27. MAKING A PRIME MINISTER IN MAKERFIELD? Predicting election results, +Ebola in African cities, +domestic worker activism, +global sand crisis, +housing and the World Urban Forum and more

In this episode Beth and Tom are joined by Dr Lotte Hargrave from the University of Manchester to discuss whether psephology - the study of elections and voting behaviour - can predict the next Prime Minister of the UK. 

All eyes are turned on the town of Makerfield in Greater Manchester, where Andy Burnham is making a play to win the constituency and head south - back to Westminster, and (probably) a leadership contest to replace Keir Starmer as UK PM. 

With Lotte we discuss whether we can predict the results of the election, the potential outcomes of a win for Burnham for the Greater Manchester mayoralty and why hyperlocal factors suggest it is all still to play for. 

Go to 27:56 for this discussion.

Also on our radar:

• Whether the UK needs to introduce maximum indoor temperatures for workplaces as urban heat rises
• Rising concern about Ebola in African cities in the shadow of global aid cuts
• Activism and urban organising for domestic workers
• How urbanization is driving the global sand crisis 
• The many faces and contradictions of datacentre resistance
• Housing and the World Urban Forum in Baku, Azerbaijan  

Guest:

Dr Lotte Hargrave is a Lecturer in Quantitative Political Science at the University of Manchester and a contracted psephologist for the BBC Elections Programme. Her research focuses on political behaviour, public opinion, gender and stereotyping in politics, and electoral politics. Before joining Manchester, she was Head of Data Science at the polling company Deltapoll. Website: Dr Lotte Hargrave

From our archives:

Interview with Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram (Episode 6)

The Manchester Model - with Adam Leaver and Rich Goulding (Episode 2)

Read more:

sand — RareEarth_KateDawson

AI Data Centers Are The New Plantations Unless We Build Them Differently - Honolulu Civil Beat

Building Climate Resilient Housing - World Cities Report

Late deciders, higher turnout - The Conversation

Political favourability ratings, May 2026

Hosts:

Tom Goodfellow is Professor of Urban Development in the Global Development Institute, and CEO of the African Cities Research Consortium, University of Manchester.  His research focuses on the political economy of urban development and change in Africa, particularly the politics of urban land and transportation, conflicts around infrastructure and housing, and urban institutional change. (linkedin.com/in/tom-goodfellow-0b418441) 

Beth Perry is Professor of Urban Epistemics and Director of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the relationships between urban expertise, governance and justice, underpinned by a commitment to co-producing collective intelligence across multiple scales to address complex urban challenges. She has worked in cities in Africa, Europe and the UK. (linkedin.com/in/itsbethperry)

Email feedback to: urbanradarpod@gmail.com

You can also follow us on instagram: @urbanradarpodcast

Thanks to the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester for providing time, resources and equipment to support this podcast. And to Sam Burgum, for post-production editing and promotion.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_03 0:08

Hello, and on our radar this month we discuss urban heat and the idea of having a maximum workplace temperature which has just come up in the UK. The Ebola outbreak in Central Africa and domestic worker activism.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

We talk about sand, data centres, and the World Urban Forum, particularly in relation to housing.

SPEAKER_03 0:28

And then with our guest, Lottie Hargrieve from the University of Manchester, we go deep into the slew of forthcoming elections here in the UK at various levels that are likely to spin out of the current crisis of leadership we have here in the UK yet again. Welcome to Urban Radar, the podcast taking an urban lens on current affairs. I'm Tom Goodfellow, Professor in Urban Development at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester.

SPEAKER_01 0:50

And I'm Beth Perry, Director of the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, and Professor of Urban Epistemics.

SPEAKER_03 0:56

So, Beth, you have got an event coming up for the summer showcase of Sheffield Urbanism. I don't know if you want to.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

I think I promised myself I wasn't going to do another Sheffield Urbanism.

SPEAKER_03 1:05

I think you did. You said no, no, no. I did. I said no after having a bit of a chance.

SPEAKER_01 1:09

It was a lot. But no, I'm doing it again. We've got six weeks, which started last week with um six. Last week, yeah, with the uh lecture of Roberto Montimore, who's going to be on our next feature. Um, and we're going to make that lecture available. But we also have a showcase event. This time we're going local. So it's about how urban research constitutes social action in Sheffield, and that's going to be on the 15th of June. So watch out on all our socials to find out about that. And Tom, you are soon heading off to Lagos, aren't you, for another workshop?

SPEAKER_03 1:39

That's right. So between now and your Sheffield Urbanism event, which I certainly hope to be at, I will be going to Lagos with colleagues from the African Cities Research Consortium as one of the workshops we're doing in all of our main cities to look across our research projects in a particular urban context and think how do they all fit together? What are the synergies? What are the unexpected lessons that come when you put all those projects into one room? Very exciting. Be there with Temmie, who you may have heard on our last podcast talking about community exchange and knowledge.

SPEAKER_01 2:05

And Tom, what do pebbles and penguins have to do with this week's episode?

SPEAKER_03 2:09

I think it's something to do with water and the sea.

SPEAKER_01 2:14

No, so we have Lotta Hargrave joining us on the University of Manchester. And ceephology actually comes from the Greek for pebble. And it was because that's how Athenians used to cast their votes by putting pebbles into uh pots to decide what they wanted to do. And um the penguin story, I'm sorry, this is just an extra one. I've been wanting to talk about this on the radar for ages, but I couldn't find an excuse until now, was just a story that keeps coming to me where children in Edinburgh Hospital have been painting pebbles for the penguins at Edinburgh Zoo to gift to their mates because penguins nest in little stones.

