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John Connolly

Andy Burnham turns the tables on Nicola Sturgeon

Andy Burnham turns the tables on Nicola Sturgeon
(Photo: Getty)
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As leader of the SNP, Nicola Sturgeon has earned a reputation for rallying against what she argues is an arrogant Westminster elite which rides roughshod over Scots. It appears now though that the Scottish First Minister might be getting a taste of her own medicine. This week, she has ended up in a fierce war of words with the mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, after the Scottish government unilaterally introduced a travel ban on Manchester and Salford.

On Friday, Sturgeon announced without warning that travel between the two North West areas and Scotland would be forbidden from Sunday, due to rising concerns about the Indian (or Delta) variant. Travel had already been suspended between Scotland and Blackburn, Darwen and Bolton.

In response, Andy Burnham lashed out over the weekend, and accused the First Minister of ‘hypocrisy’ for not letting him know about the travel ban before it was announced. The Greater Manchester mayor suggested that his region had been treated with ‘contempt’, and compared the North West’s treatment to the SNP’s usual complaints about Westminster:

“‘That is exactly what the SNP always accuse the Westminster government of doing, riding roughshod over people… The SNP are treating the north of England with the same contempt in bringing that in without any consultation with us.’

He also requested that the Scottish government give compensation to holidaymakers in Salford and Manchester who were planning to travel to Scotland this week (a suggestion spurned by the deputy First Minister John Swinney).

Today, Sturgeon hit back in turn. The First Minister accused Burnham of playing politics, and suggested that he was opposing the travel ban to further his own political ambitions:

“‘I’ve always got on well with Andy Burnham and if he wants to have a grown-up conversation he only has to pick up the phone but if, as I suspect might be the case, this is more about generating a spat with me as part of some positioning in a Labour leadership contest in future, then I'm not interested.’

Exactly why the First Minister hadn’t picked up the phone herself to tell the mayor about the travel ban wasn’t made clear. Nor has her attack gone down well with several Labour figures, who have criticised Sturgeon's response.

Sturgeon defended her decision to introduce the travel ban by saying it was necessary to protect Scotland from the Indian variant. Only there is reason to question the rationale for the sudden ban. As the Scottish Conservative Murdo Fraser pointed out this weekend, Dundee has a similar Covid rate to Manchester and Salford, yet no travel ban had been put in place in the area. According to Public Health Scotland, Dundee city currently has 315 cases per 100,000 people, while some neighbourhoods have almost 800 cases per 100,000 people. Salford and Manchester, by comparison, have 318 and 315 cases per 100,000 population. Sturgeon’s announcement also came after thousands of Scots travelled to London and back last week for the Euros – despite Scotland currently having a higher proportion of Covid cases than England. Clearly, some concerns about the Indian variant weigh more heavily than others.

Burnham is not the only figure in the North West to be frustrated by the sudden ban either. Officials in Manchester have joined the mayor in condemning Sturgeon’s failure to notify the region of the change, with the Manchester council leader Richard Leese saying he ‘was as shocked as anyone this weekend to find out that a travel ban was going to be imposed… this feels like a decision made in haste without a clear evidence base, and completely out of proportion to the situation.'

It seems that Burnham has managed to put Sturgeon in an unusually uncomfortable position for a politician who is used to batting off complaints from London with ease. The fact that the mayor is Labour and based in the North West has disrupted Sturgeon’s usual playbook of accusing the out of touch Tories of trying to meddle in Scottish politics.

The irony of the situation certainly won’t have been lost on Tory ministers, who faced their own barrage from Burnham in October last year, over the decision to introduce new coronavirus restrictions in Greater Manchester. Devolved mayors may have caused the UK government a headache last year, but now Burnham has managed to land a blow on a politician the Tories have increasingly struggled to deal with. The fact that he has taken a leaf out of Sturgeon’s book and attacked the SNP for treating the people of the North West with ‘contempt’, will have delighted Sturgeon’s enemies further. For the Tories, it seems like devolved mayors have their uses after all.