Andy Burnham pledges a big shakeup for Britain in a high-risk political speech

LONDON (AP) — Prime Minister Andy Burnham pledged Tuesday to give Britain “a new social contract for the 21st century," reform the country's electoral system and reset its relationship with its European neighbors. But he acknowledged that economic constraints make delivering his sweeping plans a big political risk.

“Small things will not get us through what are difficult times,” Burnham said in a tough-love speech to the center-left Labour Party’s annual conference.

He set out a crowd-pleasing vision of more social housing, better education and more affordable care for the elderly. But he warned that money would have to come from welfare and pension spending to deliver the changes.

Anticipating opposition to his plans, Burnham said: “I have given you what you often say is missing from politics: honesty, ideas and a clear direction for the country we all love.”

Some of Burnham’s announcements in the hour-long speech will spark big political fights. Burnham said he would stake his political legacy on establishing a “national care service” to fix what he called a “ broken” social care system. He said that like the much-loved but overstretched National Health Service it would be free to use and paid for through taxation.

Burnham held back tears as he spoke about his experiences of the care system with his father, Roy, who died earlier this month.

To help fund the care service, which will be introduced if Labour wins the next election, Burnham said he would water down the long-unassailable pensions triple lock, an expensive policy that guarantees pensions rise each year by the annual increase in consumer price inflation, average wage growth, or 2.5%, whichever is highest.

“I accept I may pay a political price,” he said. “But someone has to go through the pain barrier and rip the plaster off.”

Burnham argued that Britain took a wrong turn in the 1980s with the free-market reforms and privatization of key industries under Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

“Deindustrialization. Deregulation. Privatization. Austerity. Brexit. And what has it given us? A country run for vested interests, not in the public interest,” he said.

Burnham vowed to “move beyond a decade of drift and division” and end the economic and political turmoil that have made him the U.K.’s seventh prime minister since the country voted in 2016 to leave the European Union.

In a major move on that front, he said Labour would contest the next election on changing Britain’s winner-takes all electoral system to a form of proportional representation.

He also promised a rethink of Britain’s relationship with the EU, saying “Brexit has done more harm than good” and the U.K. needs “clarity about our position and the future of the continent that we live in.”

Also on Burnham’s ambitious agenda: ending street homelessness, cutting youth unemployment and exerting more public control over Britain’s privatized utilities.

Burnham’s relaxed, social-media friendly confidence has been a tonic to his party as Labour held its conference under the slogan “Hope again.” As the sun glinted on the River Mersey beside the conference center in Liverpool, the mood was a world away from last year’s downbeat gathering, when delegates despaired about then-Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s dire approval ratings and the seemingly unstoppable rise of the anti-immigration opposition party Reform UK.

But as delegates gathered, terror arrests near a U.S.-run air base in England brought home the daunting global situation and unexpected challenges facing the neophyte prime minister, just two months into the job.

Five men were arrested Sunday on suspicion of explosives and terror offenses outside the RAF Fairford base in western England. They were released on bail Monday as police probe lines of inquiry including a link to a hostile state. That meant Burnham and his Cabinet were peppered during the conference with questions about security lapses and potential state threats from Iran or Russia.

Burnham and others also acknowledged the gloomy economic backdrop against which Treasury chief John Healey will deliver the government’s budget on Oct. 28.

The U.S.-Iran war continues to choke shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, sending oil prices soaring and pushing up inflation and the cost of government borrowing. The price of diesel in Britain hit a record high of just under 2 pounds a liter on Monday, according to figures compiled by the Royal Automobile Club.

Burnham said his government would “stick to our fiscal rules to get borrowing and debt down.”

“I would love to go quicker, but I have to be honest about what the country can afford,” Burnham said.

The next general election does not have to be called until 2029, but Labour’s revival has sparked talk of a snap election.

Burnham insists he won’t go to voters early, and John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, said that’s a wise decision.

Curtice said Burnham had given Labour “a halo effect from a popular leader.”

“But the challenge for this party now is to change that halo effect from the leader to the party,” Curtice said. “This party needs to make much more progress before it can contemplate the prospect of an election.”

Britain's Prime Minister Andy Burnham embraces his wife Marie France Van Heel after delivering his keynote speech at the Labour Party Conference, in Liverpool, England, Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026. (Stefan Rousseau/Pool Photo via AP)

Britain's Prime Minister Andy Burnham and his wife Marie-France van Heel are greeted by supporters ahead of the Leaders Speech at the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, England, Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Jon Super)

Britain's Prime Minister Andy Burnham delivers his Leader's Speech during the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, England, Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Jon Super)

Britain's Prime Minister Andy Burnham delivers his Leader's Speech during the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, England, Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Jon Super)

Britain's Prime Minister Andy Burnham waves after he delivered his Leader's Speech during the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, England, Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Jon Super)

Iran’s currency fell to a new record low on Tuesday, with traders in Tehran exchanging more than 2.5 million rials to the U.S. dollar in a stark reflection of how the war in the Middle East has steadily eroded the Iranian economy.

