Andy Burnham: These Dangerous, Alienating Times Call for Radical Change of Our Politics

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HM: You have had an interesting political journey. You are currently Labour’s Greater Manchester Mayor. You were a Labour MP and Cabinet minister for many years. You grew up in the north-west. What made you want to become an MP and get into politics in the first place and why did you then leave Westminster?  

AB: I came into Parliament at 31 years old in 2001 thinking that I’d be able to right some of the wrongs I’d seen growing up in the north-west: the north-south divide, the sense sometimes that people were treated as second-class. That was a part of me and I wanted to do something about it. In the 16 years I spent in Parliament, I think it took me about halfway through to work out that Parliament wasn’t going to be the answer to those things. In fact, it was the problem. It created those injustices. That was a massive moment of realisation for me. 

The big turning point was when I was invited to speak at the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster as Culture Secretary. When I really thought deeply about it, what I realised was that the entire British state had been ignoring an English city crying out for justice for 20 years. It wasn’t just by accident. It was deliberate. Having been at the other semi-final match on that day, and having had many friends who were at Hillsborough, I was thrown into crisis by that invitation because I was in a Government that hadn’t done anything for the Liverpool supporters and the city of Liverpool. It was a classic case of the establishment not wanting it to be opened up. The Labour Government had a commitment to reopen Hillsborough, but quickly another Whitehall stitch-up took place, and it didn’t. Hence I knew what I was walking into that day. 

But when I went to Anfield, in many ways, I was taking my first steps out of the Westminster system. Because the only way I could reconcile the kind of position I was in was actually not to do the Westminster thing. If you’re going to be true to yourself, you have to walk outside of it, and that’s what I did. I walked outside of the collective responsibility in deciding to try and reopen [the issue of justice for] Hillsborough and use what political power I had at the time to do that.

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From the outside looking in, people will remember you as having a high-flying career in Westminster, which you seemed to be flourishing in as a minister. But behind the scenes you are saying there was a lot that was having to be accommodated to even be a politician operating in the Westminster system and achieving success in it. Did you feel you had become part of the ‘establishment’?

I’ve always in my life had a degree of imposter syndrome. I went to Cambridge University but I couldn’t relate Cambridge to where I had grown up. You would hear these people holding forth and it took me a year to work out they were talking complete rubbish, but it looks so convincing. I had it too when I went into Parliament. And I had it a bit again when I was in government. 

I was always, in a sense, having to prove myself and become part of the ‘in crowd’. But the experience of being in Westminster, as the years rolled, meant I knew I wasn’t fully in the ‘in crowd’, particularly when that invite came to the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster – it kind of made me choose. Was I going to be true to myself and what I knew to be the facts about Hillsborough, or was I going to play the Westminster game? 

The interesting thing about the British political system is that it makes you choose. It doesn’t let you be both yourself and operating at a high level within the system.

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In which specific ways does the Westminster system mean that politicians can’t be themselves and what reforms do you think are required?

The phrase people use is ‘they’re all the same’ [about politicians] but actually they’re not. That’s the problem, in my view, because most MPs, whoever they represent, go in with a pretty good heart and a pretty good intent about wanting to do things. There’s 10% who don’t, who are very career-minded, but the majority are decent people. The reason they end up looking like they are ‘all the same’ is because of what the system does. 

The whip system, in my view, is corrosive of people’s independence and, indeed, of their authenticity. The longer you’re in Parliament, the more you are at risk of it making a fraud out of you, because it makes you vote in certain ways, say certain things, take a line in an interview where you may not 100% feel it. 

We don’t have a political system, more like the US, where people are more empowered to act for their area, to act independently. I think the British political system and MPs individually would rise in the public’s esteem if they were able to act with more independence on an everyday basis and say what they really feel. Maybe we’d have a more vibrant political debate if people went into interviews and said what they were feeling, as opposed to what they’ve been told to say. 

The culture of Whitehall needs big change. We also need the Hillsborough law [to establish a ‘duty of candour’ on public servants, public authorities, and corporations to act in the public interest and proactively and truthfully assist investigations, inquests, and inquiries]. The complete abolition of the unelected lords and having a whole Parliament that represents everybody, everywhere is crucial. But also proportional representation or a political system that represents the majority view, rather than sometimes the minority view, as it currently does.

