‘Politics needs to change,’ Andy Burnham, our presumptive next prime minister, told the ‘Great North Summit’ in Leeds this afternoon. Burnham used the event to declare that what is set to be ‘no ordinary by-election’ should set the stage for a ‘bigger debate about how politics needs to change if it is to work properly for the north of England’.
The Manchester mayor argued that Britain had been on the ‘wrong path’ for the last 40 years and that change was needed. He pointed to the ‘devastating deindustrialisation’ of the 1980s that has been ‘compounded’ by ‘deregulation, privatisation and austerity’.
His remedy, then, is presumably to attempt to reverse all that. How that would be done – against the economic tide – was not clear, but he pointed to what he sees as a necessary realignment of the relationship between central and local government: more devolution.
But Burnham was forced to go on the defensive in his speech too, thanks to Wes Streeting’s helpfully – and definitely not cynically – timed comments at the weekend that called for Britain to rejoin the EU. That’s obviously trouble for Burnham, given that Makerfield is a constituency in which 65 per cent voted Leave in the Brexit referendum.
