CHANGE, Andy Burnham offered. Yet it is now clear that in the absolutely critical area of foreign and military policy, the incoming Labour premier offers no new course at all.

His article in The Times sets out his approach to the world. It is one that Keir Starmer would immediately recognise and endorse.

On military spending, on the Ukraine conflict, on nuclear weapons, on the rotten alliance with Donald Trump’s Washington, Burnham has nothing new to offer.

He fully commits to the vast increases in arms spending ordered by Trump and implemented by Starmer, without the slightest questioning of the strategic or defence unrealities underpinning them.

He even makes clear that Starmer’s national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, himself a holdover from the Blair era, is to be kept in post.

Burnham claims that “we must be guided by our values” in the conduct of foreign policy. Yet, remarkably, he fails to even mention the plight of the Palestinian people, and British complicity in the Israeli genocide against them.

This does not come as a shock. There is nothing whatsoever in Burnham’s past to suggest a capacity, or a desire, to break with the conventional bromides of the Establishment in this respect.

A supporter of the Iraq war as an MP, the premier-in-waiting has learned nothing, it seems, from that criminal debacle.

What he perhaps also fails to understand is that this continuity approach will also undermine, at the very least, the possibilities of a renewed economic and social policy.

Burnham has already committed to maintaining the Treasury’s fiscal rules, limiting borrowing. He has set out no new proposals yet on taxation.

With his determination to maintain the dash to spending at least 3.5 per cent of GDP on the military, he will place exactly the same pressures on social spending as have helped undo Starmer. Welfare, education, the NHS and local government services will ultimately be the losers.

Burnham’s only hope is that a “buy British” approach — the very opposite of the “America First” plan for arms spending advocated by Nato chief Mark Rutte, the better to appease Trump — may generate a degree of “reindustrialisation” as a by-product.

Yet that is not the reindustrialisation we need. That can only be provided by sustained investment in basic industries, regeared to meet the challenge of climate change.

The Burnham approach is also a recipe for political failure. Ignoring the Palestine crisis means ignoring the millions who have protested against Israel, expressing an anger at Britain’s role that has translated into a surge in support for the Greens and independent candidates at the ballot box.

Nor is backing President Trump a popular place to be right now.

At the very least, a new approach would mean ending all arms sales to the rogue Israeli regime, introducing real sanctions against Israel while it continues to colonise Palestinian land and ending the authoritarian proscription of Palestine Action.

Without such a shift there is no good reason for those voters to return to Labour.

Burnham’s article indicates the importance of maintaining mass pressure on the government over Palestine, arms spending and support for Trump’s endless aggressions.

Such pressure has been growing and was powerfully expressed in the great international anti-war conference held in London by Stop the War last month.

It can be displayed again on July 18, the next national demonstration in support of Palestine called by the Palestine coalition of campaigns.

The British people are facing immense dangers arising from Starmer’s approach. Burnham must be told to shift urgently towards a peace policy, or he will rapidly go the same way as his predecessor.