Mayor Andy Burnham

Caitlin Morrissey

I’m here at the offices of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority with the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Mayor Andy Burnham. Andy, thank you for joining us on The DNA of Cities podcast.

Mayor Andy Burnham

You’re welcome, glad to be on.

Caitlin Morrissey

We’re here to discover your perspectives on The DNA of Greater Manchester, so I’m going to ask my first question which is, what really makes Greater Manchester unique from your point of view, and where have those points of difference or its traits come from?

Mayor Andy Burnham

I always describe it as a place that never walks on by on the other side. That for me is the kind of Manchester I’ve known through my life. That’s the spirit of the place. People look out for each other. It’s always been like that. The DNA of Manchester, Greater Manchester, is sort of bound up in collaboration, working with each other, helping each other. So I’ve always been fascinated by Manchester. I was born in Liverpool, as people may know, and Liverpool has different DNA. It’s similar actually. It is similar. They’re almost like, not quite twins, but they’re certainly in a similar family but it is different. And Manchester’s always had a pragmatism about it, but a real kind of demonstrable conscience if you like and a commitment to work with each other in a very practical way. So yeah, I’ve always been quite fascinated by the sort of Manchester culture and it goes back a long a long time.

Caitlin Morrissey

Where does it go back to then? Where do you see the emergence of this trait of collaboration? Because I completely agree. We’ve heard it in the first three episodes that our listeners will have heard that this seems to be one of the defining traits of the city.

Mayor Andy Burnham

For me it goes back to the I would say early ‘80s. My Dad got a job in Manchester that’s what kind of moved us out of Liverpool. So although I was born there, I grew up halfway in between and actually spent more time in Manchester. So my early years around the Arndale and then as I got a bit older around Affleck’s, it wasn’t called the Northern Quarter then, you know, it was a very different place. But I just loved it. I loved the feel of the place and I loved the sort of, as I say, the friendliness of it and the directness of it as well. I just bought into it. So I kind of absorbed Manchester in the ‘80s when it was obviously a place when it was so vibrant in terms of what was, I should say, depressed on the economic front, but vibrant on the cultural side and the music side. So that was kind of my introduction to it.

But then, you know, I came back from university here, worked in Middleton for a little while and obviously saw Manchester in that period, the early ‘90s. Left, worked in London for a while. And it was kind of a fascination then as things started to change in the late ‘90s, my kind of brain came back here, became an MP. And I was really lucky to watch Sir Richard, Sir Howard sort of build the sort of modern Manchester we know today and lay the foundations for where we are today. Because everything they were doing was kind of true to the DNA as I understood it, highly collaborative, highly pragmatic, but also entrepreneurial, and that’s always been a part of the Manchester thing as well. Get on in life, succeed. It’s never been a place that has dragged people down. It’s always celebrated success and that’s something that is typically Mancunian too.

Caitlin Morrissey

And so when you think about Greater Manchester, is there one Greater Manchester or are there many? If there is more than one, what differentiates different Greater Manchesters? How can we understand plurality in a city? And then on the flip side, what is the tapestry that holds the city region together?

Mayor Andy Burnham

I think there are different Greater Manchesters in the minds of different people depending on their age more than anything I think. For the older age group who remember the pre-Greater Manchester days I think they do look at it differently and perhaps don’t buy in as much. But I think for anybody under my age and particularly under 40, I think it is their identity. Even as far flung as Wigan or Marple to the south or Ramsbottom to the north, in those places, those young people if they’re anywhere else in the UK or anywhere else in the world, ‘Where you from?’ ‘Manchester.’ For them, I think it is their identity and I think it’s got stronger through devolution. I don’t want to over claim in this space but I do think the change in the way that we talk about the place, the way we talk about GM – Greater Manchester – a lot I think kind of binds people in more and more. You know, the Bee and the Bee network and all of that identity has kind of has grown and grown actually over recent years.

