The drinkers outside the Slug and Lettuce on Manchester’s Albert Square were enjoying a light sprinkle of a rare luxury: rain. Four bald men with pints relished the few droplets that could be squeezed from the muggy summer sky. No one took much notice of the two armed policemen guarding the entrance to the offices above the square, which contain the (temporary) new offices of the new Prime Minister (who is also temporary, but hopefully less temporary than the last one). For one day a week, Burnham plans to run the country from No 10 North, one floor of a generic 1980s office building in the shadow of the city’s magnificent town hall. Around the corner, in a Quaker meeting house, the race for his replacement as mayor of Greater Manchester is under way.
The first candidate to arrive on stage at the Friends’ Meeting House was Geraldine Coggins, of the Green Party, who sat for several minutes on her own, making notes, before heading off to speak with a staffer. She looked energised. This race was another in which the Greens had a reasonable chance, and little to lose. The others arrived: Bev Craig, the Labour leader of Manchester City Council; the Lib Dems’ Richard Kilpatrick, the Tories’ Phil Eckersley. A woman on my row was trying to spot the Reform candidate. “There,” she said, nudging her husband, pointing to a heavy-set bloke with a bright pink face, but the man took a seat in the audience. “OK – him – that’s Reform,” she declared of a scowling man in his thirties with aa side parting walking towards the stage, but this turned out to be the sound engineer. In fact, the Reform candidate, Sian Astley, had only made it as far as the front door before flouncing off. She would later claim that she had left in solidarity with an independent candidate who hadn’t been invited, but it’s possible she also didn’t fancy answering questions about her recent proposal that Green and Labour voters should be made to accommodate “illegal criminals, rapists and economic chancers” in their homes. The crowd had to make do with shouting “chicken” and “shame” at her empty chair.
The hustings was organised by an online newspaper, the Mill, which was founded in the city in 2020 and specialises in local reporting. It was therefore mostly a discussion of local issues such as rough sleeping, childcare costs, housing and, of course, buses. But it was also a debate about the legacy of the new Prime Minister and the economic model he represents. For most of the time Burnham was mayor of Greater Manchester, the region’s economy grew at about twice the rate of the UK in general. But while real wages in central Manchester have grown faster than in any other major UK city, the region’s other boroughs have stagnated. Real wages in Bolton and Salford are basically unchanged since 2008. “We can all agree that it’s a lovely skyline,” said Kilpatrick, but it wasn’t one that the people arriving in the city on Burnham’s yellow buses felt they benefited from. Even the Conservative, Eckersley, said the “luxury skyscrapers” in the centre represented a form of economic growth that meant little to him in Trafford.
For most of the candidates, this meant that the new mayor should find a way to spread the economic growth from the centre to the wider region. For the Greens’ Coggins, it meant that some people’s money was bad. “I see this election as being about us taking Greater Manchester back from big money,” she declared. It’s not often you hear someone pitching to become mayor by promising to prevent people spending money in their city. Coggins’s idea is that Labour “and their developer friends” had ruined Manchester with all their horrible money, by increasing property prices (although this has also happened in places with no skyscrapers, from Cornwall to the Orkney Islands). She would fix this by building 10,000 new homes, none of which would be on greenbelt land, and buying and refurbishing another 10,000 homes, all of which would be let out “at genuinely affordable rent”. “We’ve done all the costings,” she said. “It all works out.” If you’ve ever watched Grand Designs, you will recognise immediately the confidence of someone who has never built a house (Coggins is a philosopher, by training) and feels confident that the price they’ve come up with is all they’ll have to pay. It’s often followed by a few years of living in a caravan. Assuming Coggins isn’t going to whip out a trowel and build 10,000 houses herself, she would have to do business with some of the property developers to whom she is morally opposed, and who she has, as she said, “spent the last decade fighting” whenever they wanted to build “executive homes” that didn’t meet her specifications for Green-approved housing.
Coggins speaks rapidly, hurling out syllables like she’s auctioning livestock. At one point, an audience member asked her politely to hold the microphone just a little further from her face. She wasn’t shy of dramatic statements. “Great Manchester is literally burning,” she declared, and: “Our planet is dying.” At one point she tried for some audience participation. “We all know that trans rights are…” she paused and looked meaningfully at the crowd, a handful of whom dutifully responded “…human rights.”
It would be very surprising if a left-wing candidate didn’t win here. Labour has won all three elections for mayor of Greater Manchester so far, with Burnham’s share of vote never dropping below 60 per cent. Craig, the Labour candidate, is certainly of the left: when asked which local government she thought Manchester could learn from, she cited China and Barcelona (where some of the local politicians make the CCP look positively centrist). “My pride will not be hurt by learning from… elsewhere, if they’re doing it better than us,” she said, before adding: “apart from London”. The audience responded with a chuckle of Mancunian pride.
For three of the candidates, this was a debate about Manchester, about local issues important to their core voters. Eckersley, the Tory, wanted to talk about policing, antisocial behaviour, the collapse of his local high street into empty units and vape shops with “garish frontages”. Kilpatrick, the Lib Dem, wanted to talk about his work as a city councillor. Craig wanted to talk about the Good Growth Fund and extending the cut in business rates to cafés. But for one candidate, this was a more fundamental argument.
In her career as a philosopher, Geraldine Coggins spent her time thinking about possible worlds. (The people who have the most to fear, if she wins, are the journalists who will be told by their editors to read her 184-page argument against metaphysical nihilism.) For her, this was a battle of paradigms, the new against the old, the creation of a “genuine alternative”. It was “a historic opportunity, just like Gorton and Denton, just like the local elections – we can replace Labour”, she told the crowd. And when you’re conjuring possible worlds, you can say anything. She repeatedly used the phrase “I’ve got plans for” when referring to community development funds, healthy homes funds, free buses for everyone under 22. She wants more gay police. She wants to twin Manchester with Ramallah. This is the luxury of being an outsider with a shot: you can say anything, and all you have to worry about is the risk that there’s a possible world in which you might win.
[Further reading: At last, a government that looks like it’s trying]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 29 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The new terror
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment