Continuity in the Cold
Burnham and the UK's Arctic Inheritance
Andy Burnham has the keys to Number 10. He is the sixth person in ten years to walk through the door as prime minister, the seventh since 2016, and the second Labour prime minister since 2024.[1] From where this newsletter sits, the question is smaller than the week’s noise. Same party, new man at the top. That does not usually change how a country carries itself in the Arctic. So does anything shift for Britain in the North?
Probably not much. The scaffolding of British Arctic policy was up before Burnham, and it is likely to outlast him. The governing document remains Looking North, published in February 2023 under Rishi Sunak. It brought Britain’s existing Arctic policies under one framework and incorporated the Ministry of Defence’s 2022 paper on the UK’s contribution in the High North.[2] Both belong to the last government. Keir Starmer never replaced them. Burnham has therefore inherited a framework his own side did not write, and his immediate predecessor left largely untouched. Whether a second Labour prime minister chooses to revise it is an open question, but hardly an urgent one for him.
The defense commitments are real and already running. Britain is the framework nation of the Joint Expeditionary Force, a ten-country coalition focused on the High North, North Atlantic and Baltic Sea region.[3] Last November, its defense ministers met in Bodø, above the Arctic Circle, for the first such JEF ministerial held in the High North, and formalized an enhanced partnership with Ukraine. This September, the JEF begins a new three-year exercise sequence with Lion Protector, operating across Iceland, the Danish Straits, Norway and the surrounding seas and skies. Britain has also joined NATO’s Arctic Sentry mission. The carrier group led by HMS Prince of Wales is no longer merely promised for northern waters; it was already operating off Iceland under NATO command by early July.[4] None of that is Burnham’s. None of it pauses because he turned up.
Where things might move, they move less cleanly.
Start with energy. Reports before Burnham entered Downing Street suggested that officials expected his government eventually to support the Jackdaw gas field and perhaps the Rosebank oil field. But the headlines ran ahead of the record. Burnham has not announced formal approval for either project, and his government has reaffirmed Labour’s prohibition on issuing new exploration licenses. Jackdaw and Rosebank are different cases because their underlying licenses predate that promise. What must now be reconsidered are their development and production consents, after the courts quashed the earlier approvals for failing to properly account for the emissions generated when the extracted oil and gas are ultimately burned.[5]
The timetable matters. Jackdaw remains under public consultation until 10 August; Rosebank until 17 August. Burnham can establish the political direction, but he cannot simply approve either project from Downing Street while those processes are still running. The formal decisions belong to the energy secretary and the relevant regulators. Burnham has given that department to his ally Miatta Fahnbulleh.[6] So the immediate question is not whether the new prime minister has “opened the taps.” He has not. It is whether he is preparing the political ground for Fahnbulleh to approve one or both projects once the regulatory work is complete.
Rosebank is the one for us. It is operated by Adura, the joint venture owned equally by Shell and Equinor. The Norwegian state, in turn, owns 67 percent of Equinor.[7] A British turn back toward North Sea production would therefore travel, in part, through the books of an Arctic state’s national energy champion.
The larger connection is thematic. Energy security set against climate: that is the argument Burnham is walking into at home, and it is the argument running beneath almost every serious conversation about the Arctic’s future. Climate is not the whole of Looking North—the framework also covers partnership, prosperity and security—but it is one of its foundations. Britain presents itself as the Arctic’s nearest neighbor, with a direct stake in a region warming at roughly four times the global average.[8] Approve Rosebank, and that climate story becomes harder to tell without qualification.
The cabinet makes the tension sharper. Ed Miliband, Labour’s most identifiable advocate for net zero, is out of Energy and into the Foreign Office.[9] Call it a promotion. It also removes the minister most closely associated with the green transition from the department that will decide Rosebank and Jackdaw. At the same time, it gives him custody of the wider diplomatic relationship with the Arctic.
Does Miliband use the Foreign Office to put climate back at the center of Britain’s northern story? Or does he accept a domestic energy policy moving in the other direction and sell the resulting compromise abroad? Worth watching.
Over at Defence, Wes Streeting inherits the High North commitments and the long march toward NATO’s 2035 spending target: at least 3.5 percent of GDP for core defense requirements, within the alliance’s wider 5 percent commitment.[9] The Treasury, strangest of all, has gone to John Healey. He resigned as defence secretary under Starmer in protest at a funding plan he believed could not deliver the government’s military commitments. Now he has to find the money himself.[10]
The real unknown is the man. Burnham made his name at home. “King of the North,” they called him in Manchester, a title earned through the politics of England’s north-south divide, which has nothing to do with the one on the map. His declared priority is a “relentless domestic focus”: living costs, housing, public services and reindustrialization. He has held senior domestic departments, but never a foreign-policy brief, and little resembling a developed Burnham doctrine for Britain’s place in the world was visible before he entered Number 10.[11]
That does not make him an isolationist. On his first day, he spoke with Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. But telephone calls are the minimum machinery of the office. They do not yet tell us whether Burnham regards the High North as a strategic theatre in which Britain should lead, or merely as one more inheritance to be managed.
