After six days of difficult and largely fruitless discussions with Downing Street, tempers were fraying among Greater Manchester council leaders and lawmakers on Thursday last week.
In a meeting at 9am between Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham and local government chiefs, Rochdale Borough Council leader Allen Brett told his colleagues that he was so fed up with London that he wanted to make his feelings clear to Edward Lister, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s close adviser, with whom the group was preparing to open yet another online discussion at 9:30am.
“I said I was angry, annoyed and frustrated,” Brett said. “I said I just felt like saying [to Lister], just stop messing us around. Tell us if you have the evidence for all this and that it will work — or not. Just tell us.”
Illustration: Mountain People
Brett thought his colleagues might disapprove of him going for Lister’s jugular, but instead they urged him on and said they all felt the same way.
Lister had been trying since Oct. 9 to convince the area’s leaders to agree to move into the new tier 3 level of restrictions to combat rising COVID-19 infection rates — a move that would mean the complete closure of all Greater Manchester’s pubs and bars again.
However, the talks had gone nowhere.
With Liverpool already having been forced to accept tier 3 restrictions because of high infection rates and hospital admissions, Lister was desperate for Greater Manchester to fall into line before ministers held online talks with local lawmakers, including its nine Conservatives, at 10:30am.
If they, too, agreed, the plan was that it could all be announced as a sealed deal, with everyone in the northwest united, in a statement to the British House of Commons by British Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock at 11:30am.
However, the Greater Manchester leaders wanted answers and evidence from London — not instructions and orders, or fake shows of unity.
They feared that the measures would inflict severe economic damage on local people, and leave many thousands unable to pay their bills in the run-up to Christmas.
Over previous days, anger had been building for many reasons. British Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak had said that just 67 percent of wages would be paid to those affected by the latest tier 3 closures, rather than the 80 percent that applied under the furlough scheme announced in March.
Why were people in the northwest being offered less than those in the spring national lockdown, they asked.
Manchester leaders had also had problematic meetings with Jonathan Van Tam, the government’s deputy chief medical officer for England, which made them wonder if there was any science at all behind the plan.
They had asked Van Tam if he could guarantee that closing pubs and clubs would bring the virus under control in their areas — and Van Tam said he could not.
When the meeting with Lister began, it was Burnham who piled in first, telling the man from No. 10 Downing Street that he had failed to provide any evidence of why closures would work, or reassurances about improved economic support.
“You are doing all this and telling us to go into tier 3, but you haven’t even answered the questions we gave you last time,” he said.
At 10:30am, things got even more fractious when the 29 local Labour and Conservative lawmakers began a meeting with Helen Whately, minister of state in the British Department for Health and Social Care.
Van Tam was present again. When Van Tam told the lawmakers — who included five Conservatives who had won their “red wall” seats for the first time in December last year — that people in pubs and bars who talked above loud music were more likely to spread the virus, Labour lawmaker Lucy Powell was so angry that she unmuted herself and told him in no uncertain terms that for 12 weeks it had been table service only in Greater Manchester, and that households had only been able to mix outside anyway.
Then, when Whately tried to hurry the meeting to an end, Jim McMahon, the Labour lawmaker for Oldham West and Royton, protested, telling the minister: “Well I am sorry if you haven’t got time, but people in this meeting represent 2.9 million people and you are going to have to listen to what we have got to say.”
When Whately summed up saying that she had heard many different views, most of the lawmakers — Conservative and Labour — unmuted too, saying that was nonsense, because they were all 100 percent united.
They did not want to go into tier 3 and that was that.
Conservative lawmakers had been just as critical as the Labour ones. Graham Brady, the Conservative lawmaker for Altrincham and Sale West and chair of the 1922 committee, said: “The case has not been made for Greater Manchester to move into a tier 3 lockdown.”
Another Conservative lawmaker, William Wragg, who represents Hazel Grove, was most outspoken of all.
He said: “I have news from Greater Manchester where the impossible has been achieved. All of the MPs, the leaders of the councils and indeed the mayor, surprisingly, are in agreement with one another, the meeting we had earlier today was entirely pointless. I may as well have talked to a wall, quite frankly.”
Greater Manchester was far from alone in breaking ranks last week. At the very time the government needed national unity behind the new three-tier system, different areas of the UK were pulling in different directions.
In England, resentment about rules being forced on them from London had grown among local leaders who had for more than six months been calling, largely in vain, to be given additional local powers to run their own anti-COVID-19 strategies.
It had all built up into an ugly mood.
“We have got Liverpool feeling cheated, Lancashire feeling bullied and Manchester angrily determined,” Bishop of Manchester David Walker told BBC Radio 4’s Today program.
“I think what we have seen in the last few days is that even long-held party loyalties are giving way to a widespread belief that the most urgent threat to life and livelihoods is not what is going on in Liverpool gyms and Lancashire pubs: it is 200 miles [322km] away in an increasingly disconnected Westminster bunker that seems to lack either the care or competence to get us through the crisis,” he said.
The spirit of regional defiance saw cities and areas put local interests first.
Liverpool City Region Mayor Steve Rotheram last week agreed to accept tier 3 restrictions because of the area’s acute problems with rising COVID-19 rates and hospital admissions.
However, he made clear that he would have preferred a short “circuit break” or national lockdown, as would Burnham.
Rotheram said he had been left with little choice.
