Poverty isn’t just a Northern issue Andy.

[SummerSummerSummertime]

Caught the Prime Minister on a podcast this week and he’s really stuck on a constant, hyper-focus on the North. Ok we get it, things are bad up there (former industrial heartlands etc) but as PM for the whole country, he needs to remember that hardship doesn't stop at a regional border if he wants to maintain national support.
Severe deprivation is happening right across the country, not just in northern heartlands:

London: The capital holds some of the highest actual poverty rates once astronomical housing costs are factored in.

Coastal Communities: Southern seaside towns face deep, hidden deprivation, low wages, and crumbling infrastructure.

The South & Midlands: High living expenses, struggling high streets, and insecure work hit low-income families everywhere.

He also claimed on the podcast that past governments just saw the North as "different" and forgot about it. But by constantly banging on about the North, isn't he just fuelling that exact same fire?
If he keeps treating the North as a special case, he's actively reinforcing a regional divide. Moving focus or power from Whitehall to Manchester might sound great on a podcast, but it does absolutely nothing for a struggling family in a southern coastal town who feel just as invisible to this new government as they did to the last one.
Poverty is a national crisis, not a regional identity.

If Andy wants to keep broad support, his messaging needs to acknowledge and support struggling communities everywhere.

So AB will be like Blair, Tatcher and Cameron?

We seem to agree on proper devolution. It has to involve real economic power though, and the power to materially change policy. Or it’s meaningless.

I don’t think it’s a Labour/Tory issue though. Eg Andy Street seem to have done a reasonable job just as Burnham did. Meanwhile Labour in Wales, which has some devolution, doesn’t seem to have great outcomes.

If people want Tory policies to address growth (maybe low tax, easy planning rules, private investment) they should be free to and it might work. If they want to vote for anti-growth policies there are politicians of all parties who will offer them that too.

In that none of them held any of the great offices of state before becoming PM? Yes, that’s what I just said.

Absolutely no one is saying he will anything like any of them.

It is simply being pointed out that it is factually incorrect to say that most Prime Minister's have held one of the great offcies of state, when they haven't.

I agree, read an article highlighting the issues of Cornwall and the SE, especially for young people. Education standards are worryingly lower, poor opportunities on offer for apprenticeships and work experience, the expense and difficulty for schools of extending childrens horizons and ambitions re visits, cultural experiences, university visits etc, poor mobility and widely spread out catchment areas limiting activities like organised groups, DofE, scouts, guiding etc. So huge numbers of NEETs, poor uptake of tertiary education.

So far this administration does seem to be fixated on the NE, which yes, needs development and investment ( why the heck they didn’t start HS2 in the area it would have benefitted the most defeats me) but are throwing money at what do seem to be vanity projects which don’t appear to be built on a very firm foundation , apparently the head of the new Northern Powerhouse is commuting Monday to Thursday from London, couldn’t you find a Northern based person Andy ,or did you take them all south with you.

apparently the head of the new Northern Powerhouse is commuting Monday to Thursday from London

Henri Murison is a northerner, he lives in Bradford.

I'm not sure that is true. Thatcher, Blair, Cameroon, Truss, Starmer all didn't hold one of the three offices of state.

How depressing that you seem to think it’s acceptable for us to have to choose between any of those as our best options for leaders.

"Done properly" is the key. John Prescott was given the task 20 years ago but fouled it up and it got nowhere and quietly forgotten about in most areas!

So he should do devolution but only for areas that will vote for his party, and bung them a load of extra money which they did not raise from their own constituents to spend on whatever they like?

Sounds nothing like genuine devolution (which involves local people voting on how much tax they are prepared to pay themselves and what they want it spent on, not voting on how much of other people’s money you’d like with no accountability to those paying it) and certainly not remotely democratic or likely to raise growth, quite the opposite. It’s not credible, it will undermine democracy and increase division (you can see that on this thread before the detail has even been announced) and it ignores large swathes of the areas of the country that receive the least public funding per head for schools, hospitals, etc.

Anybody supporting such lunacy is economically illiterate. The resulting mess is entirely predictable, as it always is from these half-baked, populist, economically ridiculous schemes (see also Brexit). At least that was voted for by half wits I suppose. Nobody has voted for this!

I was referring to Sam Lister.

Precisely.

Decide which policy areas you wish to devolve to local areas then reduce national taxation and devolve tax raising powers to local areas (all of them, not just ones with mayors 🙄) to raise taxes for those services.

Local politicians can then put forward local manifestos for those devolved issues regarding how much they intend to tax local residents to pay for the devolved services and how the money will be spent.

National taxes should pay for non-devolved policy areas so everybody can vote on the balance of tax and spending for those at general elections.

What you can’t have is locally devolved spending power with the money to pay for it siphoned off from taxpayers elsewhere who have no vote then on how their money is being used, and the people in local areas only voting on what will be spent there without being required to pay for it. Seriously, what do people think will happen in that scenario? All local candidates - if they don’t have to pay for their spending by taxing local residents - will promise to spend, spend, spend and obviously people will vote for whomever states they will spend the most if the local residents aren’t also expected to pay for it! The local politicians cannot be held to account by the people whose money they will be spending because they don’t have any vote on it, so huge amounts of money will be wasted on white elephants and pet projects because there will be zero democratic accountability.

All of this is blatantly obvious. So far what Burham has proposed under the guise of “devolution” is nothing of the sort: it has all of the drawbacks of devolution and none of the benefits and will cause immense waste, more social division, damage rather than encourage growth, and will be fundamentally undemocratic in operation (aside from the fact he has no mandate for this in the first place).

You’re arguing against something I didn’t actually say.

