5 of the UK's last 7 leaders were not elected [English Shadowing]

Have you heard? We have a new Prime Minister in the UK? Out with Keir Starmer, who you may have heard of, and in with Andy Burnham, who you probably haven't heard of.

That's unless you visited Manchester, the city in the north west of the UK. Andy Burnham was Mayor of Manchester for more than 10 years, until just recently when it looked like Keir Starmer was on his way out. So Andy Burnham quickly became an MP and then he could stand for the Labour Party leadership.

So, Mayor of Greater Manchester, that's 'mayor', M-A-Y-O-R, and it's just like Boris Johnson and after him, Sadiq Khan, became Mayor of London. Of course, New York also has a mayor. And yes, Andy Burnham's Manchester is the same Manchester as Manchester United or Manchester City and it's also the Manchester

that the band Oasis come from too. So we haven't had an election, we haven't had a vote in the UK, but Andy Burnham has simply succeeded Keir Starmer as Prime Minister. I'm sure you'll be hearing more about him, but in this podcast episode, let's give a feel for what's happening in the UK. So we'll be

covering some of the vocabulary that you need to talk about politics in any country, but I'll also give you a glimpse of who this new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham is. What does he stand for? And what does this word 'Manchesterism' actually mean? This is live English language developing all the time.

So let's reflect that in our podcasts while giving you interesting English language listening material to listen to! Let's answer that question about Manchesterism first. It's what Andy Burnham says he stands for politically and he describes Manchesterism as 'the end of neo-liberalism'.

What is that? You may ask. It's a term worth explaining. 'Neo', N E O means 'new' hyphen 'liberalism' L I B E R A L I S M and 'liberal' as an adjective it means 'free, easy going'.

Another expression we use and sometimes that's political - 'laissez faire' from the French, which means 'let it do, let the thing be'.

So neo-liberalism is the belief that businesses and free markets, buying and selling of goods and services should be as free as possible. Few government rules and restrictions. Neo-liberalism also means that governments should sell off public utilities like water companies, train companies, bus companies, electricity

companies and they should be in private ownership, not run by the state. And neo-liberalism also means that government stays out of the way of business. So it cuts rules and regulations and just lets the market get on with it.

And the idea of neo-liberalism is that the wealth the money made trickles down. The effect is supposed to be that the people who are less well off, who have less money, they benefit from the money trickling down. So for neo-liberalism you want a buoyant, a good economy, stability and lots of jobs. The

idea of neo-liberalism is that if all of that works there's less need for what we call in the UK 'the welfare state'.