So it’s a changing thing, isn’t it? I do think, perhaps, the over 75s still think ‘Lancashire’ whereas I think the younger generation is bought in. They like GM, what it’s about, what it stands for, where it’s going. I think increasingly it’s attractive to people who aren’t from here. They come here to buy into what it’s about.

Caitlin Morrissey

I wanted to ask you specifically about what you see as the relationship between Greater Manchester’s DNA and devolution. But I had a follow-up question, which is about your work as Mayor. And it strikes me that some of what you’ve just said relates. The Bee Network is a huge visible sign of this city region stitching together. So are there sort of interventions that you’ve led as Mayor that you feel have shaped the narrative of Greater Manchester and how do you see the relationship between the DNA of the city and devolution in that context?

Mayor Andy Burnham

It’s such a really good question that. I think there is a really important relationship between those two things. And I think the great thing about devolution, it’s allowed the GM identity to come through even more than it would have done or did do in the old Whitehall-run world. I don’t think the full character of this place did come through. Whereas as we’ve taken more power to do more for ourselves, I think increasingly the sense of what we’re about has maybe come through to the country and actually, people kind of like it. They think you know what, a bit more of that is probably what we need. And the thing is, if you go back into history, if you look right back into the 20th and then the 19th Century, the role of Manchester before it was Greater Manchester very much was to be a sort of challenger to the establishment; a more radical worldview compared to the very traditional institutional view down south. I mean, you can trace that back through the Suffragettes, the creation of the trade unions, the cotton workers not handling slave picked cotton, Peterloo. You can kind of trace that all the way back. And I kind of feel maybe a lid was put on a bit in the 20th Century, you know, where everything was a bit more top-down. And actually the lid’s been taken off again. And I think that character is coming through little bit more and the country likes it. I think they like the idea of GM standing for something slightly different to London.

Caitlin Morrissey

I mean, it’s so interesting because in the podcast we look at lots of cities and you see, when you take a really long perspective of a city, sometimes you see them finding ways to return to their own DNA, and that’s a really good example of that, I think. I hadn’t really put it together like that before.

Mayor Andy Burnham.

I think they always will, won’t they? I think The DNA of Cities is real. I really believe that. I mentioned Liverpool before. I love the two cities, but they are different and they do have different DNA. I mean, they both have traces of the same because they have Irish DNA and that brings a certain humour and a certain outlook on life. So there’s elements of the same, but it is nevertheless different. But I think cities do in the end always come back to their true character.

And Liverpool’s got great elements of its character around resilience and grittiness and never giving in. And they’re kind of complimentary in many ways, but they are different. But I think this is the great thing about English devolution. The cities of England outside of London, I think, have been suppressed. They haven’t spoken clearly as they would want to. They haven’t done things that perhaps they would have done in a different world. And they’ve all got a great character, I think that’s one of the beautiful things about our country. I’m not a great fan of the accent, but the Brummie character is a distinct character. It’s a sort of, you know it is, it’s quite a warm and I relate to it. Bristol, the same, but obviously you go to the great cities of the north, they’ve all got similarities, but that sort of uniqueness as well. And that I think has, in the sort of late 20th Century, I think that was suppressed or it found its expression, let’s say, not through public policy, more through music or humour or football. But the great thing now is we can express ourselves through all of those other things, but also through the choices we make about the policy direction we want to go in.

Caitlin Morrissey

So moving the conversation up to Great Manchester’s place in the world. We’ll start by trying to understand the Great Manchester’s roles in the United Kingdom and how those have evolved. You’ve mentioned Greater Manchester vis-à-vis Liverpool. There’s some similarities there, but they’re very different places. London, Bristol. What do you see as Greater Manchester’s roles being in the UK, historically and contemporarily, and perhaps in future as well? What’s the trajectory?

