Labour should seize the day on elected mayors in northern England

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/oct/27/labour-elected-mayors-northern-england

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It is one of the great ironies of our time that the most enthusiastic advocates of the true blue Tory chancellor can be found running Labour councils in the north of England’s reddest cities.

While Labour MPs have been busy rubbishing George Osborne’s idea of rebalancing the economy through the creation of a “northern powerhouse” as a “northern power cut” (when electrification projects on the northern railways were paused) or a “northern poorhouse” (when the government failed to step in to save steelworks in Redcar and Scunthorpe), local Labour leaders have taken a much more pragmatic approach.

The first people with the foresight to see Osborne’s idea as an opportunity rather than an object of ridicule were in Greater Manchester, a region dominated by the one-party state that is Manchester city council, run by Labour’s Sir Richard Leese for 19 years straight, 17 of them alongside chief executive Sir Howard Bernstein.

The reward: an ever-expanding deal that will devolve a budget of billions from Whitehall to the combined authority, headed from 2017 by an elected mayor. Addressing the communities and local government (CLG) select committee on Monday, Kieran Quinn, the Labour leader of Tameside, one of Greater Manchester’s 10 councils, praised Osborne for being “very clever in as much as he has been able to bully, cajole, persuade other ministerial colleagues to give up some of their powers”.

Related: Sheffield named second 'northern powerhouse'

Even in Teesside, where 1,700 steel jobs will go at the SSI works in Redcar before Christmas, the ruling Labour chiefs last week lined up alongside Osborne to sign a devolution deal handing over powers on transport and investment. It follows a separate devolution deal for Greater Sheffield, which includes more of a say over transport, skills and planning. Both are pale versions of the pact struck by Greater Manchester, which gains control over the region’s £6bn health and social care budget. Most of the leaders are seduced by the idea of more powers for themselves, but are suspicious of Osborne’s intentions, fearing he wants to devolve blame for the austerity cuts away from Westminster to a local level.

Dan Jarvis, the Labour MP for Barnsley, is due to give a long-overdue speech acknowledging that the northern powerhouse isn’t just empty rhetoric. Speaking in Sheffield at the launch of the IPPR North thinktank’s report, The State of The North, he will say: “It would be the easy choice to dismiss the northern powerhouse as a smokescreen, an illusion to rebuild Tory fortunes in the North, or a gimmick to carry George Osborne into No 10.”

To oppose the idea for the sake of it would be “easy politics”, he believes, arguing: “This devolution debate represents perhaps the greatest opportunity to remake the state and give more power to communities for a generation.” Jarvis, a former soldier turned astute political operator, has grasped what so many of his colleagues are still too blinkered and mired in old tribal loyalties to see: that the northern powerhouse is real and happening, and if Labour doesn’t offer a positive alternative sharpish then it will be left behind, whining like a cat shut out for the night.

Maybe Jarvis has also spotted that the sexiest jobs in British politics will soon not involve a seat in the House of Commons but the best office in a regional town hall. But elected mayors, rejected in referendums by a number of cities, including Manchester as recently as 2012, will only capture the public’s imagination if those running for the office are not faceless career politicos. Dismayingly, the frontrunner for the Greater Manchester gig is the interim mayor, Tony Lloyd. He only stepped down as MP for Manchester Central after 29 years when he realised he was a shoo-in for police and crime commissioner in 2012 – a job he won on a 13.93% turnout and then agreed could be scrapped to make way for the new elected mayor. He point blank refuses to accept that his recent career path looks very much like jobs for the boys.

Osborne often likes to say that mayoral elections can deliver surprising results: Boris Johnson, after all, is a Tory mayor of what is a Labour city. If Labour sits on its laurels in the north and thinks it can just put up the same old faces for the big new jobs, it might have a nasty surprise coming.