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Ready and Willing podcast: Andy Burnham
Wigan Today
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28/03/2025
Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham is questioned by a Wigan and Leigh College student in Coun Chris Ready's Ready and Willing podcast
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00:00
And another point is, when you have an issue and you have to resolve it, but you may have
00:05
people that don't have the same view as you, how do you work around that and maybe work
00:09
with them to resolve the issue?
00:11
That's a really, really important question, because at the moment in politics there's
00:16
a little bit of people sort of grandstanding, you know, they take a position on social media
00:21
just for the show of it, but don't actually sit down and try and move something forward.
00:27
You learn in politics, though, if you actually want to move something forward, you do have
00:32
to sort of meet people in the middle, and that seems a bit out of fashion at the moment.
00:36
You know, everyone wants to, as I say, stick in their own little place and, you know, sort
00:42
of, you know, take a really, you know, moral high ground position, but actually politics
00:47
is compromise, and it does require, doesn't it, sometimes to sort of find where you can
00:52
agree with people.
00:53
It looks like these days people are looking for where they disagree and making a big
00:56
deal out of that.
00:57
Well, actually politics should really be the art of finding agreement.
01:02
So the big example I could point you to in my career was Hillsborough when I tried to
01:08
reopen it following the 20th anniversary, and I realised, you know, I was so emotionally
01:12
and completely invested in trying to achieve this for the families, but I quickly realised
01:17
when I got back to Parliament that not everyone thought the same about it or prioritised it
01:22
in the way that I did, and I kind of felt I had to sort of build bridges, and to be
01:28
fair to her, Theresa May began to become interested in it and started to ask me something about
01:36
it because she'd heard me speak in the Commons on it, and I realised that that was a really
01:40
– if I could persuade her to become more involved as Home Secretary, that would be
01:43
like massive for the campaign, really, and she absolutely did and became as committed
01:50
as I was to the whole thing, and I don't think we'd have made the achievements that
01:53
we did without the help of what was then a Conservative Home Secretary or a Conservative
01:57
Prime Minister.
01:58
You know, the younger me wouldn't have imagined working with people like that, but in the
02:02
end in life you do have to reach beyond your own comfort zone and say, well, okay, I do
02:08
need your help, and if we're going to do this, it's stronger because we're coming
02:11
at it from different places, but we're going to meet in the middle, and the power of that,
02:15
of us coming together, will actually hopefully unlock it, as it did.
02:19
So, you know, it's a really good question, and I think your generation, if I could put
02:23
it this way, I personally think that my generation has messed up politics and left it in a pretty
02:30
bad state, and I think your generation, I've got real hope that you're all going to come
02:35
through and fix it again and make it work better again, because I think you see the
02:39
world in a good way.
02:40
You don't see the world through the same eyes that we were brought up to sort of see
02:45
it.
02:46
You see it in a different way, in a more, you know, more equitable way, and if you can
02:52
kind of carry that.
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