North East Mayor | The Forgotten Election?

In amongst all of the elections going on the North East is electing 2 new Mayors in May.

On Teesside Ben “Porkbarrel” Houchen, the Conservative incumbent has a fight on with Labour’s Chris “honest and sensible” McKewan. No guessing how I would be voting for, if I still lived down there.

The rest of the North East is about to elect it’s first ever regional Mayor to cover Durham, Sunderland, Gateshead, Newcastle, Northumberland and all of the other bits I have forgotten. There is a televised debate coming up this week, on the BBC.

I had a sneak preview at the Business Hustings organised by the North East Chamber of Commerce, at which I was privileged to represent the North East small business community asking the candidates questions.

Five candidates turned up; Kim McGuinness (Labour), Jamie Driscoll (a different kind of Labour), Guy Renner Thompson (Tories), the Greens and the Lib Dems. The Reform candidate didn’t show up; not sure his campaign is going well.

It is probably worth explaining how Labour ended up with 2 candidates. The North East has lots of complex internal politics and rivalries, most of which involve mistrust of Newcastle by the rest of the region. There is a profound belief that given half a chance Newcastle will nick all the regional funds for itself. There is some truth in this.

Kim McGuiness was based in Newcastle as Police and Crime Commissioner, as was Jamie Driscoll as Mayor of Newcastle and North of Tyne (a post subsumed into the new North East Mayor). McGuinness spent a huge amount of time around the North East, not just visiting local Labour parties but business groups, civic society and charties. I had dinner with her a North East business event a year ago. She successfully managed to position herself as representing the whole region. Driscoll, by comparison didn’t campaign, believing that as Mayor of Newcastle he was entitled to a place on the shortlist. This was a mistake. Unsurprisingly McGuinness got the nomination and Driscoll didn’t. Driscoll then claimed he had been “banned” from standing and announced his candidacy as an independent hoping to emulate Ken Livingstone.

This is how the candidates presented at the business hustings:

The Green and the Lib Dem were very similar, posh, authoritarian and both very right wing. Two of the biggest philosophical differences between right and left are about human nature and progress. Left wing ideas are based on the idea that humans are mostly good, and left to their own devices will do good things. Conservative ideas are based on a darker view of human nature, that society needs to control people. Unless they are rich in which case they can do what they like. Similarly left wing ideas are based on the idea of progress and change are generally for the better. Conservatives what to preserve what is good about the past. On both measures the Green and LibDem candidates were right wingers.

The LibDem and the Green candidate both wanted everything to go back to how it was in the past, but with more wind farms. If you don’t want a wind farm in your back garden tough, they are going to build them anyway. Ordinary North Easteners can’t be trusted to do the right thing with the environment, and needed a mayor who would take those decisions away from them. The LibDem told a horribly ill judged story about building his own architect designed house and how hard it was getting north east builders to work to Scandinavian design standards.

Jamie Driscoll and Guy the Tory were also very similar, and presented as the centrist candidates. Not as posh as the Greens and the LibDem, but both people who had spent a long time in local government. They are both technocrats and had the same vision for the Mayorality – it is just a very big local authority, and they are big local authority people who know lots about big local authority things. Hard to see where they disagreed on policy positions, both having worked together on the same projects, and were both very process driven.

They also both had the same problem of being a bit smug and patronising. The Greens and the LibDem weren’t from a local government background (the LibDem is a hospital doctor) so Jamie and Guy were both looking at each other and rolling their eyes when the Green or LibDem said things which weren’t right on local government processes and procedures. At one point Driscoll interrupted the Green candidate to advise him to “talk to the buses” which was weird.

McGuiness was the only woman, and the only one with a strong North East accent. If I hadn’t been following NE politics I would have said that she was the left winger, not Driscoll. She had a distinctive policy agena around women in the workplace and tacking child poverty.

Clearly she is the one to beat. She was at her best when less well polished. but is still a very competent politician, and deserves to be the front runner. If anything her biggest risk is that she looks like she has bought the brasso before she has won the trophy:

I have been pretty mean in the past about Jamie Driscoll and actually he was better than I was expecting, he came across well, with the soft bon homie of a Blairite junior transport minister with a special interest in buses. He was very technocratic and his smugness and eye rolling is a problem.

But his bigger problem is why is he standing? He didn’t offer a distinctive left wing position, in fact he seemed more right wing than McGuinness. In the absence of real left wing policies you were left with the impression that his main selling point was that as a middle class white man he is better at running local government than a woman with a working class accent. This is going to be hard to sell as a progressive campaign. If he stopped trying to be the Geordie Ken Livingstone and reigned in his ego he could actually be an asset.

He has the backing of the RMT and Owen Jones’ “We Deserve Better” campaign which is normally the kiss of death for a left wing challenger. The last time the RMT ran candidates against Labour they got less than 270 votes on average. I think Driscoll will do a lot better than that, particularly with a good on line campaign, but I can’t see him breaking out of his core support in wealthy parts of Gosforth and Jesmond.

Mainstream Labour have picked up huge numbers of voters since 2019, more than I ever expected. They have however lost a small group of urban left wingers who drifted away when Corbyn stood down. They have mostly switched to the Greens, who seemed to have absorbed all of the people who left Labour during the anti-semitism scandal. This doesn’t bode well for the Greens future. Maybe in Bristol there are enough voters like that to make a difference, but across the North East I doubt it. There just aren’t enough snobby middle class lefties who would rather have the Labour party in opposition led by a middle class chap like Corbyn, than in Government led by Starmer and Rayner, both from a working class background.

The televised debate is on BBC North East on the 17th April. Be interesting to see if the candidates have learnt anything from the business hustings.