SPEAKER_03 2:50

Oh, that's nice. I've also got a story about children and pebbles. Do you want to hear my story?

SPEAKER_01 2:53

Yeah, go for it.

SPEAKER_03 2:54

When my first daughter was so young that she would wake up, she was under six months, she would wake up so many times a night that we were all wandering around in a complete daze to the point where I'm going to be able to do remember that. So I decided to try and see how many times a night we were being woken up without having to get up and write anything down. And I had a I had a bowl of pebbles, and every time we got woken up, I would put one pebble into another bowl in my half sleep. Do you want to guess how many pebbles were in that bowl the next morning?

SPEAKER_01 3:18

Twenty.

SPEAKER_03 3:18

Thirteen. Thirteen. Still quite bad.

SPEAKER_01 3:20

That's a lot of waking up, yes. So we are very happy that we've got Lotta from the University of Manchester joining us, who's a lecturer in quantitative political science. Um, and she is a contracted cephologist for the BBC Elections Programme. Um, and her research focuses on political behaviour, public opinion, gender, and stereotyping in politics. Um and before joining Manchester University, she was also the head of data science at the polling company Delta Pole. So we are going to speak with Lotta, aren't we? Given that we are in another election frenzy, the result of which could potentially determine the future leader of the UK if Andy Burnham wins this by-election in a place that many of our international visitors, main listeners may not have heard of, Makerfield, in Greater Manchester.

SPEAKER_03 4:07

So this is really a small election, somewhere that, as you say, people won't know about, that could have massive implications. And that's why we need to sit down with Lotter and say, how do we get our head around this? There are so many different elections, and there are all kinds of interesting issues to discuss around how we might predict and also how things like gender will play into all of those elections.

SPEAKER_01 4:26

Absolutely. But first, as usual, we're going to look at what's on our radar.

SPEAKER_03 4:48

So my first story this week is about rising heat and its effect in urban areas on urban populations. And it's something I think we've talked about on the podcast. We've definitely talked about it a lot outside of the podcast. And I know you have some interest in this, and we have various colleagues working on it. But it came onto my radar this week because there was a big news story about this, because there has been a big splash about the extent of rising temperatures within the UK. So I've thought about this a lot in cities in Africa where I work and where I work with partners. But the UK as well has rising temperatures, and the idea has come in of having a maximum workplace temperature. Now, this is something that's quite obviously it's difficult to enforce legally, and there are debates going on around what what does it mean to actually have a maximum temperature? Is that really enforceable and what does it mean for the economy and so on? There are countries where there are strong kind of guidelines that exist around maximum temperatures, Germany being the most obvious example where they have a recommended maximum temperature of 26 degrees in workplaces. And then once you get to that point, the idea is that people should start trying to mitigate. And if you get to about 30 degrees, then there's a strong emphasis on employers needing to provide some kinds of measures. So we're talking about this right now. Apparently, Angela Rayner in the UK has proposed uh the idea of 27 degrees as a maximum temperature. But then it raises all these questions about well, what does that mean if you're in an external workplace, like a building site, for example? Does it mean that as soon as you get a nice sunny day above 26, 27 degrees, you down tools? And some of the suggestions coming through are around things like, well, we need to extend the working day, we need more flexibility. So rather than expecting people to work between 8 and 5, it might be that we extend the day earlier in the morning and later in the evening. Now, of course, all of these questions about flexible working have already come up in relation to caring needs, in relation to COVID, working from home. But it really could be quite a fundamental change if organizations start to think we cannot have people working in in hot places and we need to have people working at different times of day. That could have all kinds of consequences for urban economies, where you might suddenly find a new evening or nighttime economy emerging in areas that previously have just been spaces of daytime work. So there's lots to think about there. Um as well, of course, of what this means if we start to think about the wider world and places where temperatures, I mean, most famously perhaps like in Dubai, where we know about construction workers often working in temperatures up to 45 or 50 degrees. Um I believe the government there is is trying to have breaks in the hottest parts of the day, but there are huge controversies about this. So it's hitting the UK, it's happening everywhere. And whether and how we think about guidelines and even building it into law is something that the next government is going to have to think about seriously.

SPEAKER_01 7:23

Absolutely. Well, I mean, as you say, um it is a topic which I have all my fingers crossed we might be given some funding to look at soon with uh collaboration um that cuts across Glasgow, Manchester, and Sheffield. Um but it raises two issues, doesn't it? So one is the presumption of unionisation, in that if you're lobbying for workplace protections, it requires that you are unionised in the first place. Um and actually if you are working outside or if you're working in the gig economy, you may well not be. Um and so who then actually is regulating some of those outdoor temperatures? And the second, of course, is about regional variation, because we know that there are massive microclimatic differences between, say, London and Glasgow, you know, London being the hottest place in the UK and Glasgow having the uh reputation as one of the wettest. And then even between Sheffield and Manchester, where we are now uh located, the Pennines make such a massive difference to the kind of microclimates that we are facing. So, to what extent do those maximum temperatures, if they are going to be imposed, need to be part of the devolution package and determined locally?