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Keir Starmer said the Labour Government would be a “government of service” when the party was elected last July, but people generally seem to feel that things haven’t gotten any better and, if anything, that they have become more punitive. Meanwhile, it seems that Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, both in terms of the Government and the media, is already being positioned as the battle to come. There seems to be a significant gulf between national-level politics and people’s lives. What do you see as the consequences of this alienation? 

What we’re seeing with the turbulence of recent years is that our antiquated political system is struggling to deal with the complexity of the modern world. It’s also about a system that doesn’t connect with people or places and in which people can’t say what they really feel. I’ve noticed that social media makes people act more individually – it wants instant answers from an MP and they can’t do that because of the way Parliament works. 

So for me, the times we’re in require something fundamentally different to what we’ve got. Particularly, I think it requires a political system that reflects the majority view, which ‘first past the post’ doesn’t do. I think it’s quite dangerous to go into the times that we’re in with a system that can elect a government on a minority view, and yet that’s where we are. 

I don’t blame the public. I understand why the public feels quite deep alienation from the political system. It’s not set up to work in the way that it should. It’s not set up to represent people because of the whip system, but also because of the way the Treasury works. It’s not set up for fairness between places – there’s a bias in favour of London and the south-east, and other areas don’t get the same amount of funding. 

So it all contributes to people feeling frustrated and alienated from the political system. The risk is that we don’t hear those warning signs and rewire that system now – because we need to have a political system that actually represents and works for people and functions in the way that it should, representing the majority view, rather than a minority view, in a constituency or across the country. 

I think it’s now becoming really urgent to do that because of what is increasingly going to be at stake at the 2029 General Election and beyond. 

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It’s not just the Westminster system that needs to be reformed. What lessons have you learned from your position as Labour’s Greater Manchester Mayor on what can be done at a local level? We are going through such a period of sociological change in so many ways – tech, how society is structured, job insecurity, inadequate housing, the pillars of community and how people used to see their own identity is all shifting. What is the starting point, in your view, on how to tackle all this? 

The reason we have such a political crisis, and the reason it’s so deep, is because people’s lives don’t function as they should day-to-day. 

You think about the grip of the housing crisis on communities across the country – the millions of people who don’t have a stable housing situation. If you don’t have a good home, what do you have in life? And yet, millions of our fellow citizens are living without a stable, affordable, secure home. You look at other things – water bills that people can barely afford, energy bills that are beyond an ordinary, average weekly income. Transport – we’ve just put the buses under public control, but most areas have rail and bus fares that people simply can’t afford. 

That’s the problem – a country where the fundamental essentials of life have become unaffordable to people, and then that alienation isn’t corrected by the political system. In many ways, it just goes into an abyss really. It doesn’t get heard and it doesn’t get played back in terms of solutions. That is the problem and this is why the left of politics needs to take ownership. 

Who sold off those basics in the 1980s? Who sold off the homes, who sold off the water, the energy, the transport? Well, it was the arch Thatcherites, many of whom are the leadership of the Reform Party now – they were the big cheerleaders for all of those changes. 

So it’s about recognising those kinds of basic things are not right for people, trying to fix those with an urgency, particularly on the housing crisis – because it is devastating for individuals, but also it’s corrosive of the public finances because it has a knock-on effect on the NHS budget, on council funding, it means that more people are out of work than they should be because they don’t have the platform of a secure home. 

So the whole thing has led to a level of dysfunctionality in the country that I think is the problem. But then the alienation that comes from that is because people just see that the basics they need to live their life aren’t there for them, and they’re having to compromise between food and energy. But it’s also about whether politicians and those in Westminster are actually speaking to those issues relentlessly, and I don’t think sometimes we are. We should be relentlessly talking about the cost of living, what we’re going to do to get people’s bills down.

In Greater Manchester, I’ve cut bus fares. Politics needs to get in the business of doing simple, positive, everyday things that help people with their lives. Somewhere along the line, it stopped doing that, and it needs to get back in the business of doing that. 

But also, politicians can’t just speak about the obsessions that you get in the Westminster world. I speak a lot about an education system that works for all young people. For too long, under all governments, we’ve been obsessed in this country with the university route. In fact, we’ve built a whole education system for it. But two-thirds of kids in Greater Manchester don’t go on the traditional university route. What about them? Who speaks for them? When do they hear their life chances reflected in the media debate? It’s things like that, you know?

