If Andy Burnham becomes UK PM, what will that mean for Middle East policy?

David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer have all resigned as prime minister of the United Kingdom since the Brexit Referendum in June 2016. These 10 years have been a period of profound instability and a rise in populism on both the Left and the Right.

For British Jews, these have not been good times. The hope is that Andy Burnham, who is expected to replace Starmer, will prove more successful than his six predecessors when he most likely moves into 10 Downing Street. He will succeed Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown as a Labour prime minister during a century saturated by Tories.

Labour prime ministers have historically had strong links with Israel and the Jewish community. MacDonald visited the Yishuv, the Jewish settlement in Palestine, as early as 1922, while Harold Wilson sent his son to stay at Kibbutz Yagur. Blair is a member of Trump’s Board of Peace, while Gordon Brown’s father was a Church of Scotland minister who learned Hebrew and led many visits of his parishioners to Israel. Brown and former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks were close friends.

However, an admiring Labour was in power in the past when a different Israel existed, fuelled by the endeavours of “the New Jew” – to build and be built. Such idealism for Zion is a rarity in the Labour Party of 2026.

The settlement drive after the Six Day War in 1967 and the election of the Likud a decade later presented organisations such as the Labour Friends of Israel in the UK with an increasingly uphill task. The principle of creating a new society, which the founders of the state envisaged, was gradually abandoned. The individual took precedence over the collective. The New Jew was replaced by the Old Jew.