I found an article, by a Belfast-based journalist, assessing the options for a Burnham government, the analysis is informed by Britain’s government of N Ireland over the decades.
Having lived through those decades in NI, I do find that GB politics is increasingly resembling the politics and social dynamics I grew up with.
I thought posters here might find the article of interest too.
https://unherd.com/2026/07/burnham-faces-an-insurgent-britain/
We may ask what happened to the broadly pacific, affluent and content mainland Britain of the Nineties, but no answer that does not include the consequences of Labour rule can suffice. We live in the country Blair dreamed up, which the Tories reified. A heatwave is now as regular a summer occurrence in Britain as a communal riot, and the conjunction of the two presents a predictable strategic risk to a Westminster government. If the incoming prime minister can get through August without a mainland repeat of last month’s Belfast disturbances, he can count himself lucky — or luckier than Starmer, at any rate.
…The Burnham project, like all enthusiasms of the current Westminster state, is fundamentally a conservative one. It aims to shore up the Fabian experiments of its predecessors, like a bucket-hatted covers band recapturing the magic of Labour’s greatest Nineties hits, and add some extra of its own — though the restive audience seems unlikely to welcome his new material. Government by Radio 6 dad is as doubtfully appealing a project as rule by Matrix Chambers: the people are already moving elsewhere.
…. But if the odds against Burnham’s success are daunting, so are those facing Reform. Both Burnham and Farage represent, to their respective supporters, last-ditch gambles before the abyss. Mainland Britain is already a more turbulent country than that of the early Seventies: it is difficult to see any plausible route for Burnham to make it less so in the years, or months, between his coronation and the next election.