round together and that is the way we ran in Manchester and we will take to the whole country.
“And as part of that, more power to reindustrialise and to build an education system based on parity between academic and technical education, to give every young person growing up in different parts of the country a path in life to university or to a work placement, to apprenticeship and into a good job.”
Burnham also pledged to be a prime minister for “all places” and vowed to turn around the country, which he said has been struggling since Thatcherism in the 1980s.
“I mean it when I say all places. I will be a leader for the north, the south, the east and the west, for Scotland, Wales and for Northern Ireland,” he said.
“I am clear Britain took a series of wrong turns in the 1980s. Political power was centralised and economic power was privatised.
“The country surrendered control of the essentials – housing, water, energy, transport – and left people exposed to higher costs. That in turn led to the concentration of more wealth and power in the hands of fewer people and fewer places.
“Large parts of Britain were industrialised without the power to set new ambitions for themselves. Proud British towns, now a shadow of what they once were, and high streets in decline, so common up and down the country.
“Slowly, at times imperceptibly, over four decades, political and economic power drained away out of our communities in every region and nation of the UK.”
Burnham will take over from Keir Starmer as prime minister on Monday.
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