Andy Burnham is Labour’s Greater Manchester Mayor. He was the Labour MP for Leigh from 2001 to 2017, and served as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Culture Secretary, and Health Secretary in Gordon Brown’s Cabinet. He sat down for an interview at the 2025 Byline Festival with Hardeep Matharu, Editor-in-Chief of Byline Times
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.
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.
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.
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