A council home and a good technical education were the twin pillars of working-class ambition in this country in the 1970s and 80s, and those things have been sort of smashed down, and no one talks about them anymore. Hence, why many people, I think, feel that politics just really isn’t giving them the answers to some of the things that they’re struggling with.

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Theresa May infamously said ‘if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere’, while David Goodhart made the distinction between the ‘people of somewhere’ and the ‘people of anywhere’. The alienation felt by tech-savvy young people constantly dissatisfied by a life of comparisons online is different from others in their generation who can’t find a job or afford a place to live. The alienation felt by people in the ‘Red Wall’ in areas that have never recovered from deindustrialisation is different still. How can politics cater for everyone rather than just specific groups, which are then weaponised against each other?

It’s about trying to create something that everyone can buy into. But I think that, again, that is difficult as a product of our political system. ‘First past the post’ has encouraged a focus on ‘Mondeo man’ – the idea that there’s a small number of constituencies needed to be won. That’s a reductive mentality. Politics has to be bigger than that. It has to be about everyone, everywhere. What are the things that we all depend on and we all have to hold in common? It’s not enough about that. 

Sometimes politicians have been going quite narrow ‘retail politics’ with small things that might appeal to that demographic that they’re chasing rather than fixing the big fundamentals. 

What I’ve done in Greater Manchester is created a new public transport system because we want a system like London that’s for everyone. You know that the London public transport system is used by people of all backgrounds and that it benefits everybody. We’ve got to get back into the business of big reforms that benefit everybody, and bolder reforms. 

I personally keep coming back to housing, because there’s a resentment in the country if you’re in a situation where your housing is fundamentally unaffordable, but then you hear somebody who was lucky to have a home passed on or who got on the housing ladder just at the right time in the early 90s or something. That creates divides in society, doesn’t it? The haves and the have nots, and then that creates a resentment that plays out in the political sphere. 

Politics has got to get back to fixing the fundamental things that everybody needs for a good life. Too often, politics is chasing slightly flimsy things at the margins and not dealing with the fundamentals.

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Boris Johnson’s ‘levelling up’ appeared to be an attempt to recognise that neglected areas and issues across the country needed addressing after the EU Referendum, but it never materialised…

When I look at the Brexit Referendum, Cameron and Osborne were wrong to even agree to the referendum, in my view, in the way that they did. I’m not against democracy, but it should have been done in a more considered way. I think what came out at the referendum was as much as a protest at Westminster as it was a protest about Brussels and, in many ways, more a protest about Westminster. This was the first time that people could really say ‘this country is not working properly for us’. But that wasn’t responded to. It wasn’t heard properly. Boris Johnson pretended to hear it by saying ‘levelling up’. But what did that actually turn into? That did even more harm because he promised something and he actually did the opposite. That deepened the level of despair that people were feeling with the political system. 

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What do you think the response of progressives should be to the ‘culture wars’ waged by the right? Is it, as you say, to focus on how to change people’s lives in fundamental ways so the appeal of grievance-based identity politics can be circumvented?

The first way in which the left responds, in my view, is just to have confidence in who we are and what we believe when they throw ‘woke’ as a term of abuse. I call it respect for other people and basic decency, which are actually the values that Britain has always demonstrated. Don’t tilt towards that side and pander. Go the other way and work relentlessly to improve people’s lives.

Then ask yourself the question: why do people feel alienated? 

Because their housing isn’t good and they can’t afford it. They can’t afford to buy a home. Their energy and water bills are too high. They can’t use public transport because it doesn’t function in the way that it should. Fix those basics for people. The left of politics did it before when we were in government in the post-war period that built the generation of council homes that were sold-off in the 1980s. We can show to people that the post-war Labour Government actually set the country up for a period of real success in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. So be bold about intervening in a way that the left can only do to fix the basics for people in terms of homes, transport, utilities, healthcare.

I also think we need a more collaborative politics – where people can agree, they should agree, and that should be a positive thing, not a negative thing. In fact, the public wants to see more of that – more focusing on, not party first, but fixing things first, and working together to fix things. As I look to the 2029 General Election, and even beyond, I’m not daunted by it as long as we lean into what we believe and be strong and confident about that, and make some moves that people actually begin to feel in their lives. 

