The below is the speech delivered by the Labour & Co-operative Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, to the Alliance Party Conference in Belfast on Saturday 14th March 2026.

Thanks for having me – it is truly a great honour. If only my ancestors, who left Drogheda for Liverpool in the late 1800s, could see me now! And dare I say it’s nice to feel wanted by a political party?

I am grateful for the warm welcome and I do feel amongst friends, having got to know Naomi well when we were in Parliament together and Kate when she was Lord Mayor of Belfast. I was keen to accept your kind invitation for a specific reason. I feel the time has come to build a cross-party campaign across the nations and regions for the reform of Westminster. More than anything, this is what I am here to do and what I would like to talk about today, drawing on my journey from MP to Minister and now Mayor.

This is the truth as I see it: the UK political system hasn’t worked for the North West of England and it hasn’t worked for Northern Ireland. Indeed, it hasn’t truly worked for anywhere outside London and the South East. If the UK is to be a fairer and more functional country in the future than it has been in the past, nothing short of a complete rewiring of the UK’s political system is needed. And, if that is to happen, it will require us to join forces.

But here’s the exciting bit: imagine how powerful we could be if we did and what we could do to release the untapped in your part of the world and ours.

I love coming here and, whenever I do, I always think of the song Northern Industrial Town by Billy Bragg. The lyrics go like this:

“It’s just a northern industrial town, the front doors of the houses open into the streets, there’s no room for front gardens, just a two-up two-down, in a northern industrial town. On payday they tear the place down, with a pint in your hand and a bash’em out band, sure they’d dance to the rhythm of the rain falling down in a northern industrial town. But it’s not Leeds or Manchester. Liverpool, Sheffield nor Glasgow. It’s Belfast. It’s just a northern industrial town.”

This song, which came out two years before the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, has always stuck in my mind. The divide-and-rule politics of Westminster, combined with the London-based media, portrayed this place to anyone born in England in the 60s, 70s or 80s in such a way to make us think we’re so different. It created a distance between us.

But the song invites us to reassess – and people from our part of the world have been doing just that as they have got into the habit of visiting much more often in recent years. We have rediscovered how much we have in common. And that feeling has only intensified in the last decade as the devolution of power has finally arrived in England.

For a long time, Westminster was seen as speaking for England. For us that was never true. Together with my friend Steve Rotheram, the Mayor of the Liverpool City-Region, I left it in 2017 to give the North of England its own voice. Ten years on, we like to think we have achieved it.

Hopefully it is also more apparent to people here and in Wales and Scotland that we are using the devolved power to make different decisions. Steve and I came here together at the invitation of Kate in 2022 to discuss how we could cooperate on green industry and transport. Like you, we have lived experience of the devastating effects of deindustrialisation on communities and know the importance of investing in future jobs. So it was great to be at Wrightbus in Ballymena this morning to see some of the 76 electric double‑deckers due to enter service on our streets next month and to confirm a new £66m order for a further 55, with even more to follow after that.

Finally, we are forging our own relationship with Northern Ireland, making our own decisions with you, challenging the status quo, and it’s nice to celebrate all that with you today. Some in Whitehall don’t like the idea of an increasingly assertive North. They still try to talk down to us when we won’t take no for an answer. And perhaps this has helped us understand more how Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have felt for years. The cities along the western half of Great Britain – Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Cardiff and Bristol – are forged by many of the same influences as Belfast, Derry/Londonderry and Dublin.We all have different versions of the same thing. And, at different times, we have all been on the receiving of a governing mentality which thinks it can treat some people and places as second-class.

One moment on my political journey taught me this more than any other. In the early 2010s, I was heavily involved in the campaign for justice for the Hillsborough families and survivors. During the Parliamentary debates, I was struck by the strong support from MPs here in Northern Ireland, particularly Mark Durkan, the then MP for Foyle. Mark impressed upon me the similarities between the experiences of the Hillsborough families and those who had fought for justice for those killed on Bloody Sunday. I thought about that a lot to the point where, as we approached the publication of the report of the Hillsborough Independent Panel in September 2012, I asked Mark if he might facilitate a meeting for the Hillsborough families with the families in Derry, who had gone through their own Truth Day in 2010. What happened in a community centre on the Bogside, as I witnessed two groups of people who might not otherwise have met share a deeply emotional exchange, remains one of the most humbling experiences of my life.The families from Derry explained how they had been in the wilderness until the 20th anniversary in 1992 and had only then got organised in the fight for justice. It was striking how the 20th anniversary of Hillsborough brought exactly the same reaction and turning point in Liverpool.