SPEAKER_03 8:20

What else? Okay, so my next story, uh and this is a very worrying one in a more immediate sense, is around the Ebola outbreak in Central Africa. So this has been coming, uh this is this is the the epicenter is the Eastern Congo, which we've talked about several times in relation to the conflict that's been going on there, among other things. And it is again one of those things where you get the nexus of conflict and a disease outbreak where obviously the capacity to manage that disease outbreak is severely limited by the conflict conditions, and Eastern Congo as well as a very fragmented contested governance, including in its cities. And one of the things that's worrying about this is it really is a it's in urban areas, very densely packed urban areas. There have been cases in Goma in the eastern Congo. Um there are now thought to be 500 cases or so, and there have been cases in Kampala. Now, Kampala in Uganda as the capital has a large number of Congolese refugees living often in very challenging conditions, and there have been several cases in Kampala unrelated to each other, including one death. So this is a really disturbing development that I think um everyone has their eyes on, the World Health Organization and others are extremely worried. Um and I just wanted to also, I mean, it's a reminder again of how movement and mobility, so normal in everyday life, are connected to the well-being of people in cities in ways that we we we often just don't see. Uh, I wanted to smuggle in here another story about the Congo, which is actually happening in the other side of the country that speaks to some of the strangeness really of international movement in that country, which is that the US has been deporting um so-called illegal migrants from South American countries like Peru and Colombia to Kinshasa, the capital of Congo. And there's some really interesting news stories that have hit about these people from Peru and Colombia who find themselves in a kind of hotel in Kinshasa, knowing nobody, trying to make a life in the middle of Central Africa. So we can see there on the one hand, the US is spending actually millions of dollars in putting people from South America into this city in the Congo. And on the other hand, USAID, which has been central to addressing past Ebola outbreaks, has been completely decimated. And I think that's another real risk that we see of the Ebola outbreak on the other side of the country.

SPEAKER_01 10:27

Well, of course, we know that the impacts of um these kinds of outbreaks and pandemics like COVID um are extremely spatialized and urbanized because of density and various other factors. Um but of course, like you say, we now have the context of the reduction of aid and all of those humanitarian programs that previously would perhaps have stepped in to address some of those or mitigate some of those outcomes for the most vulnerable groups. It is really worrying.

SPEAKER_03 10:50

I'll move on quickly to my third story this week now, which is also an Africa-based story initially, although again it has much wider ramifications. And this was about uh domestic workers and the activism of domestic workers. It comes from a story from the continent, which is an online publication. It's free. You can sign up to it over WhatsApp and other social media, and it's a very much an Africa-based um newspaper and magazine that has stories from across the continent. So I'm keen to kind of promote it, and it's always interesting. You get different kinds of stories there, really told from the ground across the continent. This was a story uh about women in Nairobi who were domestic workers who have tried to organize themselves in the context of really challenging conditions. So we've talked about care and care work a little bit. Uh, just as a bit of a reminder of the scale of what we're talking about here, there are thought to be about 75 million people uh worldwide who work in domestic care. So we're not talking about care homes, we're talking about people generally working, um caring in the homes of other other people, wealthier people who can bring in such workers. Uh, there are about 10 million of these in Africa, and that's about 16% of all women in paid employment, right? So it's a large number of people. And this is very, very dangerous work, not least because a lot of the time they're vulnerable to neglect and all kinds of domestic and sexual abuse uh in the homes in which they work. And what's been happening in Kenya is this group of women, and by coincidence, I didn't seek out another link to our work in African Cities Research Consortium, but they they have been working in Mathari and informal settlements uh where we also work, where there's a social justice center. There's something called the Dobie Women's Movement, uh, and they've established a park, which, for example, it has children's swings, picnic tables, place for washing clothes, trees, some of the trees are there particularly for women whose family have been killed to provide shelter, or sorry, for shelter for the family of women who have been killed, um uh to and also all kinds of other trees, medicinal trees, um, for women who've been abused in some ways to help them heal. So there are all kinds of traditional knowledge coming into this park. And I was reading about this, which um I mean it was interesting, but it wasn't what I was expecting in an article that was l was was titled about being activism of domestic workers, because it was really just about these sort of spaces of care. But of course, those spaces of care in themselves do become very, very political, right? Uh and I I ended up looking uh into this book, Care Activism, by someone called Ethel Tongahan, which was published a few years ago. And this is all about how activism among domestic workers in cities around the world is often not only about changing labor rights or changing policies, which is so hard to do, but it's about care relationships and how people care for each other and how this this builds solidarity and resistance, and how care itself becomes political through this idea of dissident friendships, which I think has been developed in other feminist work. So there are really interesting stories of legal change to protect the rights of domestic workers. There's been a recent story in Indonesia where strangely it's taken 20 years to get this piece of legislation through. So a law has just been passed in Indonesia to protect the rights of domestic workers, around 90% of which are women. And it means that they now are entitled to health insurance, rest days, pensions and things, because this really is a group of people that tends to completely fall through the cracks of legislation and policy. But that kind of change is really, really hard. And it's important to remember that these things like creating spaces of care that gradually establish the presence of domestic workers in urban space as well as potentially in law and policy, that's often a first step that is really important and is ultimately political.

SPEAKER_01 14:24

It makes me think of two things. who are engaged in activism within cities? Is there something about the critical mass that that that affords? And I was also wondering, you might not know the answer to this, but it made me think of um Julia Mose's work on child labour, um, where we were talking about sort of the hidden dimensions of child labour within some of these cities. So is it is it largely just female domestic workers or adult domestic workers? Do you know if there's another aspect of it?

