LEADING WITH PRIDE: THE INDISPENSABLE ROLE OF MAYORS IN...

As delivered to the SPERI Annual Lecture, 8 November 2022.

My thanks to Koen for that warm introduction.
 
This will be the longest and most formal speech I’ve given since becoming Mayor.  I am honoured, especially given the calibre of previous lecturers and those filling the hall this evening. 
But I’m lucky to have a very supportive team around me.  Before I came here tonight, I asked them what I should say.  They told me:
Don’t be too funny – no risk of that;
Don’t be too charming - ditto;
And don’t be too intellectual – I’ll let you judge in an hour. 

It’s a privilege be speaking to you ten years after the foundation of SPERI.  SPERI’s work over the past decade has focused on building a more humane economy; a sustainable environment; a just international settlement; and a better and kinder politics. 
So I’m pleased to say: Mission Accomplished.  Thank you and good night.

Three years ago, Andy Haldane opened his SPERI lecture with the famous line from the former speaker of the US House of Representatives Tip O’Neill, that “all politics is local”. 
He went on to argue that all economics is local too.  Like the seashore, looking at the economy at the regional and local level brings out more of its “richness, complexity, self-similarity”.  We could say the same of our communities. 

Only when we take the time to look at how national and global political projects are playing out locally, do we see the full kaleidoscope of political identities at play.
If all politics is local and all economics is local, then the process of forming our social and political identities is local too.

I believe this truth has been ignored by national politicians and pundits for too long.  They have pursued abstract political projects, which play out in places like South Yorkshire often without, or against, our consent.  
One particular project stands out: the attempt - as Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel puts it - to move the UK from a market economy, to a market society.
We have seen this happen within my lifetime in South Yorkshire. But when the mines shut down and the steelworks closed, our industrial communities responded with the cry for dignity: coal not dole.  We have never lost that impulse to put people first.

Today, I want to argue that the experiment of metro Mayors offers a promising path to resisting that atomisation and fracturing of our society; to rebuilding social capital, economic inclusion, solidarity and hope. 
People like me - working with people like you – can nourish our sense of regional identity into a full blown political identity, and into the basis for a South Yorkshire democracy.  The institution of the Mayoralty enables this.

But realising that goal also means the UK has to change.  There are some who cling to the myth of the unitary UK, where every action must be one-size-fits-all and where regional identities are relegated, if at all, to comic voices on radio or TV.  When we have rejected that message before, the country has thrived.  To renew the UK for the 21st century, we must challenge it again.

This is my first academic lecture as Mayor.  You’ll have to bear with me, as it’s also my first attempt to define Coppard-ism.  T-shirts will be available in the foyer.

One of my reflections, as I was preparing for tonight, is that academic language can obscure as much as it can clarify, especially when coming out the mouth of a politician like me.  Talk of capitalism, neoliberalism, technological change or atomisation only really resonates when we can tie it to something we’ve actually experienced: the loss of a job in the name of commercial viability; the loneliness of a neighbour or family member; the hours long wait for medical attention or stuck on a broken train after a decade of austerity.

All of us in this room – the students, academics, political and community leaders, me – we all have our own experiences of how the often abstract forces I’ve already mentioned are impacting our own lives. 

I am from a family of refugees.  My grandparents came to this country in the 1930s, fleeing Nazi persecution in central Europe.  This country gave them sanctuary.  It gave them prospects at home, at the same time as it led the fight to stamp out Nazism and hate abroad.  My grandparents went on to become teachers, nourishing the next generation of the community that had welcomed them.  From them – and millions like them - I learned that what happens in our community is not distinct from the deep tectonic plates that underpin our global system.
 
It is a sad thing to reflect on, but their story has been played out in every successive generation here in South Yorkshire – from Somali and Yemeni refugees arriving in our region in the 1980s and 1990s, to Ukrainian, Hong Kong and Afghan refugees today.  Nor can we say that the stain of racism and authoritarianism has been fully removed from Britain – indeed, not even in my own party, though I am pleased we are now taking firm action against anti-Semitism.

