We now have a new Prime Minister. Our seventh in ten years, or fifth in four years, depending on how you want to count it. Andy Burnham, MP for Makerfield has now taken office, and we are all waiting to find out what he’ll do now he’s got there. Well, there may be some clues in his 2024 Book, Head North that he wrote with fellow Mayor and long-time friend Steve Rotherham.
I bought a copy recently when it became likely that Burnham would be our next Prime Minister and have just finished reading it. Here’s what I found. Head North is a fairly short text by the standards of political books at only 264 pages. There’s also no index so if you want to find specific information, you’ll need to read it yourself. It’s split into two parts. Part One is a traditional political memoir penned by both of them, taking turns in writing a passage each, different fonts signalling who is speaking. Part Two is an outline of their ideas on how to reform Britain.
It’s a pretty good read and doesn’t get boring, so they can be congratulated on that. I’ve read many ‘ideas’ books in the past that ought to have been shorter, but this isn’t one of them. The memoirs start with quite vivid descriptions of their respective experiences of the Hillsborough tragedy where 96 Liverpool fans died due to overcrowding at a football match in 1989.
Burnham is famously an Everton fan, and Rotherham is a Liverpool fan so Burnham’s experience is of a worried community waiting to discover who will return on that fateful day, whilst Rotherham was there himself, and narrowly escaped being in the infamous Leppings Lane end by unknowingly swapping his Leppings Lane ticket for an upper stand ticket with another fan. He’s clearly still haunted by not knowing what happened to that fan to this day.
Hillsborough looms over the entire book, both memoir and policy guide. The tragedy is almost the third author. Their respective experiences on that day and the follow up cover-ups and refusal by the establishment to own what happened to working class people has shaped and defined their politics. The sense of grievance by those families and in a wider sense by the North over continued failures by London politicians to understand their experience has shaped Burnham’s politics.
The memoir then follows them both through their political careers through Cambridge (Burnham) and construction career (Rotherham), through Parliament and up until Mayoralty. As I state above, it’s a good read and keeps your attention. They clearly care about their communities too. Part One of the book is over in 144 pages so doesn’t outstay its welcome and then Part Two kicks in when we find out their proposed solutions to the country’s problems. It’s here that we really get a sense of what Burnham as Prime Minister might choose to do.
Their basic diagnosis of the problem is that London takes all of the attention and money due to the Treasury’s Green Book rules about investment (the North rarely wins under the algorithm) and an over-centralisation of political power in Westminster. They make a compelling case for both of these failures of government. They then divide the remaining chapters into their proposed remedies.
Prominent among these are Constitutional Change and Rewiring Westminster. He does come out in favour of PR (pages 183-186 if you want to check) and favours the Scottish Addition Member System (AMS) of proportional representation, although is open-minded on systems. Other headline-grabbing ideas are a softening of the whipping system to encourage MPs to vote on their convictions (long-overdue in my view), a written constitution (ditto) and a programme of meaningful federal devolution for cities and home nations, getting rid of the Barnett Formula that dictates regional funding and replacing it with what they call more ‘transparent’ funding’.
Burnham clearly feels there needs to be substantial constitutional reform at Westminster and beyond. What he writes in the book chimes with what he has been saying for almost a decade now on electoral reform, as he has become one of the most passionate advocates for a move to proportional representation.
He has described how the ‘real change moment’ for him was leaving Westminster and standing for Manchester Mayor under a non-First Past the Post voting system, in the preferential Supplementary Vote system.
In an interview with ITV, he described how the fact he had to canvass for second-preference votes from voters who may not usually vote for him “finally aligned the conversation on the door with what people want from politics, which is about problem-solving first and foremost, not about point-scoring.”
He added that his experience helped convert him to the need for PR for Westminster as “it brings a different conversation”.
The Prime Minister has also previously argued that he doesn’t “believe all people in all places will be equally represented in Westminster until every vote matters”.
More recently, Burnham has spoken movingly of the influence of his father, Roy, on his views on electoral reform. Roy, a supporter or PR, had apparently long argued to persuade his son to come round to the cause. In a recent interview in the Times, Burnham said his father is suffering from dementia, meaning he doesn’t know his son has become prime minister. This has also prevented Roy from learning of what would be his ‘sweetest victory of all’ – that Burnham is now a staunch advocate for PR himself.
His ascension to Number 10 means the country now has its first prime minister who openly supports PR. Burnham’s book and his statements in recent years speak of someone who is a genuine convert to the cause of reforming our politics to make it more democratic and more representative of voters.