Head North (Andy Burnham’s manifesto to fix Britain)

Head North: A Manifesto to Fix Britain is a book by mayor of Manchester (and possibly a new MP and Prime Minister?) to fix Britain, co-written with his friend and fellow mayor (of Liverpool) Steve Rotheram.

You don’t have to be of any political party to know that there is a huge north-south divide in Britain. We all remember Andy on the steps during the pandemic, angry that Boris Johnson’s government was not giving the same treatment to people in the north, as in the Westminster bubble.

This book outlines an ambitious plan to fix Britian, discussing the challenges and lessons learned through their lives, including how the Hillsborough disaster shaped them, and how their time as MPs in Westminster saw them witnessing systematic flaws.

This ten-point plan is hoping to rewire our country, including:

• A written constitution for fairer government, preventing powerful vested interests taking advantage of current laws.
• Fair investment across all regions of the UK
• Removal of the MP whip system, so MPs can vote how they feel
• Fairer voting to make people’s voices heard, instead of the present first-past-the-post system. Apparently Andy Burnham prefers the List system (used in Scottish elections) which keeps MPs close to their communities.
• Devolution for regional areas to get more power.
• Replacing the House of Lords with an elected Senate of the Nations and Regions (presently, over half of all members of the House of Lords live in London and south east/east England).
• Giving technical colleges the same status as universities (viewing plumbers as important as academics).
• A Grenfell Law, so disasters like the tower block fire in a deprived area of Kensington can never happen again). With rules on better regulation (complaints were made by two of the victims before the fire started but they were ignored, about unsafe cladding).
• Introduce a nationwide version of the Greater Manchester Good Landlords Charter
• A Hillsborough Law, to ensure historic justice victims are not ever treated the way that relatives of the football stadium disaster were.
• Net Zero to a New Economy (better low-cost public transport, modern cheap and eco-friendly homes – Andy appears to believe these should be built more on central brownfield land and not on wildlife sites like the present Labour government).