“We need to listen to our MPs more, respect them more and I hope this deputy leadership contest will open up a debate about that whole approach to running the PLP and the Labour Party.”
The Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, has said that the next deputy leader of the Labour Party must be someone who can “root themselves in the mainstream, the heartbeat of the party”.
Speaking to Times Radio, Burnham also backed a northern woman for the deputy leadership contest. He said: “I think it helps because for all the reasons I was just saying, I spent 16 years down here and I felt I was banging my head against a brick wall at times because the default position is to think that the north can have second class infrastructure or second class services.
“That’s what needs to be challenged. We’ve not seen that shift and I’ve said that things still feel too London-centric to me. So I want a deputy leader who will be an authentic voice to challenge that, an independent voice to challenge that, but also will raise questions about the running of the Labour Party.”
Burnham also made clear that the deputy leader needed to be someone who could be both loyal but also someone who could be an independent voice and speak for what he said was the ‘mainstream’ of the party.
He told Times Radio: “We need to listen to our MPs more, respect them more and I hope this deputy leadership contest will open up a debate about that whole approach to running the PLP and the Labour Party.”
“I’m going to go back to that time when I was in the Labour government in the early 2000s and I remember the role that John Prescott did, the late and very great John Prescott. He balanced it, didn’t he? He was loyal, but he also spoke out and he kind of pulled the party back to its moorings when he needed to. We all appreciated that as backbench MPs…You need the MPs to be able to pull the government back to where it should be.”
“It’s got to have that degree of independence to be able to speak out fearlessly at times for where most people are in the Labour Party. That’s what the deputy leader needs to do, to speak for that mainstream of the Labour Party, to speak for the members when that is needed.”
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward
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