Labour metropolitan mayors need to work together to establish “a distinctive brand of northern Labour”, the shadow home secretary, Andy Burnham, has said, as he pledged to work with the party’s new candidate for mayor of the Liverpool area to create a “north-west powerhouse”.
Steve Rotheram, Jeremy Corbyn’s parliamentary private secretary, won a decisive victory on Wednesday over the mayor of Liverpool, Joe Anderson, and the MP for Liverpool Wavertree, Luciana Berger, to become the party’s candidate for mayor of the Liverpool city region.
The election was conducted under the alternative vote system. In the first round, Rotheram, the MP for Liverpool Walton, won 42%, Anderson 34% and Berger 25%. In the second round, once Berger voters’ second preferences were redistributed, Rotheram won 55% and Anderson 42%.
Rotheram said he wanted to send a message to Theresa May: “Prime minister, you may have backtracked on the idea of a northern powerhouse, but with Andy Burnham as the mayor of Greater Manchester and me as the metro mayor of the Liverpool city region, it’s our intention to create a north-west powerhouse.”
Burnham, who was selected to be Labour’s candidate in Greater Manchester on Tuesday, said: “I think Steve and I, and the other mayors that come through, need to create a distinctive brand of northern Labour. In a way that the party hasn’t done in recent times, it needs to speak very directly to people and represent them properly in terms of the way people think and feel.”
Labour’s dominance in the two regions means Burnham and Rotheram are odds-on to win their mayoral races in May 2017. The pair will appear together at a press conference next month to call for improved rail links in the north-west, which Burnham said would give the public a flavour of how the two politicians would work together.
“I think it’s a shift in the centre of gravity,” he said. “This idea that Westminster is the be all and end all is dysfunctional. I think Labour needs to learn from what happened in Scotland where arguably, after [the inaugural first minister of Scotland] Donald Dewar died, we neglected the development of devolution.
“People didn’t move out of Westminster to build it up and I wouldn’t say it completely explains our predicament in Scotland, but it partly explains it and we mustn’t make the same mistake again.”
The MP for Leigh said the new metropolitan mayors across the north of England – roles created as a result of a series of devolution deals – could join together. “I think any government of the day would be taking a major political gamble if they were to ignore the collective wishes of that cabinet of the north if we were able to construct such a thing,” he said.
Burnham said he wanted to make it clear that he was not “empire building” and that he would always put the needs of Greater Manchester first. “When the sharp elbows are needed I’ll be banging [Rotheram] out of the way. We are very competitive on a football pitch, so it’s not all brotherly love”.
The pair met in 2008 when Burnham was unexpectedly made culture secretary following the resignation of Peter Hain and Rotheram was lord mayor of Liverpool when it was city of culture. “He thought because it was a Lib Dem council that I was a Lib Dem, so he was a bit standoffish at first,” Rotheram said.
Burnham and Rotheram went on to work together on the campaign to win justice for the families of the victims in the Hillsborough disaster. “We got on like a house on fire since day one,” Rotheram said.
To be eligible to vote for Labour’s mayoral candidates, members have to have lived in the relevant area and been a member of the party since before 19 July 2015, a rule that excludes many of its new, largely Jeremy Corbyn-supporting membership.
Rotheram acknowledged that his support for the Labour leader had helped him in the race, but said many of those who voted for him were not Corbyn supporters.
“The freeze date was 15 July 2015, so most of the Corbynites hadn’t joined the Labour party by then so it didn’t have a massive impact,” he said. “But I think loyalty played a part … I’ve been criticised for being too loyal, but loyalty is a commodity in short supply in national politics.
“People have looked at [the situation] and thought: ‘Well I might not agree with Corbyn and I might not support him, but I don’t think what’s happened to him is right, so it’s right to be loyal’.”
The Liverpool city region has a population of 1.5 million and covers five Merseyside councils – Knowsley, Liverpool, St Helens, Sefton and Wirral – plus Halton in Cheshire. The area’s new mayor will oversee transport, planning and education for the over-16s, as well as a £900m, 30-year investment fund.
