“Manchester is absolutely buzzing”, a recent visitor to the city told me. “I sat in a room with a group of senior business people and they were raving about Andy Burnham. How often does that happen with a politician?”
Burnham, who has been mayor of Great Manchester since 2017, is the golden boy of British politics. He has taken what was a new office and turned it into what might be the centre of the most exciting democratic energy in the UK.
Despite his limited powers, he has used his position to drive through changes that are boosting his city’s economy, its reputation and its sense of itself. It’s no wonder that a steady procession of politicians from across the country are visiting Manchester to see what he’s done and how he’s done it.
Scotland is not immune to the Burnham effect. In the SNP’s recent Programme for Government, Holyrood’s equivalent of the King’s Speech, there were announcements on planning and attracting inward investment that clearly owed something to measures adopted in Manchester.
But I’d argue that you can’t will the ends without enabling the means. And this means that Scotland needs its own version of empowered, independent, dynamic mayors.
Scottish local government is in a mess. It lacks the authority and the powers to manage the many issues dogging our cities. It lacks the money too – centrally imposed council tax freezes have tied the hands of its leaders and vital services are being cut as they try to balance the books.
I’m writing this in Edinburgh. If I were to wander into the street and ask locals to name their council leader, precious few would know that it is Labour’s Cammy Day. I’d bet more of them would know that Andy Burnham runs Manchester.
Scotland is exhausted after years of constitutional dispute that have left us back where we started – with a divided Holyrood that, under the SNP, has been a force for centralisation. The introduction of mayors would be a way to revitalise democracy in our population centres as well as to reinvigorate local government.
Scottish Labour understand this and plan to bring mayors to Scotland if they win the Holyrood election in 2026. “We’re definitely doing it,” a shadow cabinet minister told me recently. I think it likely they might pilot the scheme in Glasgow, Edinburgh and possibly Aberdeen.
But a willingness is not the same as a detailed plan, and I’m not sure Labour are quite there yet. What is the geographical plan, for example? Would mayors run Scotland big cities up to the point of the city boundary, or would they have a wider remit that took in broader regions? Would a Glasgow mayor work across the old Strathclyde Regional Council area?
What would the structure of the operation look like? Voters might welcome the idea of a directly-elected individual full of vim and determination, but what would they think of a new tier of government, with all the bureaucracy and possible expense that could entail? They already have MPs, MSPs and councillors – is it possible to create a mayoral structure that is inexpensive, using current council structures? Which powers would the mayors have and which wouldn’t they?
These are all questions that can be answered, but they do need to be answered before Labour is in a position to press on.
I certainly hope they do. If you look at the kind of people who have inhabited the offices in England, such as in Manchester, Liverpool, the Tees Valley, the West Midlands and London, they have attracted a certain type. Andy Street used to run John Lewis. Burnham is a former cabinet minister who left Westminster for a chance to transform a big city. Across the world, there are fascinating examples of mayors not being cut from the traditional political cloth.
Scotland needs a way of bringing people like this into politics. Holyrood is a unicameral chamber, which means that unless you stand for election for one of the parties, knock on doors on rainy nights and cut deals internally, there’s no way into the system. This rarely appeals to, say, business leaders or those who are not overly tribal, and so they remain, at best, at one remove from public life. Unlike Spain or France, Scottish ministers can’t really just co-opt outsiders into the machinery of government by appointment. It’s Scotland that’s the outlier.
And so the advent of mayoralties could provide an alternative and more attractive route. I know of a number of experienced, successful businesspeople who hold an ambition to run the city in which they were often born, now live, and have made their fortunes. They look at how entangled and slow-moving traditional politics and government are and see how the powers of an independent local figurehead with a direct democratic accountability to their electorate could drive change faster.
Alex Salmond’s government had wanted to give more autonomy to councils, but when Nicola Sturgeon took over that all melted away. Giving power away was never really part of her psychological make-up. We can see from the state of local government today that the current model is not fit for purpose – our cities need dynamic champions, willing to stand up to Holyrood and Westminster and their own parties if need be, and to drive economic growth, debate and aspiration.
This democratic shot in the arm is what Labour’s intention could bring to a country badly in need of one. It would allow us to have a constitutional conversation that is about something other than independence and that could bring people together rather than drag them apart. First, though, Anas Sarwar and his team need to work out the right way to do it.
[See also: The Tories are in a different world to voters]
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