The latest decline came just 27 days after the rial hit its previous record low of 2.2 million to the dollar on Sept. 2. The currency has repeatedly reached new lows since the war began in February.

The Iranian economy has been under duress for years in the face of international sanctions. But a U.S. naval blockade on Iranian oil and new sanctions imposed since the start of the war have sent it into freefall.

Meanwhile, Iran’s top diplomat said indirect negotiations with the United States aimed at reopening the critical Strait of Hormuz have become “more serious,” while the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ chief spokesman Gen. Hossein Mohebbi on Tuesday called on Americans to take to the streets and protest the conflict.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told Iranian media late on Monday that the “current focus is solely on the Strait of Hormuz,” the chokepoint of the war.

Araghchi made the comments shortly before departing New York — where he attended last week’s gathering of world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly — and after meeting with Pakistani and Qatari mediators.

Araghchi said that the Qatari intermediaries were expected to soon engage with the U.S. side.

“They are set to raise the matter with the American side once more, after which the final U.S. response will be conveyed to us,” Araghchi said. “If there is a response, the Qataris will convey it to us and a decision will be made in Tehran on that basis.”

Officials, including from the U.S., have confirmed to The Associated Press that mediators are working with Iran and the U.S. on trying to broker a deal to end the fighting and open the strait.

The mediation efforts continue even after U.S. President Donald Trump earlier this week spurned an Iranian proposal to reopen the strait in seven days if the U.S. agreed to lift its blockade of Iranian ports, release frozen Iranian assets and waive sanctions on Iranian oil sales, among other conditions.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps on Tuesday made an appeal to everyday Americans to push their government to end the U.S. war against Iran, a provocative message that comes just weeks before critical midterm elections in the United States.

Mohebbi, the Guard spokesman, read a letter during a news conference in Iran's capital, Tehran, appealing to Americans to pressure their government and claiming that the only way for the war to end is for Washington to admit defeat and leave the Mideast.

Mohebbi’s remarks come as Trump’s Republican party faces fierce headwinds as it looks to maintain control of Congress. But polling shows the war has darkened the American electorate’s mood ahead of the Nov. 3 election in which elevated gasoline prices, a byproduct of the conflict, loom large.

Mohebbi also accused the U.S. of using Iran’s nuclear program as a ruse to “plunder Iran’s wealth” and to turn the country “back into a colony.”

He added that the U.S. and others failed in their belief that military and economic action would get Tehran to submit and that Washington “has no choice but to acknowledge defeat and leave the region.”

“This is how the war will end,” he said.

Trump and his top aides are insistent that Iran’s economy cannot sustain a conflict much longer and have expressed confidence that Tehran will be forced to capitulate.

The U.S. president predicted soon after launching the war that the conflict would last a matter of weeks. More recently, he’s said that the war will likely end after the November elections in the U.S.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a Monday appearance on Fox News said Iran was heading toward an economic “cataclysm.” Administration officials say that a combination of new sanctions and a U.S. naval blockade aimed at preventing Iranian oil from going to market are having the intended effect.

“And so when you’re denying them money through oil sales and sanctions, you’re not just punishing them,” Rubio said. “You are preventing them from getting access to money that they will use to try and kill Americans and others around the world and their own people and build weapons and threaten the world and ultimately break out to a nuclear weapon program."

In a separate development, a crucial oil pipeline in Saudi Arabia that was shuttered by the kingdom earlier this month after coming under attack is once again operating, according to a Saudi government official.

The official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, said operations are near pre-attack levels and that the pipeline should be running at its full capacity within a few weeks.

The kingdom relies on the East-West Pipeline, which runs the breadth of the country, to move its crude from oil processing facilities on the Gulf to ports on its western, Red Sea coast. From there it can be put on tankers for export.

Saudi Arabia blamed an Iran-backed militia in Iraq for the drone attack that forced the temporary shutdown of the 1,200-kilomeer (745-mile) pipeline.

Satellite imagery indicated tankers on Sunday loaded some 12.5 million barrels of oil at the Yanbu export terminal, which is supplied by the East-West Pipeline, and the nearby terminal at Al Muajjiz, the data and analytical firm Kpler said in a report.

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AP writer David McHugh in Frankfurt, Germany contributed reporting.

Iranian missiles and banners showing portraits of the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, right, and the late armed forces commanders, who were killed in Israeli and U.S. strikes, are displayed in a military exhibition commemorating the anniversary of the start of the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran war at Baharestan Square, in Tehran, Monday, Sept. 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)

Iran's Revolutionary Guard spokesman Gen. Hossein Mohebbi speaks during a news conference in Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)

Iran's Revolutionary Guard spokesman Gen. Hossein Mohebbi speaks during a news conference in Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)

Motorbikes drive past Iranian missiles and banners showing portraits of the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, center, and the late armed forces commanders and nuclear scientists, who were killed in Israeli and U.S. strikes, displayed in a military exhibition commemorating the anniversary of the start of the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran war at Baharestan Square, in Tehran, Monday, Sept. 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)