SPEAKER_03 14:55

I mean the majority are certainly female, it's something like 90% in that Indonesia case. Uh they weren't previously classified as workers at all. Uh that this is the thing. It's like it's really it's really uh coming from a very basic level. So uh a lot of other categories of workers have gradually gained these rights, but when you're not even recognized as workers, it's that it's that that much harder to do. And of course the uh added discrimination of them being women. So um urban, yes. I mean, simply obviously the the urban areas are where the vast majority of migrants go to find work. Uh and so we have much larger concentrations. I don't know if the percentage of domestic work of this kind that is urban relative to rural. But I think these stories about people coming together to create um spaces of care in in areas where, so to take the Nairobi case, just to establish your own park with particular things aimed at domestic workers and their families is a massive achievement because land is so contested, even keeping a piece of land free from development or eviction or whatever is is is something in itself. So, Beth, what's on your read?

SPEAKER_01 16:06

Well, your stories weren't that cheery at all this week, Tom, and and nothing amusing. So I'm gonna start with a do you know that the tallest sandcastle in the Guinness Book of Records was over 21 metres high in Blockers in Denmark, and actually it was made post-pandemic to cheer everyone up and boost tourism. Do you like sandcastles?

SPEAKER_03 16:24

I yeah, I don't mind a good sandcastle. I month went a really cool sand pyramid with my daughter when she was about two. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:31

Um well, tough, you're gonna have to stop.

SPEAKER_03 16:33

Oh no.

SPEAKER_01 16:34

No, well, there is a global sand crisis, and this is what I really want to talk about. Um so there was an article in mid-May in The Guardian about this global sand crisis, and it started with the story of Marle in the the capital of the Maldives, um, which is one of the world's most overcrowded cities and threatened by rising sea levels. So there's a land reclamation project underway where they're moving sand from one part of the island to build up available land in the capital. Um, but the article goes on to position this kind of land reclamation project within the context of the global sand crisis. Um, because sand is being extracted at a faster rate than it can be replenished, according to a UN report earlier in April this year. There's something like one million lorries of sand are extracted from the world's oceans and rivers, um, and 50 billion tonnes of sand and gravel are used per year. And this has to be marine or river sand, not desert sand, just in case you thought that was going to be a fix. So there are four key elements relevant for urban radar on this. The first is that this global sand crisis is directly linked, and explicitly in the articles I've read, linked to urbanisation because of the demand for homes, roads, infrastructures, buildings, etc. You know, concrete is a very high percentage of sand mixed with cement and water, and but also silicon components. So when you think about places like Dubai, you know, all these artificial land masses built from scratch, or you think about even Lagos has this 9.7 square kilometre urban extension planned along the Atlantic shoreline, or Singapore has like reclaimed something like 130 square kilometres of land over the last 40 years, like the urban urbanisation is driving this global sand crisis. But the second thing is that it's obviously quite counterproductive as well, because often where these land reclamation projects are responses to rising sea levels, it's making the problem worse because of all the environmental damage. You know, the sand plays a really important function, and moving it destroys livelihoods and is devastating for the environment. So in Malay, for instance, um, this project has destroyed something like 200 hectares of coral reef and lagoon habitat already. Um, and there are lots of examples of the terrible kind of impacts on different places around the world from this. But it also kind of conflicts with those development goals itself because some people feel their hands are really tied. Like in the Maldives, 70% of the land mass is less than one metre above sea level. Um, other people are saying, well, we're going to need sand to build the green transition, like for wind turbines. Um, and there's one geographer whose work um I came across, which is a geographer at UCL, has been working on sand extraction in Africa. And the case studies are really instructive because in places like Accra in Ghana, you know, there's this really complex role of sand in relation to development objectives because people obviously also have the right to housing. And there's a lot of demand for housing from the lower and middle-income um groups, and they're sort of claiming the right to dream of a house with four walls. And, you know, I'm going to pick that up a bit later when I talk about housing in relation to the World Urban Forum. Um, so you know, it's a really complicated issue. Um, there are some solutions that are out there, but actually, we really need to take this question really seriously. Informing some of this debate is a book by Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain, The Story of Sand and How It Transforms Civilization. And I haven't read it yet, but I'm certainly going to because it looks like it's going to have a lot to say.

SPEAKER_03 19:43

Yeah, I would love to read that. I mean, sand, there's certainly huge double standards around this, and it's very interesting, as you say, in a lot of African cases. So Lagos, you know, surrounded by coastline, they've they've created this whole place echo Atlantic City, essentially out of reclaiming land. And at the same time, the waterfront communities who've mined sand for a living and have always done it, you know, as part of their kind of livelihood, supporting a lot of the construction, have been completely stigmatized. So when I was in Lagos, um, they they'd literally banned sand mining in various waterfront communities, just really as a way of getting rid of those communities, meaning that they weren't viable when all kinds of other sand mining was going on. And actually, I want to just give a little plug because I think a project will be coming out. There's a new centre in Liverpool led by Ty Bat Lawanson and Ola Uduku, Ahuwa in Liverpool, which is Urban Heritage and West Africa focused research centre. And I think they may be doing some work in this space looking at those kind of elite sand mining relative to the other kinds of sand mining and how they're treated. And the other thing it made me think of was in Uganda, just now we talked about this too, because Lake Victoria, so freshwater sand has all these qualities that saltwater sand doesn't. So as you mentioned, there are different kinds of sand. And it's particularly good for this pure silica, which goes not into all kinds of construction but also into the tech industry, including things like mobile phones, lots of Chinese involvement. And then when you have something like Lake Victoria with a whole, you know, three or four countries around it, all with different interests in the lake, this can turn into a real mess trying to regulate that.

SPEAKER_01 21:06

Absolutely. And I mean there's so much more to say, but there's also like illegal sand mafia, it's been weaponized because um Israel put a blockade on uh building materials reaching Gaza, for instance, so they don't have enough building materials to reconstruct. So all kinds of issues with sand.

