Declassified UK: Andy Burnham has officially marked 100 days as prime minister.

Posted: 6th November 2026

Burnham’s Century

Hamza Yusuf

Regular Contributor
Declassified UK

Andy Burnham has officially marked 100 days as prime minister.

His premiership appears to be going down well with voters. The Labour Party’s polling is steady and his personal approval ratings remain stable.

The number of voters who think Labour will win the next election has also doubled since last year.

From the outset, he promised a new path, insisting on a ‘circuit breaker’ that would usher in an agenda that would mark the biggest political transformation in more than four decades.

Now feels an appropriate time for a temperature check on those fiery commitments.

On foreign policy, at least, the gap between rhetoric and reality is already widening.

What emerged almost immediately was an acknowledgement from Burnham and his senior team that, on several issues, most notably Gaza, the party had got it wrong.

Burnham said as much in a video released in July, apologising before promising to reverse course – though on more than one occasion, he has stopped short of describing Israel’s assault on Gaza as genocide.

Ed Miliband was appointed foreign secretary and tasked with overseeing the policy shift.

He promised to carry out the government’s “comprehensive reset” towards Israel, culminating in a ban on trade with illegal settlements in the West Bank. The foreign secretary also pledged to refuse arms exports that “materially contribute to the occupation” of Palestine.

Yet, as we revealed recently, no existing licences for Israel have been cancelled, and weapons exports remain unaffected, whilst the wider intelligence and security relationship with Israel appears to have survived unscathed.

Last month, the prime minister rejected Jeremy Corbyn’s call for a Chilcot-style inquiry into British military, economic and political cooperation with Israel throughout the genocide.

It’s therefore hard to take seriously any commitment to recalibrate the relationship with Israel when challenging the very mechanisms of complicity remains off the table.

Closer to home, more questions remain unanswered. The dystopian spectacle of elderly people being arrested for holding placards opposing genocide and supporting Palestine Action continues.

Burnham’s home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has repeatedly defended the proscription of Palestine Action, while the prime minister himself has been equally evasive.

This week, the Supreme Court began hearing an appeal on the lawfulness of the decision to proscribe Palestine Action. Amnesty International has called on the government to reverse the proscription and end the arrests and prosecutions of peaceful protesters.

A prime minister determined to match his words with action and reverse course might have considered his predecessor’s draconian crackdown on solidarity and the right to protest an easy place to start.

Burnham has also kept to his predecessors’ line on Yemen, where the UK has expanded military support for Saudi operations. This renews concerns over British complicity in potential war crimes, given the mass civilian casualties from earlier US-led attacks there that Britain backed.

It may be too soon to draw definitive conclusions, particularly given the prime minister’s openness to apologising to Commonwealth countries for the transatlantic slave trade and rejoining the European Union. Much could still change.

But multiple opportunities to break with the past have already presented themselves, and after his first 100 days, Burnham’s record on foreign policy suggests there is substantial room for improvement, especially when measured by the yardstick he chose.

In solidarity,

Hamza.

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