Mayor Andy Burnham

So I do think it’s disruptor, as I was saying before, both economic and social. Particularly the social disruption has been what it’s always done and arguably is doing today because devolution is disruption. We’re challenging the status quo. We’re playing back a sort of version of things to Whitehall that it doesn’t always like to hear and it keeps resisting, but we’re quite persistent and we eventually persuade them and that’s a good thing. So I think that is part of our role, and long may that be the case. I think people here like that. When I stood up to the government as was over Covid, you know, I remember here people really saying, no, do that, come on, we’re behind you. Because that’s definitely in the DNA of people and in the place for sure.

But it’s not sort of UDI either, you know, People’s Republic of Great Britain. It’s an element of that. But I think there’s a sense of, as I say, pragmatism, patriotism here, people want a fairer country and they want to be proud of that but also our place within it. So I don’t ever see us as sort of going off and completely doing our own thing. I want to have the government with us. But as I say, for me, particularly when it comes to trade missions or whatever, I’m always quite happy to have UK government with us, GM out front. So I kind of feel, you know, that’s where the relationship is. We are a bit of a challenger. We are a bit of a disruptor. But at the end of the day, we’re not a sort of breakaway type place, I don’t think anyway, unless the mayor after me is going to come and declare something different. But I push the boundaries, let’s say, but within a belief in, yeah, the Bee means something in Greater Manchester, i.e. the 10 boroughs working together. But that collaboration that we believe in applies to the other English regions, the nations, you know, we’re partners, aren’t we? We don’t go off on our own. The GM DNA says you work with people, you always achieve more doing that. You know, we’re natural collaborators and I think long may that be the case.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you, Andy. So on your trade missions, you’ve just recently returned from Japan, but you talk about Manchester on the global stage regularly in your role as Mayor. Why do so many cities call themselves the ‘Manchester of’? What does that refer to from your point of view?

Mayor Andy Burnham

Well, can I refer you to a book I read actually while I was in Japan called Made in Manchester by Brian Groom?

Caitlin Morrissey

He’s on the podcast!

Mayor Andy Burnham

The Financial Times journalist. And I really kind of enjoyed it when I was out on a trade mission because it really like, you know, it gave me a lot of, I don’t know, inspiration and I enjoyed it. But it really brought over why the world called themselves the ‘Manchester of’ this or the ‘Manchester of’ that, you know, this was the place where all eyes were upon us, you know, and good and bad because I think in Germany at the time, Manchesterism was seen as a very bad thing. I think we were attracting comment for a whole host of reasons. But the extent to which Manchester was disrupting in that period was, you know, incredible. And actually we were in Japan because Osaka is known as the Manchester of the East. And the story there was quite incredible about how students came from Japan, took drawings of all the machinery in the mills and took it back and replicated it there.

That fascinates me, all of that, but I play to that history as Mayor of Greater Manchester because there’s something really circular, isn’t there, about how the world came here and took our technology and made it work for their prosperity in the 19th Century. It’s a great thing now isn’t it that we’re open to what they’re doing and their technology. In Japan obviously green technology and hydrogen we were talking about. Well, it’s great modern Japanese technology then comes here and helps us with our 21st Century objectives.

Back to the DNA of Manchester, This has never been as far as I understand it a narrow minded or insular or isolated place. It’s always been a place that’s been open to the world, welcoming people in, showing them the mills, letting them take it. The partnerships actually that grew from the Platt brothers in Oldham who were the world leaders in all of this stuff at the time and Toyoda, who became Toyota. It was amazing to be in Tokyo and somebody from Toyota saying, ‘Yeah, we trace our history to Platt brothers in Oldham.’ It was like, ‘Wow, do you?’ To hear them saying it was actually amazing. But the point being, this is a part of The DNA of Manchester that really needs to be stressed, particularly in these quite toxic, dark times that we’re living in. This has always been an internationally minded place. This has always been a place that’s been open to other influences, open to the world, curious about the rest of the world, a place that’s always kind of faced the future and sort of embraced it with all of its complexity. Yeah, long may that be the Manchester way.

Caitlin Morrissey

And when you’re on the stage talking about Greater Manchester, what do you feel the world needs to understand? What is the story that you tell to the world about the city?

Mayor Andy Burnham

Well, I always take great pride in telling the story of industrial progress and social progress and there not being a sort of division between those things because that definitely has been the Manchester way. You could argue maybe it’s a caricature but you kind of think of London in the southeast, slightly more ‘I’m all right Jack’ you know? It’s all about the rush for money. There definitely was that here but there was always a pull from the people to say, what about the people? What about the common interest? And that is, I think, unique in our DNA. The fact that Peterloo happened here, the fact that those cotton workers wouldn’t handle slave-picked cotton. An incredible story if you think about it, 1862. The fact that the trade union movement was founded here.

I tell that story repeatedly because I draw my own inspiration from it. I see myself in this role as the inheritor of that tradition and I consider it my responsibility, my personal responsibility to be true to that tradition. And if I wasn’t and I didn’t tell those stories, I feel I’d be failing in my role as Mayor of Greater Manchester. The great thing about devolution, to come back to a point we were touching on earlier, it will succeed the more that you really let the true character of the place come through. And I see that as part of my job. I keep saying to people who are very sniffy about when I go DJing here and there, I keep saying, ‘Hang on a minute! That’s part of my job as well’ because this is a party town as well, whether you like it or not. That’s in the DNA of Manchester as well. What is the phrase? We invented the weekend. Well, I think we did. People’s enjoyment of life as well, you know, the good things in life, you know, working hard, playing hard, all of that is wrapped up in the Manchester DNA. And as Mayor, I feel I’ve got to celebrate all of it. I celebrate our music, I celebrate our football clubs, but I also, you know, always come back to that industrial past and the extent to which it forged that social progress.

Caitlin Morrissey

It’s so fascinating to hear you talk in such a conscious way about your as Mayor and the DNA of Greater Manchester and how they collide. As you’re the first mayor of a city region that we’ve spoken to, we spoke to the former mayor of Vienna. But it’s really fascinating to have this opportunity to speak to you as someone in this position about how the DNA of the city that you govern shapes your role and what you see as your responsibility.

Mayor Andy Burnham

Well, I mentioned Sir Richard and Sir Howard. But can I mention someone else who was definitely the first unofficial mayor of Greater Manchester and that was Tony Wilson because I watched him closely as a young man, certainly watched him on the television, saw what he did in the music scene. But then when I became an MP in the early 2000s, got to meet him and got to sort of see how he worked and what he did and he was incredible actually. And to me I learned, honestly, I learned so much from him because he-- I mean, if anything’s defined my political career, it’s been a kind of, bit of a chip on the shoulder about the North and I don’t shy away from saying that. That has been my thing. But I kind of saw the way Tony talked about the North and got its issues raised, but with a twinkle in his eye and a laugh and a joy. And I kind of loved the way he wove that story about the place into what he was trying to do now. I honestly, he to me was the first unofficial Mayor of Greater Manchester for certain, and in many ways the weaving of those stories, the sort of fabric of the place, where we’ve come from, all of that I consider to be tremendously important. I must be honest with you, I learnt from the very, very best.

Caitlin Morrissey

It’s also fascinating to mention the kind of way you tell the story, there’s a kind of Manchester way of telling these stories and having these conversations.

Mayor Andy Burnham

What, embellishing them you mean?

Caitlin Morrissey

That’s warm, but there’s a twinkle as well. I think, yeah, I’m sure many of the listeners will be pleased to hear you reference Tony as the unofficial first Mayor of Greater Manchester.