My dad, who some of you in the audience will know, chose to base himself in Barnsley through his career in local government.  I embrace both my heritage of migration and persecution, and my firm roots in South Yorkshire.  I was born in Sheffield.  I was raised in Sheffield.  I ran for parliament here and it is my great privilege to serve as the Mayor of the region that has always been my home. 

It took time for me to realise that politics was where I could contribute.  Inspired - like many, from afar - by the community-led, optimistic Obama campaign in 2008, I was determined to experience that sense of empowerment for myself.  When the time came for his re-election campaign, I jumped at the opportunity to head to New Hampshire as a volunteer.

There, I saw a way of doing politics that was very different to the sclerotic party bureaucracies I was used to.  It was a politics that started from the assumption that there are leaders everywhere.  On every street.  In every workplace.  In every classroom.  Obama was a vessel for that hope, but he made clear that his inspiration came from the people committed to improving their community wherever they were.  This was not about a small coterie of advisers, thrashing out a party line to passive activists.  The logic was flipped: act local, build power in your community, and channel this up to politicians who will empower you and be empowered by you, building on the organising tradition stretching from the Civil Rights Movement, through Saul Alinsky and Ceasar Chavez to Marshall Ganz.

I came back determined to take that people-first approach to building a campaign in Sheffield.  I decided to run to be the MP for Sheffield Hallam, just up the road from where we are tonight.  I showed my commitment to those activists by investing the best part of two years of my own life in pursuit of what was then seen as a hopeless cause.  When I was selected as Labour’s candidate, the Daily Mail labelled me “Twit of the Week” for daring to suggest that we could win the Deputy Prime Minister’s seat, which had never before voted Labour. 
I lost in 2015, but achieved a near twenty point swing in a year when Labour nationally saw a swing of just 1.5% and the country returned its first Conservative majority in twenty-three years.  And I am proud that Hallam is now painted red on our political maps.

However, in the seven years from that election to my election as Mayor, it would be fair to say parliamentary politics has not exactly covered itself in glory.  In a time of global flux, both of our national parties turned away from their responsibilities in pursuit of their own partial dogmas, detached from or blind to the needs of our communities.  

For me that abrogation of responsibility was personal: I called out Jeremy Corbyn’s toleration of anti-Semitism, and said that I would not stand for the Labour Party while that age old racism stained our party.  I am proud today to take my place as a Labour Mayor, and as the UK’s most senior Jewish leader in local and regional government.  For their part, the Conservative Party has been riven by its own division over Brexit, and a right-wing fundamentalism which has challenged their own traditions – drawing attention away from governing in the interests of the many, and not the fixations of the few.

But if parliamentary democracy is falling short, what is the alternative?  I’ve already tried one of them.  After 2015, I took on the job of heading the Remain campaign in Yorkshire, the Humber and Lincolnshire.  The referendum, like the Scottish independence referendum two years earlier, misinformed rather than enlightened; polarised rather than unified; intentionally distracted attention away from our fundamental problems.  It has split our political parties and continues to absorb the energy of officials and businesses six years on, preventing action on the climate emergency; quality jobs; or building international security and solidarity. 

When used to force a debate on an issue or impose a solution – rather than to draw a line under one following lengthy and informed deliberation, as in Scottish devolution – referenda almost always weaken rather than strengthen our democracies.  Recognising that flaw, Clement Attlee described them as alien to our traditions and an instrument of tyranny over democracy.

The Leave campaign did get one thing right though.  Their message - “Take back control” – was like an Exocet missile at the heart of the disempowered, hollowed out communities of South Yorkshire and so many communities like ours.  Thiemo Fetzer found, in a 2019 paper, that data for the UK since 2000 supports the view that individual and community exposure to austerity increased support for Brexit.  The size of this effect is such that, without austerity, his model suggests we would have avoided Brexit altogether.  That impact was clear to any of us who worked on the campaign or who were and are embedded in the politics of our communities.

