Head North: A Rallying Cry for a More Equal Britain
Andy Burnham & Steve Rotherham (with Liam Thorp)
Published: 7th March 2024 on Orion Books
ISBN: 9781398719736
I can’t say I wanted to read this book. That’s not to question my commitment to the North – just look at this mag. More that I’m tired of politicians who can’t get their opinions straight, particularly those still committed to the L*bour Party. However, this book is by Andy Burnham and Steve Rotherham, both men with significant power over the region which STAT covers. And so, I feel compelled to skewer their part memoir, part manifesto so you don’t have to. For the culture.
It’s a book that begins with Hillsborough, something which was a politicising event for both authors. The media’s victim-blaming, police cover-ups, and total lack of justice over the deaths of those 97 supporters clearly sets out the understanding on which this book is written: Britain is unfair, and the North’s place within it more so. Once home to the industrialists and revolutionaries of the 19th century, the North is portrayed as a husk of its former power, now neglected, not like That London. Our duo rightly lay the blame at many doors – Whitehall, post-feudal power structures, privatisation, Thatcher – but oddly, they feel the need to justify these allegations via chipper backstories as insufferable as you might imagine.
Cultural class signifiers litter the first half of the book. The two of them flex their ordinary working man’s muscles, flaunting the extent of their childhood suffering (Andy’s family didn’t go on many foreign holidays) whilst parading their street cred. “Adidas trainers – pronounced a-dee-das, never a-di-das.” Apart from being largely uninteresting their nostalgia does nothing more than obscure their politics, or lack thereof, and contributes to the messy situation we’re in – whereby a person’s vibe means more than their economic positioning. You’ll be surprised to hear neither the term “property-owning class” nor “bourgeoisie” appears anywhere throughout the book’s 264 pages.
Only in the second half of the book do the duo reveal to us their plan to “rewire” Britain – there’s a turn of phrase you’ll have to get acquainted with should you choose to pick up a copy. It’s a largely inoffensive set of reforms: enshrining equal standard of living in all regions through written constitution, abolition of the whip and House of Lords, equality of legal support before the law. Most of it is common sense. Something I was not expecting to see in this book is the proposal of a right to housing. Not just rent controls, not just building affordable housing – a legal obligation of the state to provide housing to its citizens!
It’s at this point you have to ask why this book was written and who it was written for. If Andy Burnham truly does believe in a right to housing alongside various other reforms, why didn’t he push for these as a cabinet minister during his time in New Labour? Why didn’t he argue for these things during his campaigns for Labour leader in 2015 and 2017? And why is he still an advocate for the Labour Party under Keir Starmer? Burnham still refuses to rule out a return to Westminster and this book only serves as more evidence to a potential future leadership run. How are we to know it’s not all just lip service angled toward a despondent Labour left? How is he able to explain his record as mayor of Greater Manchester (we all know how well that’s going)? Hell, how can he explain away his dire record in parliament with the excuse of the party whip when it never stopped Corbyn? The man talks rather candidly about his realisation that Westminster wasn’t a vehicle for change after 14 YEARS and it seemingly took New Labour’s further privatisation of the NHS before he figured out privatisation was bad. A thousand lefties could’ve told him that nearly a hundred years prior.
The pair’s slipperiness is not improved by the retelling of an anecdote in which both were invited over to New York by Michael Bloomberg, multi-billionaire and currently the thirteenth richest person on the planet. The visit was for a conference on the value of mayors, something which helped the duo settle into their newfound roles back when they’d just started. They were hanging out with Henry fucking Kissinger. Worst of all, they are proud of this fact. They brag thrilled they still have r mate Michael at the end of the phone. How on Earth can you ever advocate for redistributive politics when you’re pally with its main detractors at brunches and galas?
This speaks to the fundamental issue throughout the book. Burnham and Rotherham advocate for “system change” consistently, and yet much of the system they accept as unchangeable. Over and over again they argue for the shifting away from metrics of profit and toward metrics of need, and yet in the same breath reassert the necessity for private investment. They argue against privatisation and Thatcherism and fail to see that a billionaire mate is emblematic of the problem.
There’s another word that doesn’t present itself through the entire length of the book: capitalism. This isn’t surprising, particularly if Burnham’s edging his bets for a leadership punt. It is cowardly, though. And a failure to identify, even name, this “system” doesn’t bode particularly well for their ability to fight its assumptions. They also barely mention the word “socialism”, merely reiterating that “Keynesianism… works.”
There’s much else here that could be criticised at length: the book’s patronising repetitiveness, the authors’ failure to address Militant’s presence during the 1980s, as well as the swerving of Preston Labour’s so-called Preston Model; particularly egregious given Manchester, Liverpool, and Preston share the same region. A feeling which permeates Head North, and the reason I spare these lengthy critiques, is that neither Burnham, nor Rotherham, have anything close to coherent political analysis. They barely wrote this book themselves, using the Liverpool Echo’s political editor as a ghostwriter – speaks well to our independent press, aye?
This book will satisfy neither the politically in-tune, nor those wanting to learn more. It is aimed at the Labourite policy wonks eagerly awaiting Burnham’s leadership challenge. And it feels nasty to say all this, because the two of them are largely unobjectionable on the surface, maybe even useful idiots occasionally, but lemme tell ya they’re no friends of the revolution.