SPEAKER_03 21:21

So what else is on your radar?

SPEAKER_01 21:23

Yeah, well, data centres. I mean, there's everything. Them again? Yeah, I know, but there's there's like a new data center story every day, isn't there? Um, but there are a couple in particular that had kind of caught my attention. Um, one was in if we're going to draw attention to other kinds of media, in Honolulu civil beat in Hawaii. Um, and it was arguing that AI data centres are like new plantations, so they serve distant markets, but where actually the commodity is not sugar anymore, but it is kind of machine intelligence. And one of the things I thought was really interesting about this story was that actually quite often when you look at the stories about resistance to data centres, it's based on environmental issues like you. Using too many resources, using too much water, creating excess heat, et cetera. But actually, in the Hawaii example, it was really because of the data ownership itself being the key issue. And I'll just give a quote here because it says this imagination. So what they're trying to do is say that there is an alternative future for AI in Hawaii, of collective ownership, not extractive AI. And I'll put a link to the original article in the show notes. It says instead of extracting intelligence from Hawaii, it would cultivate intelligence within it. If we are not careful, Hawaii will become a server rack for someone else's empire. And I thought it was interesting because it's the data infrastructure itself that they're trying to own rather than just thinking about the kind of environmental impacts. And I think that speaks to one other point on this I just wanted to say, which was the idea that there's some kind of win-win that we can control and regulate this. And I was looking again at like what's happening in Scotland is that there's this idea that you can have green data centres. So if we've reached capacity in London and the South East because the infrastructure is at capacity, then actually we can apparently have green data centres if they're all in Scotland because they can then be powered off renewable like wind power. But of course, I don't know how that fits with one of the other things that Scotland's been really famous for recently, which is the community wealth bill. Because the community wealth bill is all about local ownership of business, of infrastructure, local benefits before profit. So I don't understand how putting local people at the centre of the economy through the community wealth building bill, building on the Preston model and other things, fits with the kind of goal of Scotland to be the UK AI data centre capital.

SPEAKER_03 23:32

Yeah, particularly for communities that have had to deal with Donald Trump's golf courses, like swallowing up large parts of their land in recent times.

SPEAKER_01 23:40

So I mean all these stories are urban to the extent that you know we're increasingly thinking about location and how they are relating to the local communities that they're part of.

SPEAKER_03 23:49

Great. Okay, so what else? Do you got one more on your reader?

SPEAKER_01 23:52

My last point is about the World Urban Forum. Um so the World Urban Forum takes place regularly. Uh we're now on number 13, and it's happening at the moment in Baku in Azerbaijan. Um, a kind of gathering of international and national organisations, civil society organisations and NGOs, and it's happening at the midpoint of the new urban agenda, focusing on housing this time around. So a lot of the questions they're looking at are the global housing problem, informal settlements, conflict and disaster recovery, intersections of climate change and migration, amongst other things. So the data really backs this up. You know, we know the stats, don't we? There's like three billion people in inadequate housing, 1.1 billion in informal settlements, 300 million homeless. We know the data doesn't capture the full reality of any of those situations. Um on the one hand, I wanted to say, you know, it's really important, right? Housing is an entry point to understanding and addressing a range of urban challenges. So it's seen as being like one way of addressing multiple different policy objectives. And the messages coming through World Urban Forum are important ones, community-led approaches, right to housing, locally driven finance, etc. Um, it also coincides with the launch of the World Cities Report 2026, which is dealing with the housing crisis. Um, you probably remember, again, back in episode one, we interviewed David Dodman and Vanessa Castambroto about the 2025 report. Um Vanessa's contributed again to this one on the role of housing in building climate-resilient neighbourhoods. Um we'll put the link in the show notes. Um, and it just made me think again, you know, what is the value of these kinds of big international events? They kind of can change the concepts and ideas that we're dealing with, bring new voices in, raise standards, share practices, you know, but we are also at a very different point from firstly when that new urban agenda was originally launched, and also even last year in terms of the kinds of struggles that we're facing around what inclusive urbanisation looks like. And I was just thinking, you know, from all the guests we've had on the podcast, this housing crisis is not accidental. Um, and I think there's a danger that these kinds of forums might treat it as sort of an innate problem that needs to be addressed. You know, housing has become a commodity, it's financialized, there's been a total failure to invest in social housing or settlement upgrading, whilst housing markets are worth trillions and you know, empty property in London can house the homeless. Um property is the most stored asset globally. And I don't really know how much those kinds of questions are on the agenda. Um, but certainly, you know, it's a really interesting moment to be talking about housing and one to watch.

SPEAKER_03 26:10

Yeah, definitely. I mean, woof, I've been to several woofs in my time at the world of the remote. I went to a woof in Naples. Yeah, a woof in Naples. I went to a woof in Nanjing and a woof in Rio. But I'm not at this woof, but we obviously aren't. But uh yeah, no, I mean it's really I haven't yet read the World Cities Report. I'm pleased to see Vanessa's been so involved in it. Also, news just in here, which I want to flag is the work of my colleague Smith Umar, who's done a lot of really interesting work around uh Makuru area of Nairobi again and the kind of very bottom-up inclusive approach to thinking about housing there, and his work has been cited quite a lot. So I think they are looking at these examples of participatory pro poor housing from around the world in the report and taking all that stuff quite seriously. The question is how to get it to the next level, and yeah, we'll see what comes out of this.

SPEAKER_01 26:50

Absolutely. But just to end, two tiny things about Baku in Azerbaijan.