That is a story that plays out all-too-clearly here in South Yorkshire.  The average Northern city saw a 20% cut to public spending from 2010-19, compared to 9% in the South. Barnsley saw the largest reduction in funding for services of any metropolitan area in the country, at 40%.  In somewhere like Barnsley, and this is true of anywhere in South Yorkshire, this means a proud community with a strong tradition having its economy dismantled for the second time in as many generations: first with the closure of the mines; then with the removal of public services and jobs that had replaced them, offering hope and the route to a stronger economy. 

Those same places are again vulnerable to trade shocks related to Brexit.  George Osborne and David Cameron broke communities they never knew and they never understood.  I fear this is about to be played out again next week by Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak.
People are right to be angry as their communities see resources withdrawn by a distant, and increasingly absent state, leaving behind either no jobs or bad jobs.  The referendum of 2016 has failed to right these wrongs – indeed, it some cases it has made things worse – but any successful democratic alternative must tackle these challenges head on. 

If a referendum is too crude to resolve our problems, and if Westminster politics is too dysfunctional, is there a better way? 

That was the question I found myself asking a year ago, as I weighed up standing to be Labour’s candidate for Mayor of South Yorkshire or to once again try to become a Member of Parliament.
I saw the strides local leaders were taking in Wales, in London, in Greater Manchester, and the potential here in South Yorkshire.  I recognised the value of a more immediately accountable, but sufficiently strategic level of government – perhaps best illustrated by the experiences of Scotland over the past quarter century, as the only region to have kept pace with UK economic averages while all other regions and countries have fallen back against London and the South East.

But more than that, I recognised the creation of metro-Mayors as a crucial experiment in the political economy of the UK.  National government has created a new tier of government in England, on the gamble that more personalised leadership can help improve accountability and local democracy.  Hedging their bets, Whitehall did this without devolving meaningful powers or money, except the bare minimum needed to convince sceptical local leaders.

Not the most promising start.  But if we get it right, the potential opportunity is huge.  For Westminster, it answers the England question: how do you govern a union of nations when one of them is home to 80% of the population?  For Whitehall, it answers the Kissinger question: who do you call when you want to speak to South Yorkshire?  For the other nations of the UK and for those in England let down by a government culture skewed to the South East, it answers the political question: how can we express our identity and local demands among peer regions and nations?  And for economists and businesses, it answers the question of how we can drive balanced growth across our country, and realise the potential of all our communities.  We need no longer be a jet plane flying with only one engine firing on all cylinders.  A lop-sided political economy in the UK is a choice, not an inevitability.

So, what are the questions face the new cohort of Mayors like me? 

Some of these are well understood: how do we deliver inclusive, sustainable growth and improve the wellbeing of our communities?
But I want to argue that there is a question that is often missing, unconscious or unsaid in our political debate: how can we craft a political identity for our region to match our new institutions?

How do we create a new common sense, so people here see it as perfectly natural that there is a South Yorkshire Mayor, who they hold to account for fixing regional problems?
This is a necessary ingredient.  Without a sense of a South Yorkshire identity, my role is dependent on the goodwill of the government of the day.  With it, my office is more secure and the virtuous circle of rising expectations, greater scrutiny and improved delivery will kick in.  Whitehall will see Mayors as stronger, more durable and more credible partners, and trust them with the powers and funding to deliver more.  We have seen that gradual ratcheting up of devolution play out already in Wales and Scotland.

The chance to lead that change in my home region was a challenge I couldn’t resist.  And in developing my campaign, I tried to capture, in the simplest possible terms, what I wanted for our region.  I settled on three words: pride, prosperity, and purpose.
Restoring and rebuilding the pride we once had in our industrial heritage and pioneering industries; the purpose that defined our place in the world; and the prosperity we retained within that allowed our communities to flourish.

I believe we can show a different approach to politics: one better connected to the community; but with the scale and influence to shape national policy.  If we can do that, we can break through parochialism and avoid the charge of dividing the UK.
If we are to realise this ambition, there are two things missing - which I cannot address alone. 
First, we need to build a self-regarding political identity here in South Yorkshire.  People must view that identity as a basis for political organisation and delivery, rather than something that is just cultural.  This is the fundamental challenge I am grappling with, as England’s mayors have mainly been created without overwhelming popular demand.  Devolution to South Yorkshire has not come after twenty years of civil society organising, regional commissions, and a full-blown regionalisation of politics as in Scotland.  In Scotland, political identity preceded the institutions. We are largely building things the other way around. 

