THE NEW Leader of the Labour Party today became Prime Minister of the UK. He took over after two years of the Starmer Government had brought Labour to an all-time low in the polls and at the ballot box. Surely things can, to coin a phrase, “only get better”.

Let’s start with the good things announced so far. There will be more to come.

Media
Let’s get the media off our chests. Burnham has not been leaking decisions to the press. His announcements will made in public, now that he is Prime Minister. This has annoyed the press and left them speculating endlessly and giving Burnham obvious and uncalled-for advice. Experts have lined up to say that if Burnham is to incur new expenditure, he will have to find the funds to do so – as if he wouldn’t have known that. This is a good way to handle the media. They will have to learn to report and analyse news, rather than compete with each other to be teacher’s pet.
The lack of announcements means there is little, at this stage, for us to analyse either. Burnham has made three important things clear – but we need details.

Housing
He has promised to build more council housing, building on the scale of the post-World War II Labour Government to deal with the national shortage.  In the short term, he has pledged to end rough sleeping. That can be done. Let’s see if he can do it.

War 
Burnham has admitted that Labour should have called for a ceasefire as soon as Israel started indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, and it should not have said that Israel had the right to withhold food and water from Palestinians in Gaza.

Labour Party
He has promised to end factionalism in the Labour Party. Hallelujah. The Labour Party has ceased to be a membership party in any practical sense, with members being expelled for dissent to the point where it is a spent force. Burnham should stop this practice – but also go further and right past wrongs. In particular, he should apologise for the Labour Party overturning the local members’ selection, in 2010, of Lutfur Rahman as Labour’s candidate for Mayor. He should also apologise to MPs who had the Whip return for voting to end the two-child benefit cap, including Apsana Begum MP; and to Diane Abbott MP and Jeremy Corbyn MP, who should be reinstated in the Labour Party if they wish.

Now let’s look at the bad news announced so far.

Working together 
Working together sounds great – but it doesn’t end well. If it was easy for all politicians to work together, they would all be in one party. Taken further, “working together” leads to electoral “reform” – in other words, proportional representation in elections, which leads to politicians being less accountable to their electors, not more.

Migrants
Burnham is reported to back Shabana Mahmood’s immigration policies. These policies are a disgrace: they treat migrants as inferior human beings. They do not instil any confidence in Mahmood as a potential Minister: she should be sent to the back benches on the first available Charter flight, no right to appeal.

Starmer
Insofar as he has said anything about Keir Starmer, Burnham has been polite, which you just have to expect and accept. But his Government will include several MPs who did back Starmer, and who defended the indefensible. Burnham must make it clear to these MPs that the agenda has changed, but in the meantime it is hard to have confidence in MPs who defended Starmer for refusing to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, in saying that people of Bangladeshi heritage should be deported, who backed the two-child benefit cap, etc.

That is what we know today, but we’re still in the group stages. And we don’t know how Reform UK is going to play when they have their first major test in Clacton. There’s a way to go before we know whether Labour is coming home at last.

●To catch up with the news in East London, go to:
East London News