SPEAKER_03 26:55

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 26:55

Okay. One big one, one small one, actually. Do you know what they are?

SPEAKER_03 26:59

We've seen pictures of it.

SPEAKER_01 27:00

So the big thing is that it's the world's lowest capital. It sits at twenty-eight metres below sea level, but it's bigger than Greater London. It would be good for running. Yeah, thank you. I'm gonna I'm gonna I should be there. But the second thing, and you'll like this, you know I would like this, it's got a museum of tiny books. And it has three of the world's tiniest books at two millimetres each, and you have to read them with a magnifying glass.

SPEAKER_03 27:22

Two millimetres?

SPEAKER_01 27:22

Two millimeters. Yeah. And they've got a Beatles anthology catching songs. I do need a very strong miniature, which basically combines your interest in the Beatles with mine in tiny things. So we should be at Baku. I love the Beatles. But do you love tiny things?

SPEAKER_03 27:36

Yeah, kind of, maybe not quite as much as you. Uh brilliant. All right.

SPEAKER_01 27:41

Let's move on. I think we're gonna chat with Lotta now.

SPEAKER_03 27:44

Let's do it. Back to the UK.

SPEAKER_01 28:00

So we're delighted to be joined by Lotta Hargrave, who introduced at the beginning of the podcast. I think I introduced you, Lotta, as a ceepologist, but I've now been told I have mispronounced the word. Do you want to correct me, Lotta?

SPEAKER_03 28:14

Well, I think it's cephologist, but you said you looked it up and I I think Beth was just thinking about pebbles and the seashore and penguins and things and got a bit carried away. But anyway, cephologist, ceepologist. It begins with a P, so it's a confusing word anyway. So on this issue of the cephologist, ceepologist, also, most people, including myself, I have to confess, them will have really only heard that word in connection with a certain person called John Curtis, who appears a lot on the news as the cephologist in chief studying elections. Well, actually, Lotta is one of the people who actually does all the work in the background behind John Curtis's appearances. So we're very excited to have a proper expert on the show.

SPEAKER_01 28:49

Yeah, and why that matters for our international listeners is that we have a by-election coming up in Makerfield, which is an area of Greater Manchester. It's going to be contested by Andy Burnham, who is the mayor of Greater Manchester. And as the media keeps telling us, uh, this is because it's a potential stepping stone for a leadership challenge to Keir Starmer. So all eyes are on Makerfield in Greater Manchester, a town where we're now expecting the future premiership of the UK to be decided. So it is not an issue of local politics alone by any means. So, Lotta, um, it's lovely to have you here. Welcome. Thanks. It's great to be here. We want to start by thinking about the data, really. With this leadership challenge to Keir Starmer looming, um, Andy Burnham is hoping to use it as a springboard to return to Westminster. What does the data actually tell us about the likely chances that he will win there? Um, and how confident can we be in making any kind of predictions based on that data?

SPEAKER_00 29:51

I think when we talk about constituencies in the UK now, there's this saying going around that there are no safe seats in Britain anymore. Um, and but I do think if you look at the data here, that this is a seat that is probably particularly difficult for Labour to hold on to. I mean, Andy Burnham, I think, probably gives Labour its best chance of winning it. Um, but I think this is by no means a sort of safe or comfortable context for him to win. So for a little bit more context, uh, this was a seat that Labour won in uh in 2024, so the last general election that we had. Um constituencies there were won with around sort of 16% marginality. So that's the lead that the kind of first party had on the second party. Makerfield was a little bit less than that, so it was around 13%, and Labour only held off reform by around 5,000 votes. It was actually reform's sixth best performance across the country. So, you know, when we look at the constituency, it is exactly the kind of place where we have seen reform performing strongly. You know, it's an overwhelmingly white constituency, it's older, it's kind of heavily working class, ex-coal mining, and kind of crucially for reform, it voted strongly for Brexit in 2016 as well. So, you know, this is the kind of seat that historically we would have thought was, you know, a classic Labour red wool seat. But now, of course, these are exactly the kinds of seats where we're seeing that reform are picking up votes. And we saw this in the local elections a few weeks ago as well, where reform kind of swept all of the walls in that area with around half of the vote. So definitely a tough contest for Labour in that sense. Um that said, I guess the the one thing that all of that, so past performance and you know, reform in the local elections can't take account of is sort of Andy Burnham himself being the candidate there. I mean, Burnham is without a doubt, kind of one of the most popular politicians in the country at the moment. I mean, I think of the polling that Ugov's done recently in terms of the favorability of different leaders, I think he is the only leader across parties, of those they asked about at least that actually came out with a net positive favorability rating. And when you look in the Northwest specifically, these numbers are even higher. And then, of course, among Labour voters in particular, he's he's kind of the golden man in that sense. So, you know, if Labour have any chance of sort of holding off reform in the seat, I think he is really the sort of the best candidate, really, to do it. I mean, whether he'll win, it's impossible to say. And I would be sceptical of anyone that's trying to tell you that they can predict the outcome of the election. Big contests is going to be very interesting, but I think uh I think we've got sort of a lot to wait and see before we can.

