Andy Burnham, who plans to challenge Keir Starmer as Labour leader and UK prime minister, has said he will prioritise British-Irish relations should he return to frontline UK national politics.
“I will carry that relationship forward, and if I get back to Westminster, that [UK-Irish relations] is what I will be feeding off,” said Burnham.
Currently the mayor of Greater Manchester, Burnham hopes to win the crucial Makerfield byelection this week, allowing him enter a leadership contest.
Speaking to The Irish Times on the campaign trail over the weekend, he acknowledged that Brexit had “damaged relations” between the two nations and suggested he was committed to continuing the process of repair.
READ MORE
He said that, as Manchester mayor, he had “worked hard on our relationship with the Irish Government” alongside Steve Rotheram, the mayor of Liverpool, ever since their first joint visit to the Republic in 2022.
“We were not prepared to let the northwest of England – which has such deep bonds with Ireland – be damaged by the Westminster approach to relations,” he said, an apparent reference to the often adversarial approach pursued by the Tories while in power.
After winning the 2024 general election, however, Starmer pursued a much friendlier approach and implemented a full “reset” of political relations with the Irish Government.
Some Irish officials have privately expressed concern that Labour’s ongoing leadership upheaval could see yet another change in approach. But the intervention by Burnham, the clear favourite to oust Starmer, seems calculated to assuage such concerns.
Burnham will be Labour’s first Catholic prime minister if, as seems likely, he succeeds in ousting Starmer from Downing Street this year. Tony Blair became a Catholic only after he left office.
Boris Johnson was the first serving Catholic prime minister in British history.
Polls suggest Burnham is on course for a narrow victory in Makerfield, a semirural patchwork of old mining towns and villages south of Wigan, about 35km west of Manchester city. He faces a strong challenge, however, from Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK.
But Labour sources remained confident at the weekend that Burnham could eke out a narrow win in the pro-Brexit Makerfield constituency, in part because another surging right-wing party, Restore Britain, is taking votes from Reform.
Burnham has confirmed that if he wins Makerfield, he would contest a leadership contest to replace Starmer, who also insists he would fight on. Party polling, however, suggests Burnham would easily beat Starmer in a vote by Labour members.
Burnham traces his Irish ancestry to Drogheda in the late 1800s and considers his links to Ireland “really quite an emotional thing”. He was grateful, he said, that the “green carpet was rolled out for us” on his visits to Ireland with Rotheram.
Last Monday morning he had a pint of Guinness at Ashton-in-Makerfield’s Brian Boru club, the oldest Irish club in Britain.
“That was a great way to start a byelection campaign week. It was good for me to be able to explain my Irish heritage to the diaspora.”
Burnham recalled that he was greeted last November in Áras an Uachtaráin by former president Michael D Higgins during the latter’s final week in office.
“What an honour that was,” he said.
Last year Burnham suggested that Britain could rejoin the European Union during his lifetime. But he has moderated his public view since joining the byelection campaign in Makerfield, where voters backed Brexit by two-to-one in the vote a decade ago this month. “I am not proposing that the UK considers rejoining the EU,” he said this month.
But he also suggested that for Britain the “biggest economic opportunity we have is on our doorstep”, suggesting he would still pursue closer ties short of rejoining the bloc.
