By Rosie Dawson
Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, used the annual Theos lecture last night to call for a new way of doing politics “with trust, community, faith, belief, connection at his heart”.
His message to his former colleagues in Westminster is: “Business as usual is finished now. You need to repair the damage in our communities. And you need to give devolution its chance to come up with a better way of running things.”
Mr Burnham, who was raised a Catholic, spoke of the need to move from a crisis of trust to” a culture of encounter”, a phrase he attributed to Pope Francis whom he met at the Vatican two years ago, a meeting he later called the “greatest privilege of my life”.
“The world has become more complex, but the way we run things has not,” he said. “In many ways it is the same as it was in the last century, and this creates a disconnect between people and politics. People have lost trust in the ability of politics to fix things.”
He was giving the annual lecture hosted by the Theos think tank to about 400 people packed into the Methodist Central Hall in Manchester city centre. When the first chapel opened on this site in 1781 John Wesley lamented that it was “too far into the countryside”. It was the first time that Theos had held its annual lecture outside London.
Theos first approached Mr Burnham about its lecture in the spring, judging correctly that he was always going to be a draw. Theos could not have known then the extent to which rumours would be flying around about his alleged ambitions to become prime minister.
“It’s nice to be in the spotlight,” Mr Burnham said as he took to the podium. “You may have noticed I’ve been keeping something of a low profile.” He went on to announce, to cheers, that the industrial action by the region’s bus drivers planned for the next few days had been called off.
On a sombre note, he welcomed the opportunity the lecture gave him to lead the city in the process of reflection after last week’s terrorist attack on the Heaton Park synagogue. The audience stood for a few minutes silence in memory of Adrian Daulby and Melvin Cravitz who died, and all those affected.
Mr Burnham, 55, is now in his 25th year in frontline politics. He became MP for Leigh, in Greater Manchester, in 2001, and served as culture secretary and health secretary in Gordon Brown’s government before becoming mayor of Greater Manchester in 2017.
The world has become ever more complex this century, he said, but politicians are still doing things in the same old ways. The result is a disconnect between government and people and a crisis of trust that leads to despair and alienation. “At the heart of this problem is the demise of the local — local agency and local action.”
Mr Burnham said the state benefits system “a top-down, soulless, tick-box system, a ‘computer-says-no’ approach that hammers the hope out of people”. The Home Office procured accommodation for those in the asylum system from companies that have no communication with communities while making millions of pounds in profits, he said. Meanwhile the asylum-seekers they were meant to serve are given substandard accommodation and inedible food.
“If we worked from the bottom up, wouldn’t we come up with a more humane way of doing things?” Mr Burnham asked. He wants to replace the soulless system with a “new vision for local state with trust, community, faith, belief, connection at its heart”.
He told the story of how, when he was health secretary in 2010, he was presented with a list of proposed cuts to the NHS. The hospital chaplaincy service was at the top of the list.
He resisted the proposal, he said, because when his grandmother had asked from her hospital bed “has he been yet?”, she wasn’t talking about the doctor. “She was talking about the priest. That mattered a million times more to Kitty Murray … That was everything to her. The state had no sight of the spiritual and in many ways it pushed it to the margins.”
The importance of working with religious organisations had again been brought home to him during the pandemic when he was advised to approach places of worship to be vaccination centres. The result was an uptake in vaccinations, evidence that “if you deliver through people and places that are trusted, you’ve then got a chance to make a difference”.
Mr Burnham went on to speak of a Greater Manchester Live Well service, a proposal the authority had put to government which would reroute money to community, voluntary and faith organisations and local enterprises so that they could deliver public services.
This would make a culture of encounter possible, he said, and the funding for it would be like “drops of rain on barren soil”.
As the fastest-growing city region in the UK, Greater Manchester was already seeing the fruits of devolution, he said: “We believe Greater Manchester can bring forward a vision for a new local state that is based on a very different way of running things.”
In the question-and-answer session that followed his lecture, Mr Burnham said he did not rule out returning to Westminster politics but he thought it didn’t want the changes he wanted to see.
“There’s a phoniness at the heart of our national system and if I were to go back it would be to fundamentally change it,” he said. He would support a change in the voting system to proportional representation and that he would like to see the party whip system removed. “Westminster makes a fraud out of good people… people lose a sense of who they are.
“I’ve been too long in politics to speak in code any more and some people don’t like it but I’m not going to stop doing it.”
When asked what advice he would give to the Archbishop of Canterbury-designate Sarah Mullally, he urged her to “get that Bishop of Newcastle close to you,” praising Bishop Helen-Ann Hartley — who had criticised senior bishops over safeguarding — for her courage in confronting injustice where she saw it.
