Burnham calls for focus on cost of living after US midterms

Andy Burnham has said the world now has an opportunity to focus on the cost of living, after Donald Trump's Republicans suffered heavy losses in the US midterm elections.

Speaking to broadcasters from the Commonwealth leaders summit, the Prime Minister said: "President Trump has accepted the results, and I feel the world has an opportunity now to unite around the issue that is affecting us all, and that's the cost of living."

Mr Burnham became Prime Minister on 20 July 2026. He said cost of living had been the issue he put front and centre in his first three months in Downing Street. US voters, he said, want to "see the world coming together and focusing on the things that matter to people".

He said he could not get people's cost of living pressures down until the conflict in the Middle East was resolved, and until the conflict in Ukraine, which Russia started, was also resolved.

Donald Trump has acknowledged that rising fuel prices caused by the Iran war played a part in his party's midterm defeats. Speaking to Fox News, he said people agreed with his actions on Iran but were unwilling to accept the short-term consequences of paying more for gasoline. He warned that the US and Israel could intensify strikes after the midterm elections if they were unable to reach an agreement with Iran. Indirect talks between the US and Iran have been stalled for months.

The Democrats now control the US Congress.

At Prime Minister's Questions, the weekly exchange in the House of Commons, Cabinet Office Minister Louise Haigh took the chair in Mr Burnham's absence. Ms Haigh said the Iran war had been "catastrophic for the cost of living crisis". Daisy Cooper, the Liberal Democrat deputy leader, said American voters had rejected Trump's "warmongering and the economic chaos that it has caused".