https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/7/20/dont-believe-andy-burnhams-pr-machine
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One of the main issues that has torn Labour apart for over a decade has been Palestine. On July 9, before his confirmation as the new prime minister, Burnham decided to address the issue in a video posted on social media, saying Labour “didn’t get it right” and needs to “do better” on Gaza.
So will he indeed “do better” on Palestine and everything else that Labour has gotten wrong over the past decade? Unlikely. That is because complicity in Israel’s genocide is deeply entrenched in the British political infrastructure. It requires radical change – something which Burnham is not offering.
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On foreign policy, Labour’s complicity in the Israeli genocide in Gaza will haunt the party for a generation. Starmer will be remembered for saying the Israeli army has “the right” to cut off water and electricity to a besieged population, and his government – for continuing arms sales to the Israeli regime, including components for the F-35 jets that have caused untold death and destruction in Gaza.
Burnham is not the outsider his PR machine is selling. He has been a member of Labour Friends of Israel since 2015, when he described the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement as “spiteful” and pledged that Israel would be the first country he visited as leader of Labour.
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His allies include Josh Simons, former director of the Labour Together think tank that engineered Starmer’s rise and helped purge the party of its pro-Palestinian left flank, often under the pretext of tackling anti-Semitism. The irony is that this same period saw Jewish members of the party investigated and expelled at several times the rate of non-Jewish members.
In May, Simons resigned as MP so that Burnham could run in and win a special by-election for his parliamentary seat, which enabled him to pursue the leadership of Labour and the prime minister’s post. The influence Labour Together figures retain around Burnham tells us that the machinery behind Starmer’s leadership has not been dismantled so much as quietly repositioned.
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https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/7/20/dont-believe-andy-burnhams-pr-machine
