 Formalizing a system of local lockdowns has opened up a new interesting dynamic between local leaders and the government in Westminster. It seems that after a tense weekend, the government has made some concessions, only minor ones. So in Liverpool, they were originally briefing that all hospitality would be closed, so restaurants and pubs. There was pushback from the local authorities there and in the end, restaurants. And I think pubs which mainly serve food, which includes weatherspoons, apparently, are going to be able to stay open. The other sort of concession was that Manchester is not yet in the highest category, although it seems like Boris Johnson is going to be pushing for that to happen very soon. And negotiations between government and local leaders will be underway this week to try and get more local authorities into level three. It is, I suppose, unsurprisingly, Andy Burnham, the mayor or the Metro mayor of Manchester who has sort of really represented this pushback against the centralising impulse from the Conservative government in Westminster. So we're going to go to a few of his interventions this weekend. So on... It was last night, in fact. He shared a telegraph headline saying, Last orders for the North, so that was the headline on the telegraph. And he says, you can almost hear the glee and the telegraph's voice in this headline and also in the voice of a senior minister quoted as saying, We want them to own it. By own it, I assume they mean the mess they created, but at least we're all clear about the strategy. So the point he's making there is very clear that these were plans drawn up in Westminster. They're necessary because of the measures over the summer, which were sort of designed with the levels of virus in the South-East in mind. He's pissed off. Another source, yeah, this is sort of evidence of that, this issue of the reason why you are seeing peaks or spikes in the North is because of policies in the South. This was sort of admitted by Jonathan Van Tam in his press conference earlier today that the reason we're seeing these high levels in Manchester and elsewhere is because it never actually went that low. So I'm going to get up a tweet from Andy Burnham today. So he here is quote tweeting Robert Peston, who tweets, Van Tam says, problem in North stems from the failure to reduce disease levels there as much as in South. He reinforces argument of some local government leaders in North that initial lockdown was eased to suit conditions in London and South rather than in the North. You can see there. Andy Burnham, I'm grateful to the deputy chief medical officer for recognizing this point. Too many rushed to blame the public in the North without understanding this. And then he shared some data there, which is showing that cases never really reduced that much in Greater Manchester in the same way that they did in London because their epidemic happened a little bit later than London's did. The biggest dispute is over what particular restrictions will be in place. We're going to talk a bit more in detail in a moment about the question of should pubs close. Is the curfew correct? Is it right that in those top tiers, all bars and pubs have to close? And finally, the issue of greater financial support and Boris Johnson obviously tried to underplay it in the press conference we just saw. But there does seem to be some real gaps in what the government is currently promising. So we're going to show a video now. This is Andy Burnham. I think it was sort of a Zoom press conference that some of the Northern mayors did over the weekend. To accept the Chancellor's package as outlined yesterday would be to surrender our residents to hardship in the run up to Christmas and our businesses to potential failure or collapse. And we are not prepared to do that. It would also run the risk of severe redundancies across the North of England, particularly when you combine the effect of any new local restrictions in this tier system with the end of the more general furlough scheme, which is still looming at the end of this month. And we estimate there are around 100,000 people in Greater Manchester still on the furlough scheme. If you combine the effect of all of those things, we think it would be to do long-term damage to the economy of Greater Manchester and the North of England. That was Andy Burnham speaking about all the lack of economic support being offered to the North from Westminster, even though they're sort of imposing all these restrictions. It's gonna be a common theme over the next weeks and months. But we're gonna go to our first interview of the evening. So earlier today to find out more about this sort of dynamic that's going on between local leaders and Westminster's, I spoke to a perfect guest, actually, Professor John Ashton. And so he was public or director of public health for the North West of England and is author of Blinded by Corona a manifesto for getting on top of the pandemic. So I started by asking John, whether the local authorities in Liverpool, in Merseyside, were right to accept new measures? I think absolutely that Greater Liverpool is correct to go with this and in fact to ask for it. We're in a very serious position at the moment. It's just like at the end of March at the beginning of April when the number of cases were doubling every few days are followed by the increase in hospital admissions and then the deaths. And what we know from that time, and this is all described in my new book, Blinded by Corona, is that we did too little, too late. And then as a result of that, we finished up doing too much too late. We locked down too late. We eased off too early. And now we're seeing this mess that we've got and where people are very confused about what's going on. That the whole of the North now, certainly the cities are not dissimilar to Merseyside and it's quite likely that other cities will have to follow suit in the near future. I mean, I think the fact that the political leaders have pushed back against some of this is mainly to do with the failure of the government to provide the adequate financial support to business and we're being asked to see public health as being somehow in opposition to business when actually they need to be hand in glove. If the pandemic now accelerates the way it looks possible, then the economy is gonna be stuffed and we have to try and get on top of this. Positive problem is that the very poor handling of this and the mixed messaging, the poor example by leading members of society, in particular Dominic Cumming has meant that there's no trust with the government and the young people in particular have been alienated by this. We're now seeing the political leaders have been alienated. So it's becoming very anarchistic. The government is unable to secure the loyalty and the following of the public and of the municipal leaders. This is a very dangerous position we're in. What needs to happen now is that the prime minister needs to put his hands up and admit that he's got it wrong. Hands up, listen to other people, broaden the circle of advisors. It's this narrow group of people drawn from the social circles in London and the academic circles that they all mix with. They need to give the money to the local authorities, public health teams, instead of stuffing the mouths of private companies with no track record of doing this kind of work who failed abysmally. They need to put that resource into the local authorities and they need to empower the local political leaders to make the decisions instead of constantly interfering. If we don't do that, I'm very fearful of what's coming down the tracks in the next two or three weeks. It does seem to me like potentially the government has learned from some of its errors or at least it's sort of speaking as if it has. So people like you have been