Places Like Ours?

“Politics isn’t working for places like ours,” says Andy Burnham of the place where he has been Mayor for the last nine years. Mayor of Greater Manchester. One of the most powerful subnational positions in Europe. Speaking of Europe, Burnham would not seek to rejoin the EU, but he may as well, since he would stick to Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules. I have just heard (“I didn’t like to call you during Corrie”) that Ed Miliband was reconsidering his endorsement of Burnham in return for the Chancellorship if the Chancellorship were going to mean that.

Yields have been going up the world over, so that was never anything to do with Burnham. Now, though, what is? Well, there is always devolution. In the areas that Burnham has in mind, how many councils does Reform UK have to take, or at the very least does Labour have to lose? Labour is tied with Reform for a distant second place at Holyrood, where it has not governed in 19 years, and it is in a very distant third place in the Senedd. Dawn Butler has rowed back on the suggestion that she might stand for Mayor of London, since the Greens are highly likely to take it, heaven help all concerned, and even more so without Sadiq Khan. There have been seven elections to the London Mayoralty, and Labour has only ever won four of them, three with Khan and the fourth with a man who, having already wiped the floor with Labour as an Independent, would have done so again.

And there is always Proportional Representation. But the arguments for that and the arguments for First Past the Post are both rubbish in their own terms, so the case for change has not been made, while at the same time the change itself would not be the end of the world, even if organisationally it might very well be the end of the Labour Party. Under the supposed Holy Grail that is the Single Transferable Vote, every Taoiseach has been the Leader either of Fianna Fáil or of Fine Gael. In any case, Burnham is surrounded by people who would want to put it to a referendum. The electoral system for directly elected Mayors has changed twice without a referendum. There was no referendum on the introduction of STV for local government in Scotland, which entertainingly led to a reduction in the number of Liberal Democrat councillors, nor was there a referendum on the drastic alteration of the arrangements for electing the Senedd. But Burnham’s associates would insist on one. Call it the Stopped Compass.

Holding out for something better, Angela Rayner turned down Health Secretary, so the opponents of assisted suicide have lost the position. James Murray is also a departure from Wes Streeting, whatever Streeting’s other faults, in that while Streeting was ambivalent, or inconsistent if you prefer, about gender identity, Murray is a true believer who now runs England’s NHS while unable to define a woman. And where does this preposterous idea come from, that Jeremy Corbyn would have the slightest desire to be back in the Labour Party? An interviewer should ask him. Like them or not, he has always given very straight answers. We former members of the Labour Party get everywhere. Lee Anderson, who was a Labour councillor into his fifties and well into the Corbyn Leadership, is now the Chairman of Reform UK. It is notable that he has been given that job while remaining Chief Whip. It is, though, wholly unremarkable that he should have it while having been Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party under Rishi Sunak. Not Boris Johnson. Not Liz Truss. Rishi Sunak. Think on.