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Life as UK prime minister will come at him fast, beginning on Tuesday as recess ends
Britain's prime minister Andy Burnham reacts during a visit to the The Oh Yeah centre in Belfast, Northern Ireland in August, where he met young people to discuss the cost of living.
Photograph: Cathal McNaughton/POOL/AFP via Getty Imagesfter spending his first six weeks as UK prime minister on a summer “listening tour” of Britain, all while pushing policy ideas, pulling pints and guitar-strumming moody Smiths tunes,The bank holiday Monday was the last day of Westminster’s summer recess. Now, following the break, the UK’s parliament returns. With it comes a list of crunch issues for Burnham – new leader, familiar problems for this Labour government.
’s plans to release prisoners early from Britain’s overcrowded jails while dampening criticism for freeing some of its most reviled criminals. Burnham is expected to appear on the UK government’s front bench for the first time in 16 years as the House of Commons scrutinises a proposed solution. António Guterres: ‘Superpowers need to understand things have changed’, Labour warned that it had inherited a prisons system close to collapse.
Thousands of prisoners were given early release in the first weeks of Starmer’s premiership in July 2024. His authority was severely damaged by television images of freed inmates in hoodies popping champagne corks in prison car parks. Yet with England and Wales’s prisons still operating at an unsustainable 97 per cent of total capacity and well beyond 100 per cent of usable space, the UK government says it had little choice.
Plans were made last year, before Burnham’s arrival to exclude rapists and child sex offenders from the early release plan – murderers were never to be included. Andrew Harper was a Berkshire police officer who was killed in 2019 when he was dragged along by the getaway car of three teenage burglars, who were convicted of manslaughter. Under Labour’s plan, they would have qualified for early release.
Following a public campaign by the police officer’s family, Burnham effectively ordered his new justice secretary, Alex Norris, to find a way of keeping Harper’s killers in jail without gutting the plan to free up space. On Sunday the UK prime minister announced that all those convicted of unlawful killing, as well as grooming offences, would be excluded from the plan. Norris will formally announce the details in the House of Commons on Tuesday afternoon.
What might feel nearly as long as that for Burnham, however, will be the next eight weeks of speculation in the run-up to his administration’s critical first budget. This will be a period during which the new prime minister and his chancellor, John Healey, may find it increasingly difficult to square the circle of their lofty promises to the electorate – no income tax, VAT or national insurance tax hikes, yet lots of fresh spending – with the fiscal realities that hobbled Starmer.
Healey helped to end Starmer’s premiership by quitting because the government would not lay out firmer plans for boosting military spending to 3 per cent of GDP, in preparation for a possible war with Russia. Now as chancellor it is he who must explain why, this time, it is his new boss Burnham’s administration facing down demands to borrow to spend big.
Burnham may be the new face in Downing Street, but as the weeks ahead will make clearer, many of Britain’s problems remain the same. British far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos detained by ICE as a ‘visa overstayer’A Wicklow woman in Marbella: ‘I would make friends in the summer and they would then go home.
But I found my tribe’Farmer Phil: ‘The story goes that a tree in our field was planted by Cromwell’s grandchildren 350, 400 years ago’Loneliness at college: ‘Even though I have friends I still feel lonely, which is interesting’
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