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Prime Minister Andy Burnham used his first address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York to launch a strong attack on Russian disinformation, an address from which the BBC later extracted key moments for its video compilation titled Watch: Key moments from Andy Burnham’s first UN speech. Burnham told delegates that Russian agencies had used every means at their disposal to spread lies and prey on people’s fears, with the Kremlin spending around 1.3 billion pounds annually on such activities according to his remarks reported across outlets including Reuters and ITV News. The prime minister detailed how these operations involved bots, fake websites, falsified newspaper articles and the forging of branding for 28 British organisations including universities and the BBC itself, efforts he said had sought to interfere in the 2019 General Election by amplifying far-right narratives and sowing division.
A new National Centre for Information Defence will be established to detect, attribute and disrupt hostile state information attacks and identify damaging deepfakes, Burnham announced in the speech as covered by the Liverpool Echo. The centre will support vulnerable democracies overseas by sharing UK expertise, the prime minister added in comments that Reuters said formed part of a broader push to rebuild Britain’s diplomatic standing after a decade of political turbulence. Burnham framed the initiative as a direct response to what he described as an industrial-scale assault that had been allowed to continue for too long, according to the ITV News account of the proceedings.
Burnham positioned the United Kingdom as an honest broker on artificial intelligence, warning that the technology would multiply existing threats while offering significant economic opportunities if properly managed. “We’ve all heard the warnings – which we must heed. I know how worried people are. So we have to rise to this moment,” he said in the address, a passage highlighted in the BBC video and echoed in iNews coverage that noted recent expert alerts including an Anthropic researcher’s assessment of more than a 10 percent chance of AI wiping out humanity within a decade. The prime minister revealed plans for a new AI defence partnership with the United States to protect critical national infrastructure, an agreement struck after his meeting with President Donald Trump and detailed in reporting by Bloomberg Law.
Britain would use its upcoming G20 presidency to drive agreement on a single set of global principles and standards for frontier AI transparency and safety, Burnham stated according to the Reuters dispatch from the assembly. He described the most advanced forms of the technology as one of the most significant challenges and opportunities of the age, a characterisation that aligned with his call for the world to rise to the moment rather than succumb to doom-mongering. The approach builds on the United Kingdom’s prior convening of international AI safety discussions, though the prime minister stressed the need for urgent collective action to prevent safeguards from being outpaced.
The speech also renewed calls for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, denouncing the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel as utterly horrific while criticising settlement expansion that could block peace prospects, India Today reported from the event. Burnham announced that the United Kingdom had banned trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank in response to the E1 expansion plan, which he said deliberately aimed to undermine a two-state outcome. Failure to match decades of political rhetoric with concrete deeds would further erode global trust in international processes, he warned in remarks that the Liverpool Echo listed among the six key points from the 21-minute delivery.
Burnham closed by declaring that Britain is back on the world stage and that other nations could count on the country to uphold values of fairness, justice and opposition to racism and abuse of power. The address formed part of a 10-year plan focused on reducing economic insecurity, particularly among young people vulnerable to foreign influence amid cost-of-living strains, according to the LBC summary of his comments. The prime minister, serving as the seventh holder of the office in a decade, used the platform to draw a line under recent instability while projecting confidence in the United Kingdom’s renewed global role.
