MANCHESTER CENTRAL: ANOTHER CHANCE FOR RESPECT?

MANCHESTER CENTRAL

Could the drama of Bradford West be rerun in Manchester Central?

Labour chooses its candidate next Monday to replace Tony Lloyd who is set to resign to stand for Police and Crime Commissioner for Greater Manchester.

Manchester Central has some of the characteristics of the Yorkshire seat that saw George Galloway’s shock victory for Respect at the end of last month.

Nearly 30% of the electorate is non-white and many feel this would be an appropriate constituency for Labour to choose an ethnic minority candidate. It is long overdue for Manchester to end its white male monopoly representation at Westminster.

If that is to happen then Patrick Vernon is the man. He is Chief Executive of the Afiya Trust, one of the leading race equality health charities in the country.

However he faces an uphill task. He is a Londoner facing three experienced Manchester politicians.

Party bosses are hoping that Lucy Powell will be chosen. She is a close aide of Labour leader Ed Miliband but failed to dislodge the Liberal Democrats from the neighbouring Withington seat two years ago.

The other candidates are Manchester councillors Mike Amesbury and Rosa Battle.

If Lucy Powell is chosen, will she face a similar challenge from Respect that Labour failed to withstand in Bradford?

Probably not as Manchesteris a city well run by Labour without a hole in the ground where a shopping complex was meant to be, as was the case in Bradford.

But there will be nervousness about the timing of the contest after Galloway’s victory and because by elections that are caused by party manoeuvrings, rather than the death of an MP, often annoy voters and lead them to punish the party that held the seat.

 

FROM PRISON TO TOWN HALL?

The government hoped that a different type of person would stand to be elected mayors instead of the usual political suspects.

Well they have certainly got what they wished for in Salford. Paul Massey hasn’t got a political record, but he certainly has a criminal one. In 1999 he was jailed for 14 years for stabbing a man in the groin. Mr Massey will give a whole new meaning to the description “independent candidate” when he stands against the likely winner, ex-Labour MP Ian Stewart, in the poll next month.

There are ten candidates in Salford but a full dozen in Liverpool where the race will be on to stop the Joe Anderson political bandwagon.

One blow for the current council leader will be that he will not appear at the top of the voting paper.

Normally alphabetical order prevails but there appear to be different rules for this new post. Election officials carried out a ballot which resulted in Joe being placed second behind the National Front representative.

There are a number of quality candidates including successful businessman Tony Caldeira for the Tories, experienced Richard Kemp for the Lib Dems and Tony Mulhearn who has stuck to his socialist principles all his life.

But the independent candidate Liam Fogarty should be given serious consideration. Liam was my producer at the BBC and has been campaigning for an elected mayor forLiverpool when most of the other candidates were still pouring scorn on the idea.

Nominations are now closed for the two mayoral polls and the local elections across Lancashire, Greater Manchester and Merseyside. The parties are all likely to be affected by three extraordinary weeks in politics.

 

GALLOWAY: THE POLITICAL TROUBADOUR

By all means the major political parties should beat themselves up over the result in Bradford West. They need to ask themselves how a political maverick and a powerful social media campaign among the Asian community of that city, left them floundering.

However it is likely to be one of those by election soufflés. We have seen a few of them in the North West.

Shirley Williams was elected at the height of the surge of the Social Democrats in 1981 as MP for Crosby, but dismissed by the fickle electorate two years later. The SDP had a similar experience ten years later when Mike Carr won Ribble Valley on the back of poll tax anger. He lasted a year.

Chris Davies managed just two years as Lib Dem MP for Littleborough and Saddleworth from 1995-97 following a by-election.

By-elections, like the European Parliament elections are classic opportunities for otherwise serious voters to let their hair down and give the major parties a kicking knowing that the government of the country is not at stake.

Bradford West was a bit different because of the complex world of Asian politics which mixes uneasily with the traditional politics of Westminster.

We saw that in the 2010 General Election in Oldham East and Saddleworth where old Labour party apparatchiks answer to Muslim voters drifting to the Lib Dems was to “get the white vote out”.

