Do we like them?

Do we like Andy Burnham?

Our score: 7 out of 10. A long record of voting and acting for LGBTQ+ people, with a contested stance on single-sex spaces and a backing of tough asylum reforms holding him back from the top end.

Burnham was born near Liverpool to a telephone engineer and a receptionist, grew up in a village between Liverpool and Manchester, and studied English literature at Cambridge. He was elected to Parliament at 31 and served in Gordon Brown's cabinet, then lost two Labour leadership bids. He left Westminster in 2017 to become the first Mayor of Greater Manchester.

The moment that defines him came in 2009. Heckled at the 20th anniversary of Hillsborough, he dumped his prepared speech, and he later launched the government inquiry that found police failures, not the victims, were responsible. As mayor he took Manchester's buses back under public control, and his angry live-TV reaction to a lockdown announcement in 2020 made him a national figure.

On the harm check, the record is mostly good. Burnham marched against Section 28 as a student, voted for same-sex marriage and civil partnerships, urged Pope Francis to back marriage equality, and backed ending conversion therapy for all LGBTQ+ people. In 2025 he apologised for the “shameful” treatment of LGBTQ+ people by Greater Manchester Police.

The asterisk is on trans issues and migration. He met the LGB Alliance in 2020, defended trans women's use of women's toilets in 2022, and after the 2025 Supreme Court ruling said guidance should be introduced “in the fairest and most compassionate way possible”. PinkNews noted his first speech as PM didn't mention LGBTQ+ people. On migration, allies said he'd back Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood's tougher asylum reforms, which Angela Rayner called “un-British”, while Reform UK has called him “open-borders Andy”.

There was also a stoush before the Makerfield by-election, when a Reform UK councillor asked police to look into an alleged lockdown breach over a fire at his home in 2021. His team called it “completely baseless”, and Greater Manchester Police said the time limit had expired and took no further action. Nothing was ever proven.

Gaza is where your view will depend on how you read it. In July he said that “my party didn't get it right and I am sorry about that”, backed more sanctions and said there was increasing evidence of war crimes, while leaving the genocide question to international courts. Some will see a late but real shift, others a convenient one in the middle of a leadership run.