I need to be able to show the people of Askern that they benefit from the investments we will make here with our universities at the heart of South Yorkshire’s innovation economy; I need to be able show the people of Dodworth that the investments we make in Rother Valley will deliver better jobs and opportunities for their families.

Second, we need a reformed political culture in the United Kingdom.  Failing to ease the centralised grip on England’s regions we see today, while regional political identities are planted and taking root, is a recipe for further political fragmentation and strife.  We should not build stronger political identities just to pit them against each other.  Our current approach of divide-and-rule, of having places bid for small competitive pots of cash to build public toilets or keep buses on the road is wasteful and corrosive.  Funding driven by political calculation rather than the needs of our communities won’t deliver levelling up.

Without UK-wide reform, we either risk a central backlash against devolved and mayoral powers, or a fracturing of Britain.  Neither will build up the political agency or regional solidarity we need to move our country forward this century. 

Let me take the question of building a political community and identity first.  This not an impossible task.  Our identities are not immutable.  In less than a decade, we have seen a rise in the self-identification of people in the UK as English, Scottish or Welsh rather than British; and, in the wake of Brexit, a surge in the those seeing themselves as decisively “European” or otherwise.  I see myself as from Sheffield, from South Yorkshire, a Yorkshireman, English, Jewish, British and European.  I am an Arsenal fan, and will be red in the face shouting things I shouldn’t repeat on this stage at fans of Tottenham Hotspurs; but come the World Cup later this month, we will all be cheering England on.

Our identities changes over time and place – but they are all there, and they are all real.  I would have to accept, though, that ‘South Yorkshire’ is arguably the least politically defined of those identities, especially compared to the city-regions of London or Liverpool.  The sense of being a distinct community, within but not wholly defined by being English, is there in Liverpool in a way that is less clear here. 

I mentioned earlier that we all bring our own experiences to bear on abstractions.  South Yorkshire is a case in point: it is the sum of the shared experiences of those of us who live here, have lived here, or have an idea in their head of what South Yorkshire is like.  That could be the industrial apocalypse of Blake’s Dark Satanic Mills; the post-industrial dislocated home of Pulp and the Arctic Monkeys; the much-feted Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire, leading the country’s ambitions on social housing and transport; the industrial battles that brought an end to that era in the 1980s; or the warm and friendly communities scattered across our beautiful valleys and peaks.  All of these experiences are true and valid in their way.

What I can do as Mayor – alongside our artists, historians, and 1.4m of our fellow residents – is to interpret and articulate our shared experiences: creating opportunities for the people of South Yorkshire to build a shared sense of community and purpose. 

My hypothesis, as I do that, is that a common thread of our South Yorkshire political identity is that, as a region, we lack self-belief, confidence and agency.  We are the victims of forces outside of our control.  Managed decline is our lot in life.  Sometimes we let those on the outside portray it that way too.  An all-too common telling of our recent history runs from the Battle of Orgreave and the Miner’s Strike; through the Hillsborough Disaster; into the collapse of employment in the steel industry captured in films like the Full Monty or Brassed Off; to more recently, the scandals and tragedies of child sexual exploitation.  What these add up to is an often pervasive sense of a place where our best days are behind us, bedevilled by social ills and fated for decline.
I see every day in my role as Mayor that this is simply not the case.

Over the last six months, I have been lucky enough to see first-hand the pride and passion of those people in our region committed to living their life by the motto of South Yorkshire – each shall strive for the welfare of all - their absolute determination to protect and serve our communities. 

Julie Kenny – who has taken on the frankly outrageous task of restoring Wentworth Woodhouse, once the largest private house in the UK.
Chris Hardy, who manages the S6 food bank, which has gone from the back room of a church to a warehouse in just a few years, working tirelessly to serve hundreds of families across our community every week.  
The founders of Rivelin Robotics, creating world leading technology from an office in Kelham Island.
Mark Chadwick, who responded to the news about Peel Group looking at the future viability of our airport by bringing thousands of people together online in just a few days, to share, news, information, and build a campaign to fight for DSA’s future. 

