So why did the new mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, refuse to attend a victory rally with Jeremy Corbyn outside the city’s convention centre on Friday night? Rather than hail his success alongside the Labour leader, Mayor Burnham was pictured drinking champagne with his campaign team in an exclusive city restaurant, The Refuge, around the time Corbyn rolled into the city.
“It was a whirlwind day full of commitments,” Burnham explained to the the Observer. “Whether or not I attended an event is the kind of trivia I am trying to get away from. I am genuinely trying to leave that kind of politics behind.”
He’s leaving the national Labour party behind too. Burnham, the former Labour cabinet minister, secured 63% of the vote in the mayoral contest, easily beating the Conservative Sean Anstee, who polled 22.7%. He did so to a large extent by insulating his campaign from national politics and from Corbyn’s Labour.
Party sources say his team had told Corbyn’s office earlier in the week that he would be too busy, and that the timing of the count would be too unpredictable to make a joint appearance possible. They didn’t want him there. “But they just came anyway,” said one of his supporters. Burnham added: “I don’t know what time Jeremy came, to be honest.”
Burnham’s entire pitch, ever since he chose to stand for the job, has been that devolution of power to city mayors will only work if they cut the umbilical cord with Westminster and dedicate themselves to local challenges. “I have long felt that it is nigh on impossible to renew politics from the Westminster level,” he said. “The party has been too London-centric in my view for too long, and I dont see that correcting itself any time soon. You see it from Scotland. Having one line to take for the whole of the UK will never work, and therefore the rebuilding has got to be done in a different way. You have got to step out of that.”
His success, he believes, came from adopting a doggedly local approach and a manifesto that was tailored entirely to Greater Manchester’s needs. Burnham focused much of his campaign on ending rough sleeping and homelessness in the city, on promoting the interests of young people, and dignity for the elderly who need care in old age. Voters trusted that he had thought about local problems, he said. “The public thought about who they wanted to be mayor of Manchester. They did not use this as a proxy for the general election. This was hard won. I did not just stroll around Westminster and then think I would go to Manchester and see how I would get on there. I did a whole detailed consultation with people on the manifesto. We did not want to have the Westminster approach.”
He is, in effect, saying that it was his win, not that of Corbyn’s Labour. That he did not want to be pictured alongside the party leader on a day of mostly disastrous results for Labour is unsurprising. Burnham describes the results as “not good”. “You could say mixed [Corbyn’s description] but overall they are not good. I don’t think there is any point in putting a gloss on that.”
He does not want to get involved in criticism of the leader or his team but says that if the party is to turn things round and stand any chance of winning on 8 June, it has to announce a set of far bolder and more eye-catching policies, including radical plans for the NHS and social care, tuition fees, homelessness, and more devolution of power to the regions.
“It is all about the strength and credibility of Labour’s manifesto now,” he said. “There have been good policies which lay the ground well but they are not yet of an order that will completely change the game. You need policies which will change the conversation. The prime minister is trying to boil it down into a narrow choice of strong and stable leadership over Brexit but we have to boil it up into a choice about where the country is going. You only have to walk around the streets of this city to see that this is not a country that works for everyone.”
He believes that Labour can turn it around and win, and that there is still potential for a surprise. It all depends on Jeremy Corbyn now. “This is his moment, isn’t it? This is his moment to give the public something clear to vote for. There are a lot of hopes riding on the next few weeks. This is a massive moment for Labour.”
