UK's Andy Burnham confirmed as new Labour leader
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This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Janet Jalil and at 15 hours GMT on Friday the 17th of July, these are our main stories. Britain hears from its new Prime Minister in waiting, Andy Burnham. China's President Xi lays out his vision for the future of AI. Japan tries to fix the succession crisis in its imperial royal family. Also in this podcast, India launches its first hydrogen-powered train as part of its efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. Unlike conventional trains that burn fuel, the only direct byproduct are water vapor and heat. There's no combustion, no smoke, no carbon emissions. The man who will soon be Britain's seventh prime minister in 10 years has been laying out his vision in a short speech after being selected as leader of the governing Labour Party.
Andy Burnham will take over running the country on Monday when Keir Starmer steps down. But so far he has provided few details of what he plans to do to boost Britain's stagnating economy and help people struggling with the cost of living. Mr Starmer was forced to stand down because of his growing unpopularity and long-running divisions in the Labour Party, many of whose members want more government spending. Mr Burnham, who only returned to Parliament a few weeks ago, said Labour was now united and would put its strength at the service of, as he put it, people and places who have been waiting too long for politics to let them hope again.
I want people to say once again that Labour are for us. I want that to just fall off people's tongues and we can do it. We can be that party. The party that puts more power in people's hands, drives good growth in every postcode and puts hope in every heart. that gets the country pulling together again and moves beyond the divisions of recent years. All people and all places, public and private sectors, in a new sense of unity.
Our political correspondent Rob Watson was listening to Mr Burnham's speech.
He said a lot of the things that the previous six prime ministers have said these last two years, Jeanette, and that is that Britain needs to look after those sort of places and people left behind to try and make the society more equal to spread opportunity everywhere. But what sort of stood out for me was his promise to make this the biggest change in 40 years. And he essentially was making a broad brush argument that the privatisation in Britain and the liberalisation of the economy... from Mrs Thatcher onwards in the 1980s, had been a mistake and had badly affected working class parts of the United Kingdom. Now, exactly how he's going to achieve this biggest change in 40 years isn't entirely clear.
He said he'd set out a path when he becomes prime minister next week. But it is clear that he's clearly a politician of left of centre and thinks that the Solutions lie in more public ownership, more and more public control, more state intervention and more devolution, more spreading power from London, Britain being a very centralised country, to other bits of England and the rest of the United Kingdom.
Yes, this all sounds very ambitious, but he hasn't yet named his top team and he's going to become prime minister on Monday.
Yes, he's promised to set out his team and the policies that they will be pursuing. Because, of course, what really marks out Andy Burnham becoming prime minister is that nobody has attained high office in recent years with so little scrutiny of exactly what his policies will be, what his team will be, what his style of governing will be. And that's because the Labour Party decided to go for a coronation rather than what they feared would be a divisive leadership contest. So we get a general sense. We get a sense that he is proudly of the left. There's a strangely kind of nostalgic whiff, if you like, to Andy Burnham with him talking as if, everything had gone wrong in the 1980s onwards.
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