arguing for a long time that test and trace should be a local based system, not one which is done on a national level with a big organization like CERCO. The government do seem to be saying they're gonna commit some more money to local authorities, they're gonna try and have more of a local system. I don't know if you feel like potentially the tide is turning. Oh, reluctant this handover. They're giving bits of it away. They're control freaks. I mean, they're like alcoholics who fall off the wagon. They pretend to be doing it and then they don't do it. What they're doing is still keeping control of the tracking and tracing or trying to. They will inform the local areas of complicated cases for testing and tracing when they've come back and done that work. Then they're mopping up the data back into the center all the time. This is the definition of a management consultant is somebody who borrows you watch to tell you the time. What this government is doing is collecting everybody's data, hoovering up everybody's data and then not giving it them back properly or giving them it all back. They need to commit to giving it all back. What the government should be doing is saying to the local areas and the regions, how can we best help you? That's the question, not telling them what to do and then throwing them tidbits. That's the way they're behaving at the moment. This is serious and it cannot be run by a group of largely men inside the M25. Our, I wanna go to you on this because I think over the weekend, you sent me a WhatsApp saying you've been speaking to friends in the North and you think it's all gonna start kicking off. We had a little discussion about that. Where do you think this sort of political tension is going? What's the direction of travel here? Kicking off is a strong word. What I would say is that right now, the explicit point of political tension against central government is coming from, to a lesser extent, Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon because she also has to administer a national response. If the SMP weren't in power in Holyrood, they'd probably be much more adversarial. Where you are saying it is Northern mayors. So you're seeing a little bit with Steve Rotherham. You're seeing it far more with Andy Burnham. And that seems to be an embryo, a sort of point of political counter power, an alternative political response. It's what you're seeing from Westminster now. Taking Siddique Khan as well. Obviously to an extent, you can't really do that with any real authority because they don't really have much executive power. They don't have huge budgets. But it's perfectly possible that all of a sudden people like Burnham, people like Siddique Khan start to out-ride Keir Starman and the National Labour Party. And what I think for unionists and for sort of British nationalists, what they should be incredibly grateful for is the absence of any real movement for devolution in England, for the north of England. Because you have Scottish nationalism, you have the SMP for decades. But what really makes that a national movement which can win is the Global Financial Crisis 2008. Shortly thereafter, they form a national government at Holyrood. And of course, we've seen their rise ever since then now by far and away the most dominant party north of the border. It's perfectly plausible over the next two, three years if we see this continued catastrophic economic and public health response, where it does seem to be a national policy almost of managed decline for much of the north. We know that rates of COVID in some Tory seats are worse than various places which are presently facing shutdown. So there is inarguably a political dimension to this and the party political dimension to it. Had there been that antecedent voice saying, look, Westminster's let us down, we need more devolution, we need more political power in the north of England, in the Midlands, I think this would be the time where actually that has rocket boosters underneath it. Which is a lesson there actually for people including on the left that you don't have to necessarily be winning things to make a difference because before you know it, an opportunity comes along like the Global Financial Crisis, that's what made UKIP, that's what made the SNP. Plausibly, this crisis might be the making of a devolutionary movement for the north of England. I mean, I think there's a lot to that. And it's also, I mean, in the same way that Nicola Sturgeon has sort of been able to use this to her advantage by saying, you know, Scottish nationalism, the case for independence isn't just a romantic one. And it's not just an anti-Torre one either. It's also a pragmatic one which is we're more competent than them. And also that sort of devolved government works better. Governments which are closer to the people work a little bit better. And I think you were gonna have a massive case study that sort of, well proves is a strong word, but a massive case study which is an argument in that direction which is the test and trace system we've had because we have had people in local government, people like Andy Burnham, to be fair to them, the front bench, even, you know, they could have done it louder but the Labour Party have been saying that test and trace should be in charge of local public health authorities because they're the people who know the area. Great article in the Sunday Times actually about this saying in Cumbria, they have so much higher rates of contacts with people because they know the area. It's often people who are known to authorities who are most hard to reach by a sort of national circle run system. And they just have found that these local systems are way more effective. The government is starting to admit it, partly because they now are desperate to get the Northern mayors on side and the Northern local authorities on side because they don't want to seem like they're imposing this as Andy Burnham there tweeted. They want the Northern leaders to have ownership of this so they can kind of blame them for it. And the government don't have to take the flak. But they seem to have recognized that these local systems which are close to the ground are much more effective than a national top-down circle run system. And it is the arrogance of people like Dominic Cummings who basically think, and I was thinking about this on the weekend, I was thinking, what's the relationship between the sort of theories of Dominic Cummings which is that, you know, things work well when you put exceptional people in charge. Most people are average, most people are incompetent. And, you know, he writes about the Manhattan Project where it's all like, you used to have a system whereby the least effective person in the team would get almost voted out big brother style. So you'd only sort of have the elites rising to the top and doing technocratic government. And what that ignores is, you know, I'm sure Dido Harding is fairly smart and qualified, but they've done this top-down system which is really disrespectful of anyone involved in it. You've got all of these outsourced people who have no background in public health. You've basically said to public health officials, oh, we don't believe you're particularly good at your job anyway, you know, we're gonna do this via a completely different top-down system. We're gonna reinvent the wheel. Then it obviously all fails and they go crawling back to the public health officials sort of saying, oh, can you actually help us out? No, no, it's all failed. And just as sort of Nicola Sturgeon on coronavirus is an example for why an independent Scotland could work better, the fact that this local system has been proved to be much better than the national test and trace system. It is an argument for devolution which I imagine people like Andy Burnham will start deploying.