Manc To The Future

**Andrew Hunter Murray** (0:00)
Page 94 The Private Eye Podcast.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Page 94 My name is 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 has done a big speech, outlining his big vision for the future of the country.

**Helen Lewis** (0:19)
Can we also mention that he's called Andy Murray Burnham?

**Andrew Hunter Murray** (0:22)
I know, I know. Nightmare.

**Helen Lewis** (0:23)
There has been an optic in the number of Andy Murrays in public life.

**Andrew Hunter Murray** (0:26)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was just getting over the last one.

**Helen Lewis** (0:29)
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 had to gag at the beginning about how Kemmy Badnock wasn't going to like this and he was halfway into his out of his Manchester clothes. And he made a joke about how he's going to buy longer shorts or repeal the public decency. Like there was just a level of breeziness to it that I thought was quite good and somewhat refreshing.

**Ian Hislop** (0:55)
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.

**Richard Brooks** (1:14)
Right.

**Ian Hislop** (1:14)
About outsourcing, over-centralization, no money in the region. I mean, you do agree with some of these things.

**Richard Brooks** (1:22)
You know, the principle of more regional devolution, power to places that should know what to do with the money, you know, is a great one. The trouble is that while over the last few decades, while so much has been centralized, so much power and money has been brought into why all 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 twenty years or so.
What's left is often sort of cheerleading for the region.
It means there's no scrutiny in local journalism, really.

**Ian Hislop** (2:27)
So you're suggesting that with no one looking at how the money is spent, it might not go well.

**Richard Brooks** (2:35)
That's right.

**Helen Lewis** (2:36)
Do you perhaps have any examples of mayors who perhaps have spent rather like a drunken sailor and given contracts to their friends, Richard?

**Richard Brooks** (2:44)
Yeah, there's a chap called Ben Houchin, who's a mayor of the Tees Valley, who's not, sorry, not Ben Houchin, the former judge at the Political Podcast Awards in 2026

**Helen Lewis** (2:54)
The one who overlooked us, you mean?

**Richard Brooks** (2:56)
You mean the ones who didn't win, Andy? For some reason.

**Ian Hislop** (2:59)
Enough of this petty griping.

**Andrew Hunter Murray** (3:02)
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, Teeside as an example.

**Richard Brooks** (3:11)
Yeah.

**Andrew Hunter Murray** (3:12)
Where it's gone wrong and what could have been done to avert it.

**Richard Brooks** (3:14)
Actually, Houchin is in the Telegraph this morning writing about Burnham, saying why he'll fail. And he's, 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.
The thing is, he's made a couple of decisions that should be keeping him awake, that we've written about. Notably, with the spending of vast amounts of public money, which is what Andy Burnham is now proposing for regions around the UK.

**Ian Hislop** (3:53)
And it is re-industrialising, which is exactly what Burnham is proposing to roll out. These can create problems.