The new mayor for West Yorkshire on how her friendship with Jo Cox inspired her to enter politics and how she hopes to ‘bring back northern pride’
In all the fevered commentary about how Labour might reconnect with its lost voters in England’s northern towns, one credible answer seems to have been hiding in plain sight. The latest symbolic red wall defeat to the Tories, in the Hartlepool byelection last month, overshadowed another result that might give the opposition party some cause for hope: Tracy Brabin, the former Coronation Street actor and shadow culture minister, was elected the inaugural metro mayor of newly “devolved” West Yorkshire.
Brabin’s victory, with almost 60% of the vote, gives her strategic powers in a region with a population of 2.3 million. It also, she believes, establishes a new red “thread” across the Pennines – a link with fellow Labour metro mayors Andy Burnham in Greater Manchester, Steve Rotheram in the Liverpool city region and Dan Jarvis in South Yorkshire. If the past year has revealed one thing in the changing political landscape, it is that these regional figureheads, with their direct local mandate, can be a potent voice of opposition to Westminster government in a way that council leaders rarely are. The prime minister spent the first wave of Covid criminally avoiding consultation with local government, but the second being forced to listen, in particular to Burnham, Labour’s “northern leader”. Michael Heseltine, one political godfather of the metro mayors, told Brabin in a call after her victory that it was now her solemn political duty to “kick the government’s butt” in every possible way on behalf of the people of West Yorkshire. When I met her last week in Batley, 10 miles south of Leeds, it was clear she couldn’t wait to get started.