Mayor Andy Burnham

Yeah, I think a very big part of the tradition here is embellishing these Manchester stories and what was it? ‘What Manchester does today, the world does tomorrow’ I mean, we’ve got these quotes, haven’t we, and doing things differently and all that. I think we do the myth of Manchester, we all do that very well. We all talk it up and build it. But I love that about it as well. My Mother who very much was fond of Manchester but she’s a Scouser, that’s her loyalty. She would have always said, ‘Oh, Manchester’s got tickets on itself.’ And what she meant by that was it was always a bit boastful, a bit braggy, but that’s it, that’s what it is. That’s how it has kind of made itself what it is. It’s had that bit of, well, swagger’s an overused word, isn’t it? But it is about a bit of that. It’s kind of promoted itself that bit more than other places and it’s done it without feeling embarrassed about doing it. There’s a good thing about the sales pitch of Manchester and I buy into it as well. I just buy into what the place has been about. It just resonates for me, this place where people can get on, but don’t as I say, walk on by, and that for me is a good philosophy on life, basically.

Caitlin Morrissey

And when we look at the kind of last 50 years in Manchester, obviously, this was conditioned by the shock of the industrialisation. And we heard from Brian Groom actually that one way to understand this is you can use the analogy of someone who’s got a really successful career and faces a sudden redundancy in it, that kind of shock of losing something that you’ve proudly built up and you’ve been associated with. So just coming back to this sense that you’ve said that Manchester kind of tells, buys and produces these myths by itself, it proudly tells them. It just strikes me as a really fascinating character to the city because you can imagine that other cities who have suffered the great loss like Manchester did and the struggle to get by was tremendous in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but it still had the wherewithal to tell its story of itself, whereas others may have shied away. Does that make sense?

Mayor Andy Burnham

It does make sense and again, because I do have a loyalty in the Liverpool direction I think Liverpool does it too, but it does it in a different way. I think it maybe is linked to the Irish connection about mythologising and storytelling and where we’ve come from. There’s something in the Irish sort of mentality, I think, that brings a bit of that to both cities. Both cities are good at telling their story and what they’re about. Liverpool, the of sense that the fight for justice and fairness. That is really in their DNA and rightly so. To a degree it’s in Manchester’s too, but Manchester has that slightly different thing about the prosperity and the rival to London that’s a bit more in the narrative here. But I think both have that storytelling side to the place. The music of both places is different but kind of reflects some of that as well. I kind of love that about these places. And I also love the fact that they have been done down and therefore have got so much more to give and I think that’s true absolutely of Manchester. I think it’s flourishing again. I’ve used the phrase that some people raise an eyebrow at, but I’m going to keep using. I think what’s ahead of us directly is our best period since the Victorian period. I do think the 20th Century was pretty disastrous for Manchester and Greater Manchester in the way that Brian Groom described. It just was a sense of things are slowly being stripped away from us. I think that was, well, it was my sense of growing up here when I heard my Dad talk about his job and the fears and it was a depressed time. But it was then the sort of the music and the football that kind of somehow kept people’s hope alive. But it was a decline definitely no question about it and I do feel it’s reversed. For me as somebody who came back here from university, tried to work here and I had to give up and go south, and my experience was true of so many people in this city born in the late ‘60s, ‘70s. The fact that now more Londoners are moving here than northerners are moving to London, to me that’s an amazing thing, that turnaround in those 30 years. It says to me that what’s ahead of us between 2025 and 2050, I think we are going into our best period, as I say, since the Victorian age. What’s not to like about that?

Caitlin Morrissey

And I’m going to ask you about that specifically because just yesterday when we talking, the new 10 year Strategy for Greater Manchester was launched so we’ll come back that in just a second. But while we’re talking about the way that Greater Manchester responds to shocks and tragedies, is there something about the way that the city responds that tells us about its character?

Mayor Andy Burnham

Yes, I mean obviously you can go straight to 2017 and the response which actually was led by the people. I was two weeks in and obviously it was a really traumatic moment, appalling, evil act that was committed, and how does a city respond to that? And I’ll be honest, I had a sense of how it might but I wasn’t certain.

