Another election that catches my business eye is the one for mayor of Greater Manchester. The winner will have a powerbase with huge potential: a city-region of 2.7 million people, an enterprise culture that has evolved over two centuries, an outstanding university science base, strong flows of inward investment, Europe’s largest industrial estate at Trafford Park, a global sports brand at Old Trafford, and a world-class airport. Yes, it also has problems of ‘entrenched worklessness’, NHS overstretch and underperforming schools — and nine of its ten local authorities are Labour-controlled. But that’s no reason to award the mayor’s job to yet another socialist opportunist.
I refer of course to Liverpool-born two-time leadership loser Andy Burnham, who is standing down as an MP in the expectation of mayoral victory on 4 May. Who am I to argue with the New Statesman when it says Burnham is ‘widely seen as an unprincipled flip-flopper’; but what’s more important is that he can claim no working relationship with Theresa May, has only lately paid lip-service to city-region devolution and the Northern Powerhouse, and has never in his life had anything to do with enterprise.
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