In that extraordinary moment in Derry, some profoundly uncomfortable truths about our country revealed themselves to me.
In the UK, all people and places are not equal. Power is not distributed evenly. With no written constitution, it is too easy for the powers-that-be to write their own rules and cover up; to stonewall bereaved families and create false narratives; to invite people to think the worst of working-class people and the places where they live. When the second Hillsborough Inquest returned its verdict of unlawful killing, I remember eyeballing a packed House of Commons and saying this: how is it even possible in a country like ours that an entire English city could cry injustice for 20 years and no one down here was listening?

I have never had an answer. But we have tried to turn it to a positive.

Just as the Derry families helped us, so the Hillsborough families have passed on the same insights to help others after them – the sub-postmasters and mistresses branded petty thieves and the victims of contaminated blood blamed for their own infections. As one justice campaign has helped another, the rest of the country has seen the pattern and joined calls for change. The Hillsborough Law is a first step in the change we need in the way this country is run. It tips the scales of justice towards ordinary people and, through a statutory duty of candour, away from an unaccountable state. Parts of it will apply to Northern Ireland, coroners’ inquests for instance, and I can say with confidence that the seed for it was planted in that community centre in Derry.
I introduced it as a Private Member’s Bill in 2017 and credit to the current UK Government for adopting it. That said, it is currently stalled in Parliament due to an unacceptably wide carve-out for the security services.

I hope I can make an ask of this Conference today. Could you endorse the call of the Hillsborough families and other justice campaigns represented by Hillsborough Law Now for the legislation to be passed in its entirety? I hope so as it is an important first step in the necessary rewiring of the UK.

But there is much more to do if all people and all places are to be truly equal. When you look at infrastructure across the UK, the gap between London and South East and everywhere else is huge. When it comes to rail services, people in the North West are treated as second-class citizens every single day. You might say it’s even worse here. Can it be true that a train between Derry/Londonderry and Belfast takes 2hours 16mins? And why haven’t we all risen up in common cause against this inequality?

The answer is that the UK Parliament isn’t set up to facilitate it. First-past-the-post leaves millions unrepresented. The Commons whip system is designed to keep people in their party tramlines, rubber-stamping the establishment positions of the Whitehall silos rather than forging dangerous cross-party regional alliances. And the unelected Lords is drawn from predominantly from the great and the good with addresses inside the M25. This political system concentrates inordinate power in an astonishingly small number of hands, many unelected. The use of it is not even codified in a written constitution, as the UK is one of only six countries without one.

Is it any wonder this doesn’t work for you or us? Are we prepared to work differently to change it?

The Gorton and Denton by-election revealed many things but the biggest was the depth of the chasm between people and Westminster politics. They don’t see it any more as a means to fix things making life worse.

In a recent poll, 59% of the public thought the cost-of-living crisis would never end. When people are giving up on politics, we are in dangerous territory. It is Code Red for Westminster.

Our broken political system has created a level of alienation which has given rise to the populist right and, worse, could usher them into power on 30 per cent of the vote or even less. It is time for those who oppose this prospect to wake up and work differently. Hence me being glad to be here with you today.

There are practical things we could all agree.

First, to encourage as many parties as possible to fight the next General Election on a shared manifesto commitment to introduce a system of PR at the one after.

Second, to build on the end of the hereditary peers by making this Parliament the very last of the unelected Lords. In the next, we should indirectly elect a new Senate of the Nations and Regions based shares of votes cast at the 2029 election.

Third, to reform the whip system so that Parliament keeps power in the hands of elected representatives, raising their status and ushering in a more collaborative, place-based, problem-solving political culture.

Fourth, to introduce a written Constitution so that no citizen anywhere, in Northern Ireland or in the North West, can be treated any more as a second-class citizen. This means a Basic Law on the German model requiring equivalent living standards in all regions and nations.

And, fifth and last, to then allow the nations and regions to require the maximum possible level of devolved funding and powers out of that reformed Westminster, right for them, to achieve higher growth, as we have done in Greater Manchester, and deliver those equivalent living standards for their people.

So, in conclusion, the time has come to build a new politics and from it a new economy in all our regions and nations.
If we remove the turbulence and volatility inherent in our point-scoring political system, we will create the conditions for a new approach to long-term public investment in all nations and regions.

It will allow all places to get the transport infrastructure they deserve; a plan to solve the housing crisis; and to retake public control of our utilities. Perhaps then the public will start to see a way out of the permanent cost-of-living crisis.

A new politics to build a new economy – this is the only credible plan to take us off the march to a government of a kind we have never seen in our lives.

We must make politics work for people again – and I am here today in the hope that mission will become our common cause.