I never said we have the perfect choice of leaders right now. I just think that given the current political line-up, someone who understands normal life is a massive step up from the privately educated, inherited wealth, London-centric elites who usually run things.

I like Andy Burnham. And I love hearing someone talking with passion and pride about the place they are from.

Yes, far lower spending per head on education and services in the south than the north of England, on average.

And also yes, Airmiles Andy wasting billions and creating extra security risks with his new office in Manchester, charging the taxpayer £30k to fly him up and down on private jets. Eye-watering costs for absolutely no benefit to the population of the UK at all just because he’s angry that London is our capital city. It’s a pathetic vanity project and seems mainly motivated by his wife refusing to move and him wanting to work close to home, at enormous taxpayer expense. Apparently despite Manchester allegedly being the centre of the universe now the inhabitants haven’t discovered Teams/ Zoom.

I responded that way because you responded to me implying that I had said something I didn’t: I am criticising Burnham because he is our Prime Minister and so far has been very unimpressive with his announcements, which demonstrate a fundamental lack of grasp of the priorities that the UK needs to address most urgently. His priorities in his first days of office have been mostly trivial and it appears we have yet another ideologically driven PM with no grasp of evidence and economics and the relative importance of issues. The immediate focus on bus fares was utterly absurd, as if that is the biggest issue facing the country. If he wants to be PM then he needs to start behaving like one and focus on the serious issues.

At no point did I imply that it would be preferable to have an Etonian or Reform idiot running the country. I think we should all be able to expect (and, indeed, demand) leaders of higher calibre than any of those on offer. Burnham being a different flavour of useless doesn’t make him any good.

It’s not baseless. No: Airmiles Andy refers to our new dear leader, who is spending £30k of taxpayer money each way on private jet flights to his new home office in Manchester.

I was actually specifically responding to you agreeing with a previous poster who had said, “Andy has a massive chip on his shoulder about the South.”

I asked whether you’d listened to the specific podcast referenced, because I think he spoke eloquently and intelligently about his background, his love for the place he is from and the ways it has shaped his world view.

You of course are entitled to disagree with Andy Burnham’s policy proposals - but the criticisms that he’s “chippy” or “a professional Northerner” aren’t that.

And what does he mean by every postcode?

Does he mean M (for Manchester), M40 for Moston or down to street level?

And when he says Manchester (as in him being mayor of) he actually meant Greater Manchester. The city centre is looking very shiny and tall but the outer towns maybe don't have that shine.

I think he's a million times better than Sir Starmer, but is currently in danger of disappearing up his own arse.
His two week holiday is interesting. His socials are still posting.
He had said he wanted to take over in September, presumably cos he had plans for the summer which didn't involve being in charge.

No, it doesn’t.

He wasted £104m on a ULEZ zone that doesn’t exist. He is obsessed with buses, and wasted enormous amounts of taxpayer money on schemes that have minimal economic benefit, while completely failing on his other pledges about infrastructure like rail services.

Her failed to tackle homelessness even in one city. He claimed he’d eradicate it in Greater Manchester in 2020, yet he didn’t, did he? Yet he claims he will eradicate it now UK wide. Delusional: it’s not possible to eradicate, as anybody who understands the causes knows. He also missed affordable housing targets for the area, repeatedly, throughout his time as Mayor.

Greater Manchester Police has been in and out of “special measures” throughout his time as Mayor. Since 2017 the crime rate has rocketed, particularly for violent crime: while Burnham was the Police and Crime Commissioner. Greater Manchester Police has failed to investigate over 80,000 crimes.

He focused on the urban city centre only and ignored poverty in many peripheral areas under his jurisdiction (sound familiar from his recent rhetoric?).

Let’s not even get into his Parliamentary record: now complaining about the social care system when he did not fix this as Health Secretary. He was also the Health Secretary during the Stafford Hospital scandal. The report produced by the healthcare commission investigating this concluded that neglect of patients and “fixation on Government targets” (set by Burnham) led to the needless deaths of hundreds, if not over a thousand patients.

It’s amusing that people think him being constantly moved around cabinet posts means his CV is impressive. Those of us who have actually worked at senior levels in organisations are aware that this is what you do with troublesome but useless and incompetent people you can’t get rid of, to limit the damage that they can do. What did he, personally, actually achieve in any of these roles in Government? Answers on a postcard…

Then you didn’t mean the head of the Northern Powerhouse.

The descriptions of him as “chippy” and a “professional northerner” are entirely accurate. Please name a single speech he has given since becoming PM in which he hasn’t mentioned being northern. He is the very definition of it, to the point of caricature. If he is so obtuse that he can’t see how this has alienated already a large number of voters that he needs onside to have a hope of remaining in office for very long, then he’s not very bright, is he?

I’ve never heard another PM going on and on and on about the specific region of the country from which they originate in such a manner because they all seemed to understand that their job was to represent and act in the interests of the entire UK (even if they made bad decisions about how to do that, they at least seemed to grasp the difference between being a constituency MP/ mayor or PM).

I think most of the country is thoroughly fed up of hearing about what “people from Makerfield” think. Other places exist and our PM would be wise to recognise that and cease this divisive rhetoric when he returns from his holiday, two weeks into the job.

It’s been appended to Andrew Mountbatten Windsor for decades. Burnham travels by train.

No, he doesn’t.

And to be fair there have been some pretty useless PMs who did hold high office previously.

This is turning into pantomime. He’s flown from Stansted to Glasgow and thence to Manchester once. He travels between London and his constituency by train. Unlike Sunak. I bet you never called him Frequent Flyer Rishi.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66434605?app-referrer=deep-link