@borntobequiet
Interview with Mohammed Iqbal of Pendle Council. Councils caved under government threats of withdrawing any financial help if they didn’t cooperate. They asked for some money to support business, government offered much less and then threatened none unless they went into Tier 3. I can see why Andy Burnham isn’t folding.
I should point out the difference between reporting of this locally and nationally.
Nationally Burnham is being blamed souly for the row.
Yet locally its being pointed out the problem is cross party. Most notably Bolton which is a Tory Council and has 2 (out of 3) Tory MPs.
One, Chris Green, resigned from his government role as Parliamentary Private Secretary in the Department for Education over the handling of it. He opposes T3.
He said: "The main point is that Bolton's been through the Greater Manchester lockdown for ten weeks, three weeks of which was a more extreme economic lockdown, which really caused a lot of people hardship.
"You'd expect having such an extreme lockdown that the transmission rate would decrease significantly, instead we just saw it rocket up. It clearly failed and the government should take account of that and their approach should reflect that reality. Instead, the government seems to be set on doing a repeat of the last six months.
His argument is that he is yet to see evidence that localised T3 restrictions will actually work because they didn't appear to when they were applied to his constituency previously.
Then you have Graham Brady. By all account the Manchester call yesterday started with him going in saying that if it was imposed he would go legal.
Here's just one tweet on the subject.
Daniel Hewitt @DanielHewittITV
Hearing it was Tory MPs “leading the charge” against the govt on call between Helen Whateley and Greater Manc MPs. They heavily criticised “the lack of consultation and lack of financial support.” Worth noting some of them didn’t even get the email inviting them to the briefing.
Brady also spent yesterday talking to the media about how the case for t3 hadn't been made.
Speaking to Times Radio, Sir Graham Brady, Tory MP for Altrincham and Sale West, said it would be “very foolish” of the government to go against Andy Burnham and put the area into a Tier 3 lockdown.
“The danger is if you try to do these things without consent people lose patience very quickly, we have a very clear demonstration of that”, he said.
William Wragg is the Tory MP in question who was livid yesterday about the meeting and not being invited to it.
Reading between the lines about what happened yesterday, this is what I think happened:
Before the meeting the media had been briefed everywhere that Manchester were going into T3. DURING the media it was being tweeted by the media that the Manchester MPs had been TOLD that Manchester was going into T3. Then as the meeting was finishing it suddenly became apparent that the government had somehow changed their minds and backed down.
And since then Andy Burnham has been repeatedly blamed.
But I don't think this is the case at all. Both Labour and Conservative representatives said during the course of the meeting they were considering legal action.
You also have to put into context the lack of support Manchester feels its had ALREADY with regards to financial support and priority for testing and money for local track and trace.
Bolton is one of those councils who has had to fund their own local track and trace without funding from central government.
All these councils now have a massive financial black hole looming. There had already been an issue as during the early stages of the panademic they had been told they would recieve as much money for fighting covid as they needed, only for the government to renege on its word and only cough up a fraction of the money.
So the reality of the situation is that G Manchester is an extremely precarious finanical position which the government refuse to properly acknowledge. This will have a massive impact on the city's ability to deliver any kind of services in the next year.
But the government regards negogiating as something where you tell people what to do and are completely tone deaf as to what they say in return, with the strategy to bully or bulldoze their way. As we've seen from Brexit negogitions.
The trouble with this approach is the inconvient wall of reality.
I think that ultimately G Manchester (and by that I mean Burnham, Councils and MPs of all colours) is at a point where it can't just accept whats on offer because the crisis is so deep after the initial lockdown and months already of local lockdown.
There is this rising sense of not just frustration but outright anger.
So Johnson's response has been simply to smear Burnham and say that Manchester should 're-engage constructively'. When the converse is actually true.
Manchester has previously already issued open letters asking for more local control and powers which has been ignored. It was constructive and make some very valid points.
It is deeply annoying that how this is being reported nationally totally neglects what has actually happened and who is involved in protesting the imposing of T3.