I’ll never forget actually being at the vigil and Sir Richard Lee said to me, ‘Look, there’ll be no political speeches, but we’re to have the vigil because the city needs to come quickly back together.’ I’ll never forget being there. It was Richard’s idea to ask Tony Walsh to speak at that vigil Something happened that night that I will never forget, which was, again, the DNA of the place stirred and the kind of response came from that which was ‘we’ve been shaken here but we’re going to quickly re-establish us and what we’re about’ and the poem spoke to that. But then the people’s reaction to the poem asserted that and it was quite something to behold. Honestly, I will never forget that as long as I live. But something of the same was evident in 1996. I was in the city that weekend. It was Euro ’96, massive bomb as we know at the Arndale and I remember thinking well the Euro game will be off at Old Trafford tomorrow. Well, it wasn’t. Manchester kind of has this thing about ‘We will not be moved, we will not be shaken, we will carry on. We are resilient and we’ll do it together.’ That’s a real reaction. You can’t fake that. In fact, you can’t mythologise that like we like to do. You can’t tell a fake story about that. It either happens or it doesn’t. And it happened, obviously, in both of those occasions.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you very much for saying that. I wasn’t here when Tony Walsh read his poem after the Ariana Grande bombing, but even the video conveys some of the feeling and I can’t imagine how magnified that was on the day because anybody I talked to in Manchester vividly remembers.

Mayor Andy Burnham

It was electrifying and I was standing right behind him and there’s a phrase obviously that people use that you hear it and you hear it trotted out. For the first time in my life, I saw it really mean something right in front of my eyes and it’s the phrase ‘rise to the occasion.’ I saw Tony physically kind of rise in front of the crowd and lean into what he was saying and it was something of a kind that I don’t think I’ll ever-- it was an electrifying thing to see it and the reaction from people and it built and it built and then the kind of applause got louder and it was really something and is something uniquely Manchester, I think.

Caitlin Morrissey

I mentioned a couple of moments ago that the Greater Manchester Strategy was just released, the next 10 year strategy and my final question to you Andy is to ask what is the future of Greater Manchester and how will its DNA shape that future as you see it?

Mayor Andy Burnham

I think it’s a really, really optimistic future because of what many, many people through many generations have built before me, which is this determination to collaborate, to keep building this place and making it stronger. And all of that is starting to really blossom. Now, the first decade of devolution has given us a confidence. It’s shown we can do it. And I just feel what comes next gets really exciting. Whether I’m here to see it all unfold, I don’t know. But certainly I want to be around for the coming period to see the city really break out into everything that it could be. There’s no reason to kind of be held back anymore. We’ve made the case. We’ve got the ability to do more for ourselves. Let’s just go and do it. And it’s such an empowering sort of moment to be in.

So I kind of just see the place going from strength to strength. I actually see this place changing the country in the next two decades. I think what we’re doing is undeniable. I think what we are prioritising are the right priorities, not just for here, but for the country. Greater Manchester in its past has led social change. It’s going to be doing it again, perhaps in a more meaningful way than it’s ever done before because it’s really going to start to change the running of this country.

Yeah, I feel a bit of a sense of fulfilment, really. I came into politics to kind of really challenge this idea that the North was a second-class place with second-class citizens and we had to always accept second-best, and I kind of feel that we’ve punched through that now and actually, if anything, the eyes of the country are on us, not on London and the South East. They’re saying, okay, what are they doing next? What’s their next sort of move? We’re kind of in that place, we’re in the spotlight. And Manchester likes a spotlight. I think that’s in the DNA as well. Manchester doesn’t shy away when the spotlight is shining. You go and walk into it and you do your thing. So Manchester’s going to be doing its thing over the next 20 years. I think it will shine in the national and international spotlight.

I’m very optimistic. I’m not saying any of this by the way though without recognising there are still huge social challenges, there’s still huge inequality in the city region. So many kids growing up here don’t currently have their full life chances that they should have. However, as we change economically because of who we are, because of the plans we have, lives will change as well. It will once again be economic progress and social progress hand-in-hand.

Caitlin Morrissey

Andy, thank you so much for taking the time for this amazing conversation we’ve had.

Mayor Andy Burnham

You’re welcome. Thanks for having me on.