For a non-Arctic country whose northern influence depends on turning up, that distinction matters. Britain is a State Observer at the Arctic Council, not one of its eight members. Its claims to influence rest instead on geography, science, diplomacy, defense relationships and its self-appointed role as the Arctic’s “nearest neighbour.”[12] The JEF gives Britain unusual convening power across Northern Europe. But a government can keep the machinery running and still starve it of the thing that turns machinery into strategy: sustained political attention from the top.
There is a joke in there somewhere. The King of the North, looking north less than anyone in years.
And he arrives at a rough moment for the region. Finland’s and Sweden’s accession to NATO has left Russia as the only one of the eight Arctic states outside the alliance. Seven Arctic states now sit inside NATO, hardening the political division between Moscow and its northern neighbors.[13] The Arctic Council, under the Kingdom of Denmark’s 2025–27 chairship, is trying to preserve practical cooperation under the weight of the Ukraine war and the wider collapse in relations with Russia. At the same time, Washington continues to threaten the sovereignty of one of the chairship’s three constituent countries. Trump renewed his demand for American control of Greenland at NATO’s July summit in Ankara.[14]
Britain sits in the awkward middle: tied hard to the Americans and tied nearly as hard to the Nordic states. That relationship was always going to take a deft hand. It will take a defter one now, from a prime minister whose instincts pull him toward the domestic in-tray.
Continuity, then, under a quiet strain. The commitments hold. The framework stands. The exercises run on schedule. My read is that this is where things stay.
Two chances in three, call it, that Burnham’s first year comes and goes with Britain’s northern commitments simply running their course: Looking North left as the last lot wrote it, no dedicated Arctic minister appointed, and the government’s attention pinned to the cost of living and the reconstruction of the domestic state.
The thing most likely to break that pattern is not in Downing Street. It is in Washington. If the Americans materially pull back from NATO’s northern flank, Britain, as the JEF’s framework nation, will be left holding ground it cannot easily give back. A reluctant prime minister would then be dragged north on someone else’s clock.
That would be engagement under duress. More of the same strain, not conviction.
For a man who built his name on the North, it would be a strange epitaph: to look north everywhere except the map.
Notes and sources
[1] Burnham described himself as the sixth person in ten years and seventh prime minister since 2016 in his first Downing Street speech on 20 July 2026. Prime Minister’s Office, “Andy Burnham’s first speech as Prime Minister.”
[2] Looking North was published in February 2023 and explicitly builds on the Ministry of Defence’s 2022 High North paper. It organises UK Arctic policy around partnership, climate and environment, security and prosperity. Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, Looking North: the UK and the Arctic.
[3] The JEF consists of ten countries, with the UK serving as framework nation and the High North, North Atlantic and Baltic Sea region as its principal geographic area of interest. Joint Expeditionary Force, “About the JEF”; UK Government, Joint Expeditionary Force Policy Direction.
[4] The Bodø gathering was the first JEF defence-ministerial meeting held in the High North and formalised the enhanced partnership with Ukraine. Lion Protector is scheduled for September 2026. HMS Prince of Wales was operating off Iceland under NATO command by 6 July. UK Ministry of Defence; UK Parliament; Joint Expeditionary Force.
[5] Reporting indicated that officials expected eventual support for Jackdaw and possibly Rosebank, but no final decision had been confirmed. The earlier approvals were quashed in January 2025 because downstream emissions had not properly been considered. Financial Times; Bloomberg; Reuters.
[6] The official project records list Jackdaw and Rosebank as under review, with consultations closing on 10 and 17 August 2026 respectively. Miatta Fahnbulleh became energy secretary on 20 July. Offshore Petroleum Regulator for Environment and Decommissioning; GOV.UK ministerial record.
[7] Adura is jointly owned by Shell and Equinor, with each company holding 50 percent. The Norwegian state owns 67 percent of Equinor. Adura; Equinor.
[8] The UK government describes Britain as the Arctic’s nearest neighbour and the Arctic as warming at approximately four times the global average. Climate and environmental protection constitute one of Looking North’s four priorities.
[9] Ed Miliband became foreign secretary, Wes Streeting became defence secretary and Miatta Fahnbulleh became energy secretary on 20 July. NATO’s 2035 commitment is 5 percent of GDP, comprising at least 3.5 percent for core defence and up to 1.5 percent for broader defence- and security-related spending.
[10] John Healey resigned as defence secretary in June following disagreement over the government’s defence investment plan and was appointed chancellor on 20 July. GOV.UK; The Guardian.
[11] Burnham promised a “relentless domestic focus” during his campaign for national office. Contemporary reporting has repeatedly noted his limited direct foreign-policy experience. The Guardian; Associated Press.
[12] The United Kingdom is not an Arctic state but holds State Observer status at the Arctic Council and describes itself as the region’s nearest neighbour. UK Government.
[13] Seven of the eight Arctic states are now NATO members, with Russia the only Arctic state outside the alliance. NATO, “Arctic security.”
[14] The Kingdom of Denmark—Greenland, the Faroe Islands and Denmark—holds the Arctic Council chairship for 2025–27. Trump renewed his demand for US control of Greenland during NATO’s July 2026 summit in Ankara. Arctic Council; Reuters.