“The government didn’t give us a choice on Tuesday, we were going into tier 3 no matter what,” he said, adding that he was still fighting for more economic support. “Of course, we want to preserve life, but we need a package of support to preserve the livelihoods.”
London, where Mayor Sadiq Khan has said he, too, would prefer a national lockdown, as well as Essex and York, were put under tier 2 controls, meaning tighter restrictions on household mixing.
Scotland closed pubs across its central belt earlier this month.
Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford last week imposed a ban on people from COVID-19 hotspots in other parts of the UK travelling to his country.
Pubs and restaurants in Northern Ireland were ordered to close and schools are to have an extended half-term break as part of a four-week “circuit-breaker” to deal with soaring cases.
Northern Irish First Minister Arlene Foster announced that the partial lockdown would also mean a ban on indoor sport, close-contact services, such as hairdressing, and public events involving more than 15 people.
Across England, Conservative concerns were not confined to “red wall” areas of the northwest.
Andy Street, the mild-mannered former businessman who is now the Conservative metro mayor for the West Midlands, issued a statement on Monday last week revealing that he did not agree with the decision to place the majority of the region into tier 2.
Street had been pushing for more flexibility to be placed in the tiering system.
Tier 2 would increase restrictions on hospitality, which he argued was not a big transmitter of COVID-19 in the region.
After weeks of close cooperation, relations “have soured,” one insider said.
On the night he won his stunning general victory in December last year, Johnson said he wanted to run a “one nation” government.
The Conservatives had taken dozens of Labour seats in the north and Midlands. Johnson promised to repay the trust of those former Labour voters by working night and day on their behalf.
The UK would be “leveled up.”
Just as former British prime ministers David Cameron and George Osborne had promoted the idea of a “northern powerhouse,” the Conservatives under Johnson were again promising big things for their new voters in working-class areas.
However, over the past week, the fight against COVID-19 has, in the eyes of many voters in those areas, made a mockery of such pledges.
Centralized policymaking, diktats from the center and refusals over the past few months by the Johnson government to devolve authority to local leaders in the fight against the novel coronavirus have instead fueled intense anger.
Some predict that COVID-19 could turn out to be as damaging to the Conservatives in the north under Johnson as the miners’ dispute was to the party under former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
Jim O’Neill, who served as a minister under Cameron, and who helped promote the northern powerhouse, said he did not know how the government could get out of the mess it had got itself into.
“How can you have a government with a prime minister who made his first two trips to the north to make passionate speeches about how he is going to do something about leveling up, now be pushing ideas that would do the reverse? I can see why the Treasury might want to penny-pinch a bit, but how on earth, when the government happily introduced the 80 percent furlough in March, now — when it relates to the north — can they say they will chop it to 67 percent?” he asked.
“If it is just about pubs and bars, why don’t they just guarantee the revenue of the pubs and bars?” he added.
Asked if the pandemic had demonstrated the case for more devolution, O’Neill said: “100 percent it has.
“The theme of the northern powerhouse is about treating the regions more seriously, including devolving policies seriously; and I think the crisis has demonstrated the case better than any words that ever came out of me or anybody else,” he said.
Even before the latest rows, Conservative lawmakers were angry with their own government for ignoring them and being too centralized. Now that anger has spread to the regions and cities amid cries that “one nation” promises have been betrayed.
Deborah Mattinson, author of a book on the red wall seats won by Conservatives at the latest election, returned to voters she spoke to then. Their responses suggest a shift in opinion might be under way.
Ian, a Conservative convert from Lancashire, was scathing, she reported for an article on the Web site of the Guardian.
“The whole lockdown thing isn’t working and needs a rethink. You can’t impose these ideas from the top. Andy Burnham knows the area and the likely impact on the area, but he hasn’t been listened to. I’m increasingly unconvinced by Boris Johnson, he’s not impressed me at all,” he said.
Courteney, from Middleton, was still more negative, saying: “I don’t think the north will recover fully for a long time if the tier 3 lockdown is imposed.”
Tony Travers, an expert in local government at the London School of Economics, said that the combination of COVID-19 and Brexit had highlighted the need for a “constitutional reset” involving real devolution, if trust in government was not to be further eroded.
“Attempting to deliver politically sensitive local lockdowns based on confidential data analyzed in Whitehall was bound to end in trouble,” he said. “Telling people in Bolton, Liverpool and Gateshead they had further to curtail their freedoms because of decisions by the Cabinet on the basis of numbers analyzed in London could only have worked if civic leaders had been brought fully into decisionmaking.”
“Until such power and resource-raising powers are shifted to mayors such as Andy Burnham, Steve Rotheram and Andy Street, leveling-up has no chance of success,” he added.
On Saturday, as the deadlock continued between Greater Manchester and central government, it was clear where most people in the city were placing their trust.
Inside the popular Wilson’s Social bar on Oldham Street, chef Romin Farahani said: “Burnham’s right on this, he’s the only one who’s stood up to them.”
Across the road, Mike Davis, barman at the Freemount pub, was withering about the prime minister’s handling of the crisis. “There is no science backing it [tier 3]. The 10pm curfew? What’s the point?”
And along nearby Hilton Street, Colin White, who runs Vinyl Revival, said his record sales were hugely down.
“Any impact on the night-time economy has a massive knock-on effect for us, we’re already 50 percent down. It’s a complete shitshow, but at least Burnham is trying to help the working man,” he said.
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