SPEAKER_01 32:25

And that's from that's from a data scientist saying, Don't don't count your chickens before they've come home to roost Andy. Equally, in the last couple of days, um, we've had the first um video from Andy Burnham out on the streets, and I watched it over my breakfast. Um, and he has got that appeal, hasn't he? He's popular without being populist, as um we were discussing on a previous podcast with Matt Flinders, which I think is really important, isn't it? I was reading your article in The Conversation, and of course, we have a recent election, other than the local elections. I'm sorry, international listeners, we're just like, we can't stop having elections here. But we had another by-election in Gorton and Denton. We actually talked about it a few episodes ago on the podcast as well. Um, and that was where a green candidate was elected, Hannah Spencer. And in a recent article you've written in the conversation with your colleagues Hannah Bunting and Jessica Smith, you note that undecided voters, and particularly undecided female voters, were really important in determining that outcome. And one of the things that really interested me was that there was such a high percentage of undecided voters, like compared with normal, as far as I understand it, like around a third of people hadn't made their mind up even the night before the election. So I guess the question is, will that also be the case in Makerfield? And if so, because you've done a lot of work on gender and political communication styles, you know, what would a candidate like Burnham or Kenyon uh do to kind of win undecided, or particularly undecided, female voters?

SPEAKER_00 34:00

So uh I think there probably will still be quite high levels of undecidedness in the maker field by-election. And the work that I've done with Hannah and Jess, as you mentioned, would suggest that these probably are more likely to be women. But I do think that the dynamics in this by-election are quite different to the one in Gordon and Denton. So in Gordon and Denton, right, that was a race between holding off reform, but also between Labour and the Greens. And as you say, the Greens ultimately took that seat from Labour in the end. So I think that the unusually high levels of undecidedness in that election perhaps came around because of the strategic environment, really, right? There were voters, particularly those on the left, that were trying to weigh up whether Labour or the Greens were sort of the right party for holding off reform if that was what you know you wanted to do as a voter. And actually, I live in the Gorton-Denton by-election, so I was subject to all of the campaign material that that we got for that um for that by-election.

SPEAKER_03 34:55

There was a lot, right? We had people on desk.

SPEAKER_01 34:57

We collected all of it, we collected lots of flyers together from our colleagues who live in the area, and we were like rifling through it on the podcast, weren't we?

SPEAKER_03 35:05

Yeah, we'll send you the link to that episode because it was a whole discussion about the materials.

SPEAKER_00 35:17

Mostly in my case, it was actually Greens or or Labour, both of them with a different party art claiming that they were the party that was, you know, strategically the best choice to hold off reform. So I think if you were a voter that kind of cared about making that strategic choice in this constituency, I think it was actually quite hard to work out, you know, what what would have been right in that instance. And I think that might have bumped up the kind of uncertainty that was the reason why it was potentially so high here. Um I think that Makerfield is a little bit different from that because, you know, in a way for people there, the electoral choice is is much clearer. I mean, I don't think there's going to be quite the same kind of tactical calculation going on. So even if the Greens stand a candidate, I don't think the voters are gonna sort of be torn in whether Labour or the Greens are you know the right party to hold off reform. Um so the decision is quite simple, right? It's basically in very simple terms, do you want Andy Burnham to be the Prime Minister or not? And I think when voters can sort of see, I guess, the consequences of their electoral choices, I think that might reduce the level of uncertainty that's there. So I'm sure it will be there, but I think it might be you know a little bit lower in this case than than we saw in the Gorton and Denton by-election.

SPEAKER_03 36:23

It is fascinating, isn't it? Like I've as far as I'm aware, like this has never sort of happened that a by-election is basically appointing any prime minister.

SPEAKER_01 36:31

Desperately undemocratic. I mean, I want to vote.

SPEAKER_03 36:34

Yeah, it's it's really, really bizarre. And I mean, I the what really captured it for me is when I saw the headline saying that West Streeting had come out and said, um, oh yeah, I Andy Burnham is uh is the best chance for Labour to win this seat in this by-election. I was like, that doesn't make any sense. Like Labour was already there. Like the guy's just resigned. Um it's not like other candidates are going to come in and compete with Andy Burnham. Like Labour's already got it and they're handing it away because it's about it's about a national Yeah, it's about who's gonna be Prime Minister.

SPEAKER_01 37:00

Can we just pick up the gender part of that as well, though? Because your work's also been on gender and political communication. You know, is there a particular way that female undecided voters like maybe would respond to political communication different from male undecided voters? So or non-binary undecided voters.

SPEAKER_00 37:19

Yeah, I mean, I think it's it's difficult to generalise with these things, not least because obviously uh women voters or or non-binary voters are quite like a, you know, they're not a homogenous group of people. So what those people want, and indeed the reasons for their undecidedness is gonna is gonna vary, right? Some people it might be deciding whether or not to vote at all. So if you're unhappy with any of the options, you might decide you'd rather not vote. For some people, it might be um waiting for more information. For some people it might be that you've just not paid attention to the news yet and you've got sort of no idea that the um that the by-election is necessarily even happening. So I'd be a bit sort of um hesitant to uh, you know, ultimately it's up for the parties, what to do about that in terms of what they're offering and how they win people over. I guess sort of one potentially interesting uh element of this from work that I've done more broadly, not just on sort of uh vote intention and uncertainty, but on the way that women respond to surveys in general. Um we found that um women say don't know to questions more than men uh sort of outside of just vote intention. Um and one thing we find is that this tends to be actually higher for questions that are around sort of polarizing or contentious issues in some sense. So possibly in a very high profile election like this, right? Where you have you're gonna have, you know, an intense amount of media attention and the stakes are gonna feel really, really important and very consequential, as you say. I mean, people in one constituency are effectively deciding the prime minister. I do wonder whether that's the kind of contest where you might see that women are sort of a bit more, they maybe think for a bit longer than men in terms of who they vote for or whether they're gonna vote at all. So there might be some sort of potential gender dynamics there that are perhaps a little bit different to the Gorson-Denton uh election that we saw a couple of months ago.