The whole team at Baby Basics, a charity started in Sheffield, stepping in to make sure babies born across South Yorkshire have access to the fundamental support they need at the beginning of their lives. 
 And Dave Richards from WanDisco – potentially the region’s first Unicorn - creating the next generation of programmers and wealth creators here in South Yorkshire.

I have been inspired by the dignity and passion of their service to our community, their refusal to accept the status-quo, and their pursuit of a future that is greater than either our present or our recent past; their reach forever exceeding our grasp. Because there is no shortage of expectation, and no limit to people’s courage or resolve.

And we have done this before.  The past glories that people in South Yorkshire look back to, a world of full industrial employment, an expansive welfare state, and an ambitious local and regional leadership – of 2p bus fares and utopian cities in the sky under the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire.  They were themselves the product of previous attempts to build a radical identity in South Yorkshire. 

We look back now to the post-war settlement in the UK, and ignore the seventy years of work before that to build up a self-conscious Labour movement, organise it and direct it to take political power, and reconfigure our political economy in the interests of non-elites.  This is the “double movement” that Karl Polanyi wrote about: the rise of an organised working class in response to the laissez-faire Victorian era. 

It was the fruit of the combined work of generations, of artists; writers; neighbourhood and religious leaders; trade unionists; local politicians; and intellectuals.  With an ever-growing self-confidence, they articulated a different vision of the UK, of our local communities, and convinced people that this optimistic and better vision was worth fighting for.  Before the centralising reforms of the Thatcher era, they also had the power and the money to give it life.

We need the same today.  Only metro mayors, or the national parliaments in Wales and Scotland, truly see this creative act - of defining an alternative that fits with their history, their heritage, and their dialect – as integral to their work. 

Underpinning my argument here is a theory of democracy that builds up and out from the lived experience of our communities.  It starts not with the inheritance of monarchical power flowing out of Westminster across the country; but bottom-up, from the enterprise and solidarity of our communities.   

To allow our communities to live with dignity, we must change things with them, rather than doing things to them.  Reciprocity between communities and those who hold power in trust is how we begin to restore faith in British politics.
This same principle of reciprocity, and of rootedness, should guide our economy too.  If ever it were possible to direct the commanding heights of the economy from Whitehall, it is not an option anymore.  Decentralisation is needed to unlock local value, enabling on-the-ground discretion rather than jarring bureaucracy.  Those industries that thrive do so when they are firmly entrenched in local economic system.

But the political temptation to cling onto policymaking power nationally is strong too.  We have a UK government that acts as if we can still direct from the centre, even as our economies have both globalised and localised.  The political result is predictable: those industries close to power in London, with the ear of ministers, have the most sway.  Just as power fails to trickle down, so does economic growth – except where local and regional leaders take it upon themselves to provide an alternative.

True social justice and economic efficiency demands that we make the most of talent and industries across the UK.  This means creating a system where local, regional and UK-wide government work in harmony.
What does this look like in practice?  One of the advantages of the UK being a relative latecomer to decentralisation is that we can learn from other countries in the OECD, just as in South Yorkshire I can learn from what my colleagues in Greater Manchester, London and Wales have done ahead of us.  But we can look abroad too, and go well beyond the usual suspects of federal states like Germany and the US, into unitary states that until the 1970s looked much more like the UK: such as Spain, Italy, France, or Sweden. 

What would it mean if we borrowed their approaches to decentralisation? 

My officials and I would be sat in working groups with ministers and officials routinely, giving us a forum for joint working.
Budgets and national policies would be agreed with me, rather than being subject merely to consultation or – more typically – simply imposed. 
I would have the power to pass local legislation for a time-limited period, which could be generalised across the country if it proved successful. 

And I would have a direct voice in the upper chamber of Parliament, so that I could press the case to national ministers directly, and personally propose legislative alternatives.
With the announcement today that Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list recommends a peerage for Ben Houchen, the Mayor of Tees Valley, I’m pleased to see that Boris Johnson is belatedly getting on board with at least part of my plan.

