Burnham dropped a hint that he could raise defense spending to 3 percent of GDP by 2030 — a key demand of his chief finance minister, John Healey, when he quit Starmer’s government earlier this year as defense minister. Burnham said he had appointed Healey “precisely because” of his arguments on defense.
Yet both men have pushed back any decision to a spending review in 2027, and will not face easy choices; the U.K.’s long-term borrowing costs are their highest since 1998, and Burnham declined to rule out tax rises in Healey’s fall budget. On paper, the position did not move on Tuesday.
The tension was summed up in Burnham’s promise to bring “much more substantial change as promised in [our] 2024 manifesto.” Healey last week put the same thing very differently, saying it was a “continuity of a Labour government with a change of leader.”
Contradictions are already emerging within Burnham’s approach.
The new prime minister wants to keep his focus more domestic than Starmer’s, but said he will head to the COP31 climate summit this November. He also promised a statement “very shortly” responding to Israel’s E1 settlement project in the West Bank, which he said “could imperil, if not end, the two-state solution.” That statement will strain relations with Israel and could do so too with Donald Trump, who Burnham is hoping to meet on a U.S. trip in late September.
He said the recent mass fatalities in Nepal, caused by falling glacier ice, were “what the climate crisis looks like.” But with energy prices rising, Burnham hinted his government will soon approve at least one of the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas projects in the North Sea.