Metro mayors ditching ideology

Good morning.

I am standing in for Stephen today as the country gears up for its latest visit to the ballot box at next week’s local and mayoral elections.

Pragmatism over posturing

As I wrote here at the start of the year, the evolving mayoral landscape in this country is worth watching in the context of any change of government, because — especially in the north of England — the map is starting to fill up with mayors.

During a visit to Coventry last week to interview the Conservative mayor Andy Street, who is battling to hold on to the West Midlands mayoralty, I was struck afresh by a theme emerging from the mayoral system. 

All of the big political hitters in regional development over the years have something in common: pragmatism. And, generally, mayors are no exception. 

Conservative figures acknowledge the need for state intervention; Labour figures acknowledge the importance of the market. Ideology tends to drift out of the window when your focus is on a specific place — and although places are all different, outside of the south-east the levers you are looking to pull are all likely to be quite similar. 

Meanwhile, voters mainly just want to see some stuff happening on the ground. 

Thus, back in the early days of austerity after 2010, you ended up with Manchester council’s former Labour leader Sir Richard Leese accommodating a relationship with then-Tory chancellor George Osborne, a Labour bogeyman who at the time was slashing the city’s revenue budgets to bits — Osborne had separately grasped the need for infrastructure investment in the north. 

(I will come back to that point separately later this year: June will mark a decade since Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse speech.)  

Michael Heseltine and Michael Gove, big Conservative beasts in this space, both understand the fundamental role of the state (and therefore subsidy) in getting things moving beyond the south-east.

The market alone won’t get economies firing on all cylinders in Blackpool, Burnley or Birmingham; it needs something to help it along.

Meanwhile, Tory ideology often goes out of the window when the party’s candidates are pitching directly to electorates comfortable with left-of-centre economic policies. 

Ben Houchen, the Conservative mayor in Teesside, has had no concerns about pursuing policies that at national level look more like Labour ones, such as buying an airport, because they are popular locally. His counterpart over the border in North Yorkshire, Tory hopeful Keane Duncan, has promised to buy Scarborough’s dilapidated Grand Hotel. 

Which is not to say that either move necessarily constitutes good policy. But the political calculation that a left-of-centre economic pitch will go down well is in notably sharp contrast to the prevailing Tory view of the electorate from Westminster. Street is making a big push on social housing in his campaign, an issue the Conservatives in Downing Street have hardly put to the top of their agenda. 

Street particularly emphasised the need for political pragmatism in our interview, in which he made a point of rejecting the “culture wars” ideology being pursued by his colleagues in London.

This is part of a wider political strategy, of course: he is distancing himself from the nationally unpopular Tories and has calculated that in a multicultural city region such as the West Midlands, talk of “mob rule” is not particularly helpful to him. 

But it is also, in common with other regional leaders, what he genuinely believes. 

Street and his Labour counterpart in Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, are focused on the same economic development priorities — and have essentially the same devolution deals — because the same things are needed in the two biggest cities outside London. Both recognise the need for a focus on transport, housing and skills.  

You can dress that up in party colours (although notably neither of them really do, instead they are pursuing campaigns that are about their own brands) but you still tend to end up back in the same place.  

Such pragmatism is alien to the shrill national political context of 2024 and particularly to the approach taken by Rishi Sunak’s strategists. The cultural and ideological warfare will doubtless only be stepped up further in the forthcoming general election.  

Yet if anyone who is serious about rebalancing the UK economy — and if they’re not, they’re not serious about improving the economy full stop and have failed to grasp the political dangers that flow from our woeful geographical imbalances — ever ends up in Number 10, they are likely to find themselves drawing the same conclusions as Street. 

Delivery is what matters — and getting there often requires the ideology to be ditched.

Not all O-Kay on the night

Delivery on the ground does not always go to plan, of course.

The Co-op Live venue near Manchester City’s stadium, a vast £350mn project backed by US investors OVG and now the country’s biggest arena, soft launched on Saturday with a private Rick Astley gig. 

That proved somewhat chaotic, after local regulators concluded at the eleventh hour that the building was not sufficiently finished to safely go ahead at full capacity. Thousands of tickets were cancelled at the last minute. 

The arena will be a hugely significant addition to the northern cultural landscape, following hot on the heels of the Factory arts venue’s launch on the other side of the city centre last year (another project that has not proved straightforward, amid delays and cost overruns).

Saturday’s confusion was not the end of the story, however.

Critical ongoing build delays resulted in the public launch of Co-op Live, scheduled for Tuesday night, being cancelled the day before. Comedian Peter Kay’s gig has now been bounced into next week.

OVG and the council, which has warmly welcomed the further investment into the area around Manchester City’s ground as part of its regeneration strategy, will be crossing their fingers that next time it will be all right on the night.

Now try this

Finally, a plug for two places that have fed me outrageously well in recent weeks. 

If you’re in North Shields, do try the wonderful Mexican food at Lobo Rojo on Fish Quay. I can recommend the carne asada, their copious jugs of margarita and a pint afterwards in the cosy Low Lights Tavern around the corner. 

And if you’re in Didsbury, south Manchester, go and buy the San Sebastián cheesecake from the Turkish Sweet Centre. It comes in huge slabs with a pot of melted chocolate on the side and I am absolutely obsessed with it.

Don’t miss our live election special Q&A on May 8, a collaboration between Inside Politics and Political Fix, where Stephen Bush, George Parker, Lucy Fisher and Camilla Cavendish will break down the local election results and tackle reader questions. Register here to watch online for free and submit your questions. 

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