Let me illustrate what this might look like, with the example of the biggest challenge I have faced since becoming Mayor: the closure of Doncaster Sheffield Airport, which is happening this week and risks plunging hundreds of families here in South Yorkshire into uncertainty as we head into a winter cost-of-living crisis.

Working alongside the Mayor of Doncaster Ros Jones, I have been working with the current owners, potential investors, and a plethora of consultants and legal advisers to find a viable future for the airport.  Leaders across South Yorkshire have found millions of pounds that could be used to support a transition for the airport, as part of a locally-led plan to secure its long-term viability.

Every step along the way we have been stifled by the inaction, insensitivity and the disinterest of national government, and a nationally-set legislative framework that imposes a straightjacket on what we could achieve locally.  The Secretary of State for Transport repeatedly failed to meet with me and South Yorkshire’s MPs; our efforts to identify statutory instruments they could use were met with a non-response; and their political choice was to side with the company over the community.

A strong local coalition, underpinned by the likes of Mark Chadwick and activists brought together over social media, were able to secure 127,000 names for a petition to national government, and it achieved nothing.  There is little stopping government simply ignoring residents – which is what they have done – and the law favours the absolute discretion of the property owner over the community that has both invested in its success and stands to carry the losses.
In a better system, I would have been able to insist on the formation of a working group between ministers and my team – perhaps subject to the agreement of my fellow mayors - rather than being stonewalled.

We would have been able to provide a united front, in pushing the airport owners to accept my offer of bridging support, and in credibly raising the stakes by threatening their investments elsewhere in the UK – rather than being isolated.
We could have considered other statutory tools to expand the opportunities for negotiation – rather than being powerless.

Finally, I would be able to promote a change in the law so that this could not happen again: extending the statutory requirements to consult and engage the market for other interested parties, before a closure could be considered for privately owned critical infrastructure.
I could do none of these things.  We were ignored, and now – for the second time in thirty years – South Yorkshire runs the risk of becoming the largest urban area in Western Europe to lack an airport.  Our failed governance directly contributes to the continued imbalances across our economy.

What I have sketched out so far is radical: the creation of regional political identities across England; and a rewiring of the UK state to empower those nations and regions rather than suppress them.  It will require political courage at a local, regional and national level to deliver, and will not be quick, cheap or easy. 
The most obvious risk is failure.  Mayors may fail to activate new, optimistic identities and fail to steer local economies in a better direction.  This is not an unreasonable view.  Last month, Britain in a Changing Europe published a paper painting a sobering picture for those of us in office.  Only 30% of people in England trust their Mayor, local MP or local council to care about their area.  That only 14% say the same of national government should not be a source of comfort for people like me.  However, that same fact explains why local leaders are in the best place to try: reform is even less likely to succeed if led by an untrusted national government alone. 

Similarly, we can take hope from early and partial evidence that suggests devolution is working.  The most substantive piece I have seen to date comes from a paper in the Lancet earlier this year, isolating the effect of health and social care devolution to Greater Manchester and identifying a marked rise in healthy life expectancy there as a result.  If we give Mayors time to deliver, I expect we will see a growing evidence base to support their success.

The second risk is what you could describe, perhaps at the risk of being over-dramatic, as the Balkanisation of our country.  Low trust in national politics coupled with an erosion of ties to UK political institutions could lead to an unravelling of our country.  At the very least, it could empower separatist and nationalist movements as we see in Scotland. 

In Nicola Sturgeon’s speech, she argued for inclusive, prosperous communities that were internationally connected, overseen by responsive, social democratic governments – something I can wholeheartedly endorse. While I have a huge amount of respect for the First Minister personally, it won’t surprise you to hear that I disagree with her ultimate constitutional goal of an end to the Union.  But it must be just that – a Union.
Identity politics gets a bad name.  We can define our identity negatively – in the SNP’s case, against Britain.  Or we can define it positively: in terms of the richness, depth, traditions and quirks of our homes and communities.  I am an advocate of a positive, expansive and inclusive identity politics for the UK. 

