Andy Burnham used his big speech this week to unveil his spiffing new idea to solve all the country’s terrible problems: moving its head office somewhere slightly different. This he calls ‘place-based collaboration’. Apparently, all the collaboration we’ve been doing up till now has not been place-based, and has presumably been in a mysterious, spooky void outside the normal realm of space and time.
I wish politicians would can this talk of collaboration and playing nicely. If anything, politics should be more confrontational
But along the way, he also found time to inform us how he intends to ‘reach out to other political parties, to find as much common ground as we can and build that more collaborative approach.’ There will be an end to ‘finger pointing’ and ‘point scoring’, because Andy intends to furnish parliament with love, and grow apple trees and honeybees and snow-white turtle doves. From No. 10 North in Manchester, AKA the cloud kingdom of Care-a-Lot, Andy and Labour’s Care Bears will establish a new kind of politics.
Our kid Andy is not the first, not by a long chalk, to announce a new dawn of polite politics. Let’s take a look back at similar announcements from previous prime ministers and party leaders. Sick bags at the ready!
