Jen Williams
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
That very much has the ability to flip overnight from Labour to reform.
And I know people who are very sympathetic towards Andy, who have said to me, like, he would be absolutely mad to go in St Helens.
And that was before these results started to come through overnight.
Stephen, last thought on this to you.
Jen, who are you buying or selling?
Well, I'm afraid this is a little bit of a cop-out, but I'm going to hold Manchesterism, which is Andy Burnham's professed vision, I guess, and blueprint for government, which is, if you're an Andy Burnham fan, it is essentially this kind of business-friendly socialism idea that has come out of his time being mayor here.
If you're more of a sceptic, it's a sort of
retrofitting of something that had already happened before that actually isn't particularly left wing and doesn't necessarily tell you all that much about what he would do in government.
I think it's fair to say, and I think probably he knows, that actually that hasn't really been fleshed out in an awful lot of detail.
And a lot of the legwork on that
has in practice been done by civil servants when he has gone and made speeches in his capacity as mayor talking about Manchester and Greater Manchester.
And so those speeches have then doubled up as a bit of a nod and a wink, certainly to the soft left of the Labour Party.
I think that needs to be fleshed out.
And at the moment, I'm not entirely convinced what that means as a platform for government.
So, yeah, it is a cop-out, but maybe in future weeks I can take a slightly riskier decision on it.