I know it’s a small thing, but I like to think that people, when they use public transport in Greater Manchester, they think ‘well, at least they did that – that’s a change that’s benefited me’. We need that, but much, much, much, much more of that.

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Byline Times was set up with a core purpose to hold the established press to account. The media is an entire power bloc which is largely unaccountable and too often advancing private political ideology and interests in this country as opposed to the public interest. Any desire for democratic change surely has to take into account the problems of the media in warping our politics?

I separate the media out and I’m not going to describe it as one homogenous thing. It’s many things, isn’t it? Including the independent media, like yourselves, which is great to see that having growing influence, and regional and local media often plays a different role. 

I’m going to come back to my main critique, which is Westminster culture, because the media within that system I think is too close to power. There’s a patronage that sometimes comes with power or the favoured relationship that some parts have with it. 

I also remember very vividly the policy-making process in Whitehall being too driven by the agendas of certain parts of the media. I think the reason we’ve ended up in this country with a quite punitive, distrustful benefits system that, more often than not, is tripping people up rather than helping people out is because policy has been designed, over many governments over decades, to please certain newspapers in that space – because it’s perceived that that is what people want to hear, being ‘tough on benefits’. In the end, it leaves you with a system that doesn’t work, that people fear interacting with. If you fear interacting with the system, it’s not going to help people into work. 

Having left Westminster and looking at things with new eyes, I see all of that afresh now – the closeness, sometimes the incestuousness, of the relationship between the Westminster media and Westminster players in both opposition and government, and it creates a policy environment that I think is skewed in the way that I was describing before to certain agendas. And when you’re in my position, and you just look at the world through the eyes of my residents who live in Greater Manchester, you just think, actually, they need very different solutions. They need a more supportive benefits system that actually helps them with what they need to get towards work. They need a housing situation that works for them. And some of these issues just get completely neglected by the Westminster media bosses. 

I always remember just after I was elected for my second term as Mayor, I asked a question in my acceptance speech: I said, how can it be that a single bus journey in Harpurhey, Greater Manchester, costs three times as much as one in Haringey, London – £4.50 in Harpurhey and £1.50 in London? A couple of days later, Transport for Greater Manchester got a telephone call from 10 Downing Street saying ‘we heard the Mayor quoted some figures at the weekend about bus fares – they can’t possibly be correct, can they?’ And my team said ‘well, yes, they are, actually’. 

It just shows you how the bread-and-butter issues that people are dealing with in the vast majority of England are just not understood at the heart of that Westminster bubble. In fact, they’re not even seen. They’re not even discussed, because the Westminster media down there is not interested in them either, and all of it creates a disconnect between the political world and the reality of people’s lives.

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So what’s your role or potential role in all of this? You love being the Mayor of Greater Manchester, but you seem pretty fired up and quite clear on what the challenge ahead is in terms of the next General Election…

I want the Labour Government to be a success. I think that means, to me, being quite radical because I think the depth of people’s alienation is quite significant, and hence the change that was promised at the General Election – it needs to be equal to that sort of disillusionment that people feel.

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Do you think the Government understands this?

I think they do, and they’ve made some really positive moves, renationalising rail and some of Angela Rayner’s moves on housing. But I would say, go even more with that and move decisively. Work with the mayors. Get delivery going more quickly. 

I think 2029 is going to be a major moment in politics in this country and it’s winnable. But it requires everything to be focused now to build to that and make as much change as possibly can be made and focus relentlessly on lifting some of the burden that people feel. 

People are feeling the weight of these times, aren’t they? And I think there are things that can be done to just start to acknowledge those issues that people feel and to start connecting with them by talking about housing a bit more, talking about the kids who don’t go to university. 

Don’t have a sort of Westminster take on things that the voters see politicians always playing back to the focus groups. How about talking to, you know, real people? 

So I do think it’s about changing the political narrative, changing the obsessions, getting stuck into delivery – but really focus on what’s coming and be confident in the left having better answers. The right of this country sold it all off and they created the problem. So let’s come back with some big fixes.

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This interview has been edited in parts for clarity and context