Andy Burnham has said Britain needs to make more use of immigration detention centres, and that he agrees with Reform leader Nigel Farage that the country needs to “get back to a sense of order”.
The mayor - highly popular within the party and considered to be on the soft left - voted in favour of the British invasion of Iraq in 2003 when he was MP for Leigh in Tony Blair’s government.
He also joined Labour Friends of Israel, a pro-Israel group within the party, in 2015. This established him as a non-radical figure in contrast to his colleagues who were strongly pro-Palestinian, like Jeremy Corbyn.
Running unsuccessfully to be Labour leader in 2015, Burnham said his first overseas visit would be to Israel. He called the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement “spiteful” and said he opposed it.
At a leadership hustings, Burnham praised Israel as a “democracy that has a long history of protecting minorities and promoting civil rights” and said that the Balfour Declaration represented “an example of British values in action”.
But Burnham also marked himself out as a critic of the Israeli government.
Less well-known than his membership of Labour Friends of Israel is that he visited the occupied West Bank in 2012 with Labour Friends of Palestine.
In March 2015 he reacted to Benjamin Netanyahu’s reelection as Israeli prime minister by calling the news “depressing” in a tweet.
“Netanyahu elected on pledge to build more settlements,” he said.
He is also hostile to Press freedom. Josh Simons, the MP who stood down to allow the by-election, had PIs and MI5 digging dirt on investigative journalists who were looking into the Labour think tank backing Starmer. Burnham intends to make Simons a senior advisor at No. 10.
There’s a surprisingly large population of Israel loving voters up North in Manchester. It makes sense that he aligns himself with them. It’s just politics.
Isn’t he’s pretty cosy with the Israeli lobbyists too?
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/how-andy-burnham-stood-starmer-over-israel-and-could-now-reshape-uk-foreign-policy
He is also hostile to Press freedom. Josh Simons, the MP who stood down to allow the by-election, had PIs and MI5 digging dirt on investigative journalists who were looking into the Labour think tank backing Starmer. Burnham intends to make Simons a senior advisor at No. 10.
There’s a surprisingly large population of Israel loving voters up North in Manchester. It makes sense that he aligns himself with them. It’s just politics.