Improving regional governance in the UK - and improving Westminster and Whitehall’s responsiveness to those regions - is about empowering places to act in solidarity; it is not about creating a new dog-eat-dog marketplace within our country.

Another way of making that same point is to say that this is about getting the right powers to the right level, complementing and refining our political identities as we do so.  Just as I will work to craft a South Yorkshire identity, others craft the Yorkshire identity, and our MPs in the region shape the British identity.  For each identity, there will be an appropriate set of powers: although it has its attractions, I am not seeking to lead a private army here in South Yorkshire.  I certainly don’t want a South Yorkshire HMRC.  I am happy for those to stay with the UK government. At the other extreme, we should not discount the opportunities for ever more local devolution, to empower our neighbourhoods and communities to act for themselves on the most immediate issues.

Is this a wildly utopian goal?  I don’t believe so.  Unlike some, I do not believe that the UK’s politics is fundamentally broken; that our only choice is to go back to the drawing board.  On the contrary, I see the strength of our constitution in its openness to reform, when its political masters and the public push for it.  That I am addressing you today as the Mayor of South Yorkshire, a post that has only existed since 2018, is a testament to that pragmatism.  We have one of the oldest, uninterrupted constitutional settlements in the world precisely because of its capacity to flex to radically different economic needs and international structures. 

Here, as much as it pains me to say it, I have to give credit to George Osborne, who knowingly handed over new powers to a tier of government he knew would be led by a rival party.  While we can argue about the precise powers and funding - and recognising that it is still early days - metro mayors are now major economic and political players, provided we can use our formal and informal powers well.  So no pressure.

When I look at South Yorkshire, our combined authority, universities and the health and social care system (which I oversee as Chair of the ICP) together employ 200,000 people, more than a third of all jobs in the region.  We support far more through the supply chain, and by providing the skilled, healthy people and the infrastructure needed for others to thrive. 

Both national parties are starting to understand this.  When Labour takes power nationally, it will inherit a new structure of regional mayors.  It has not had to govern in partnership with metropolitan areas in that way since 1979.  Gordon Brown will be putting forward his Commission for the Future of the United Kingdom in the coming months, setting out Labour’s position. 

This cannot be a simple return to the world as it was in 2010 - of nationally-directed Regional Development Agencies, Learning and Skills Councils, and the rest.  Instead, Labour must choose more democracy and more immediacy in our politics.  Investment, publicly-backed if needed, into local news, community groups and community owned assets, will give power and voice to our communities to hold me and others to account.
Ten years ago, SPERI was founded in response to a crisis in our politics, our economy and our society.  I wish we could say that we learned all of the lessons of the Global Financial Crisis and then the Eurocrisis.  The truth is that we, patently, did not.  Let us hope that, in ten years’ time, the same is not said of the recovery from the Global Pandemic and the “permacrisis” of 2022.  One of the lessons of the last decade is that we will not do better by adopting more austerity and more centralisation.  Policy support to regional government, to local government, and directly to communities must be central to the renewal of the UK.

This is not just a message to decision makers in Whitehall.  All of us – in every workplace decision, neighbourhood chat, academic paper, arts event – will face the choice of whether we act to treat our region seriously as a political player.  I would implore you to build your organisations across South Yorkshire’s geography: for those of you based in Sheffield, ask what you can do for Barnsley, Rotherham or Doncaster; and vice versa.  I urge you to write and lecture on our textured history of coal, steel, struggle and solidarity; and help me create our future of green, democratic jobs building on our craft, industrial and manufacturing traditions. 
I need all the help and ideas I can get – and I really mean it, you should get in touch with me if you can make a change happen for South Yorkshire.

As South Yorkshire’s mayor, I will stand alongside you in that journey. 

Together, we can build a new South Yorkshire; holding its head high and walking with a swagger, as a partner and example to the other regions and nations of the UK.
As I said earlier, under the crest of South Yorkshire – itself only created in 1974 – it says “each shall strive for the welfare of all”.  It we are to restore the pride, prosperity and purpose of South Yorkshire I cannot do it alone.  I look forward to working with you all to make South Yorkshire great again.