But there was was no sign of the dodgy leaflets in Bradford that did for Phil Woolas in Oldham.

One suspects that in Bradford a fairly complacent Labour machine felt they just had to put up a well known member of the Muslim community and job done. But Galloway has been riding political bandwagons since 1987 when he defeated the leader of the Social Democrats, Roy Jenkins, in Glasgow Hillhead.

After saluting Saddam Hussein and getting expelled from the Labour Party, Galloway was at it again defeating an excellent MP, Oona King in Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005.

People made the mistake of thinking that pretending to be a cat slurping milk on Big Brother would do for him. But the Muslim community of Bradford West appears to have turned a blind eye to such decadence.

Certainly the younger members of that community have anyway, because there is evidence that a frantic surge of tweeting in the final days caught the main parties napping. The doorstep encounter is no match for the iPhone amongst the young. That’s something all parties will now have taken note of.

So where have all these events left the parties in our patch with a three weeks to go to the local and mayoral polls?

Despite Bradford, Labour is set to do well. We are now deep into mid term and that is usually a bad time for the party in power. Nowadays the government is both the Tories and Lib Dems, so it’s a win win for Labour. Also Labour did really badly in this round of elections in 2008 and can regain lost seats relatively easily.

For the Tories we only have to put together a few bizarre phrases to identify their short term problems.

Just think of a granny munching on an ambient temperature pasty while trying to fill a jerry can and you have identified that the Conservatives have temporarily lost the plot. They are heading for the mid term hammering that they avoided last year. But petrol and pasties will be forgotten if the underlying economic woes can be sorted out in the next couple of years.

The Lib Dems are perhaps staring down the barrel of a pistol rather than a double barrelled shotgun this year, but it stlll looks pretty dire for them. Local elections used to be great for their party. They were grateful recipients of the votes of people fed up with the government. But they are the government now and will only be saved in some places by the individual work put in by councillors in particular wards.

TROUBLED WATERS AND FAREWELL TMP

English Heritage isn’t the only organisation that Peel Holdings have to worry about now that they’ve got the go ahead for the Liverpool Waters scheme.

Lindsey Ashworth, the bullish development director for Peel, devoted much of his time at Liverpool’s Planning Committee to lashing English Heritage for their opposition to his plans for 150 acres of derelict dockland north of the Pier Head.

It is part of the much larger Atlantic Gateway project which stretches from the Wirral, up the Ship Canal to Salford Docks. That makes it an issue for the mighty Combined Authority of Greater Manchester and they have just fired a broadside across Peel’s bows.

A report suggests Wirral and Liverpool Waters should not be given priority by the Atlantic Gateway Board unless there is more robust evidence in its favour.

The authors are Mike Emmerich, boss of the New Economy policy think and Barbara Spicer, the Chief Executive of Salford Council.

They want evidence that there is market demand for such a large amount of Grade A commercial floor space outside a city centre. They demand an investment plan that shows the level of private investment and the cost of public support particularly in relation to infrastructure. They also question whether Liverpool/Wirral Waters will really contribute to the region’s Gross Value Added at minimum cost to the public purse.

We’ll see how significant these reservations are. Mr Ashworth is not a man to be easily put off his stride as he demonstrated in Liverpool Council Chamber this week.

He told the planning committee that he was seeking outline permission for the £5.5bn project after months of detailed work. Peel had tried to respond to heritage objections. The historic Dock Wall was being preserved although it put constraints on the scheme. But Ashworth claimed that English Heritage was still not satisfied. They seemed happy to leave the old docks to rot away. Peel would compromise no further and if there was a public inquiry, the company would walk away.

The planners gave the scheme the go ahead and take Ashworth’s threat so seriously that Liverpool Council leader Joe Anderson is seeking talks with the government to try and prevent a public inquiry.

It is possible to interpret this as over mighty behaviour by Peel Holdings which must recognise that it is operating in a democracy. Alternatively one can admire the commitment of this organisation to transformational change in North Liverpool.

