185: Manc To The Future
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello and welcome to another episode of Page 94. My name's Andrew Hunter-Murray and I'm here in the iStudio with Helen Lewis, Ian Hislop and Richard Brooks. We're here on a momentous news day. It turns out that Britain is going to be renamed Even Greater Manchester. Andy Burnham's done a big speech outlining his big vision for the future of the country.
Can we also mention that he's called Andy Murray Burnham?
I know, I know. Nightmare.
There has been an uptick in the number of Andy Murrays in public life.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was just getting over the last one.
I will say it was, in terms of the vibes, the vibes were good. It was happy, it was summery. He was in a little T-shirt with a suit over and he'd had to gag at the beginning about how Kemi Badnok wasn't going to like this and he was halfway out of his Manchester clothes. Right. And he made a joke about how he's going to buy longer shorts or repeal the public decency act. There was just a level of breeziness to it that I thought was quite good and somewhat refreshing.
And for a public that's had a lot of speeches by Keir Starmer, I mean, this one just looked good, even if the bar is quite low. And I kept thinking, Richard, a lot of his diagnosis of what is wrong... you would have to agree with, because you've written it and I've published it, about outsourcing, over-centralisation, no money in the region. I mean, you do agree with some of these things. You know, the principle of more regional devolution... power to places that should know what to do with the money is a great one. The trouble is that while over the last few decades, while so much has been centralised, so much power and money has been brought into Whitehall, taken away from local government, so have the things that
can hold those areas to account when they do spend the money. So local democracy is in a shocking state because people aren't really that interested in the bin collections or things like that. There's no auditing of spending regionally. The Cameron government abolished the audit commission, which used to look at local government spending. So now if you spend money wastefully, fraudulently, you basically get away with it. And thirdly, the Local media as well barely exists. Hundreds of local newspapers have shut in the last 20 years or so. What's left is often sort of cheerleading for the region. It means there's no scrutiny in local journalism, really. So you're suggesting that with no one looking at how the money is spent, it might not go well?
That's right.
Do you perhaps have any examples of mayors who perhaps have spent rather like a drunken sailor and given contracts to their friends, Richard?
Yeah, there's a chap called Ben Houchen, who's the mayor of the Tees Valley. Sorry, not Ben Houchen, the former judge at the Political Podcast Awards in 2026.
The one who overlooked us, you mean.
The one who didn't win, indeed.
What is Andy Burnham's vision for Britain?
For some reason. Enough of this petty griping. Sorry, sorry. So, yeah, I mean, Richard, what's really useful, I suppose, is how things have gone wrong and what you would do instead. As in, you know, sorry, Teesside as an example of where it's gone wrong and what could have been done to avert it. Actually, Houchen is in the Telegraph this morning writing about Burnham, saying why he'll fail. And I wrote down what he said. He said he points out that actually regional mayors have it quite easy because they don't have the really difficult things to do that the prime minister, for example, has to do. So he says, we rarely make the calls that lose you friends, crater your poll ratings and keep you awake wondering whether history will forgive you.
Right.
The thing is he's made a couple of decisions that should be heaping him away that we've written about.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–3:44
2
What is Andy Burnham's vision for Britain?
3:44–9:41
3
How does Andy Burnham address regional devolution?
9:41–15:54
4
What examples illustrate the challenges of local governance?
15:54–31:55
5
What are the implications of the proposed council house building program?
31:55–49:01