It is now an issue in the mayoral election campaign with Joe Anderson backing Peel and independent candidate Liam Fogarty expressing his concern and not wanting to be elected mayor of “Liverpeel.”

The Liverpool City Region now has no excuse but to get its act together.

This week I went to the final event organised by The Mersey Partnership (TMP). Its economic review of the sub region was comprehensive and helpful.

Absent of course was Lorraine Rogers the organisation’s former Chief Executive. It took her resignation to break the log jam and pave the way next week for TMP to transform itself into The Liverpool City Region Local Enterprise Partnership under the leadership of Robert Hough. He will bring his renowned diplomatic skills to the task of welding the 6 districts together.

Rogers wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. It’s been suggested staff cheered on the news of her departure. Whatever the truth of that, Rogers deserves a lot of credit for the good work done by the TMP. The world of economic regeneration is far too dominated by men and it is a shame that Lorraine had to be a casualty of the process.

A TALE OF TWO CITIES

In the week when we are celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of Charles Dickens, I’m writing about two cities; not London and Paris but Manchester and Liverpool.

If you want to know the real issues facing business in Manchester city centre ask Pat Karney.

He’s the councillor responsible for the heart of the metropolis and everyone beats a path to his office.

At a major gathering of city centre employers this week, Cllr Karney gave them an insight into the diverse range of problems that came across his desk in just one morning. In addition to the uproar over charging for Sunday parking, one shop keeper came to complain about human excrement outside the Hidden Gem church and representatives of the gay community objected to a club being turned into a budget hotel.

Despite these minor inconveniences, Manchester seems to be surviving the recession very well. Indeed council leader Sir Richard Leese suggested that the city centre could accommodate a thousand new residential units a year for the next decade. There is 96% occupancy of the existing provision. Leese claimed that Manchester employment had returned to pre recession levels.

Leese does not want the city to vote for an elected mayor, he prefers the Combined Authority model that has been in place for nearly a year now. All the local authorities in Greater Manchester are working together to drive an impressive range of projects.

There’s the enterprise zone at Manchester Airport where the infrastructure for a major retail, leisure and warehousing scheme will be in place by next year. In addition there’s MediaCity and the Sharp Project in east Manchester for budding media businesses. So successful has the latter been that Sharp 2 is planned. Nearby Manchester City football club is developing the Etihad Project.

At Manchester University a government backed plan is underway to capitalise on the discovery of graphine (very thin and very strong). Are we going to make some money for once out of a product developed in Britain?

Salford’s soon to be elected mayor will inherit a city still struggling with some big social problems but with a number of infrastructure schemes including the Chapel Street gateway and a plan to open up a riverside route from MediaCity up to Salford University.

Meanwhile Liverpool Council took the formal decision to go for an elected mayor. Liberal Democrat opposition to scrapping the planned referendum was half hearted and the debate did not match some that I have witnessed in the historic council chamber.
Council leader Joe Anderson had the wind in his sails having just signed off the £130m deal with the government that he insists was only possible because the city was going to have an elected mayor.

One felt the politicians already had their eye on who was going to stand. Joe Anderson will clearly be Labour’s candidate. He might face ex leader and Lib Dem peer Mike Storey. The suggestion was certainly not denied by a senior party source. If Storey can’t be lured from the best club in London, then Cllr Richard Kemp might consider standing.

The Liberals will field Cllr Steve Radford who gave his support to the new post on Tuesday night, and there is likely to be a Conservative candidate.

But the campaign will be enlivened by independents. There are two at the moment and they make an unlikely couple. There’s former broadcaster Liam Fogarty who has campaigned for the last 10 years for an elected mayor. A clever man of substance, he cares passionately about his city. It will be fascinating to see how he stands up to the robust style of bruiser Anderson.

Then there’s celebrity hairstylist Herbert Howe who has promised to take no salary and to be independent of all party factions.

Before you dismiss his chances remember that Robocop got elected in Middlesbrough. H’Angus the Monkey won in Hartlepool and an English Democrat became mayor of Doncaster.