SPEAKER_03 39:04

But let's just look at this relationship between this election and the national leadership contest i in a bit more detail. I mean, obviously many people are saying if Andy Burnham wins this by-election, then he will become Prime Minister, and it will be seen as a demonstration that Labour can beat reform nationally because it's going to be a close race and it's really a very reform-leaning constituency. So it is this kind of bellwether, as well as being about Andy Burnham, it's also about can Labour beat reform? I mean, I don't know what what you think about that and how how it will affect people's voting. Because on the one hand, they're thinking about Burnham, they're also thinking about reform and its agenda. They may also be thinking about local issues that concern them as constituents. I mean, how do you think the relationship between all these things might come together in in how people decide to vote?

SPEAKER_00 39:49

So I think that um people in the constituency are it's gonna be very hard to ignore the fact that this is the weight of this choice, right, for what it means nationally. I think um that's gonna be very important in terms of deciding how people are gonna vote. I think in terms of whether the what the outcome means in terms of the national picture or kind of what this might mean even for a general election going forward, I don't think I would be cautious about kind of taking what happens in the maker field and projecting that onto what might happen in a future general election, not least because that's probably gonna be maybe three years away and British politics changes very, very fast. Um I think for Labour, though, of course, like the consequence of this can't be overstated, really. I think, you know, if Burnham, their you know, their top guy who's very popular, particularly in the Northwest, you know, basically comes from this area, can't beat reform in a seat like this, then I think there's gonna be real panic amongst those in Labour for what that means for them, what that means for their jobs um at the next election. Of course, for Burnham, you know, personally, the stakes are enormous. I mean, whatever you may think of him, you know, it's a bold move. If he loses, it's gonna be, you know, pretty difficult, I think, at least this side of an election, for him to look to come back to Westminster or of course to um to try and lead the party. Um I'm I'm maybe like a little bit less convinced that um Burnham winning there necessarily means that uh a Burnham-led Labour Party is going to be able to hold off reform nationally. I mean, Makefield is difficult to reign for Labour, um, but you know, ultimately is still in Greater Manchester, where Burnham is exceptionally popular personally and you know is very well established in terms of his political profile. So although it's a difficult seat, you know, is it the most difficult seat of all the difficult seats for him to win? I mean, maybe not. Um and I guess the final thing I'd say on this is that, you know, I think there's maybe a little bit of a danger in assuming that um Labour's uh problems as they exist are going to be solved by just changing the person that's in charge of the. I mean, Burnham, although very popular, you know, is that popularity is to some extent sheltered at the moment by the fact that, you know, he's he's not directly tied to Starmer's government, you know, he's not defending a position in cabinet, you know, he hasn't been tested in that role as prime minister. So I think ultimately what this means for uh the label, what this means for the next election is kind of less going to be about whether Burnham ends up in number 10 and more about sort of what the person, be that Burnham, be that Starmer if he continues, or be that any other candidate, actually does right when they're in office. You know, what are what's the vision for the party? What are the policies that they're going to pursue and such? So although the by-election is very important, I'm sure voters will be thinking about some of this or all of this or different things in making their decisions. I think that whether Labour is, you know, ultimately saved or doomed based on the outcome of this test is is kind of bigger than just Burden winning what happens over the next three years, really.

SPEAKER_03 42:57

Yeah, it's interesting because it's like obviously Labour's very much playing up the positive potential of winning and how that would mean that's it, we can beat reform. Of course, it's much less certain. If if he wins, the outcome is in a way more uncertain than if he loses, because like you say, he's then got three years to kind of convince for things to go wrong. It's gonna have to deal with the Brexit issue, the North-South issue. If he loses, then the kind of idea of game over for Labour for now seems almost more certain. And it's it's amazing to think how that's changed from, you know, reform is all about game over for the Tories, right? That's what the conversation has been for the last few years, and it would suddenly flip. But I think to shift our focus and our scale, maybe, the one place where Labour, you know, ha has always been strong and may continue to have an important future, whatever happens, is in cities, as uh, you know, in the mayoralties of large cities and in regions. And obviously that's been really important for Labour and for Andy Burnham personally, being being there in Manchester. So if we can kind of put aside what happens in Makerfield, other than the fact that obviously there will only be a mayor election if he l if he wins. Um Assuming he wins, we don't know what's going to happen to Labour nationally, but what might happen to the mayoralty in Manchester? So, as a Manchester resident and a and a cephologist, what do you think about that position that Andy will have vacated?

SPEAKER_00 44:12

Yeah, so I think it's interesting actually. I think Burnham's people or the greater mayoral authority put out a statement a couple of days ago confirming that it was only if he wins he has to step down from the mayor. I think there was some ambiguity around this before that. So, you know, that's good for Labour in that it avoids the for them nightmare scenario where Burnham steps down as the mayor, doesn't win the by-election, and then the by-election for the mayor won by, you know, Green, reform, whichever party. So I think um that's definitely good for Labour, and it's definitely obviously good for Burnham personally, who might be looked on quite negatively if he then steps down and you know hands the mayor off to someone else. Um so yeah, you're right. If he wins, there's a by-election uh that has to happen for the mayor. I think it's um around 35 days working days afterwards, so it's quite quick uh when that has to happen. Um and I think it would be an exceptionally competitive contest between reform, between Labour, but also uh for the Greens as well. I think um the good thing about it only happening if he wins is that the mayor uh by-election would happen in light of a Labour victory against reform, right? Like this would be seen as symbolically important for the party that they can hold off reform in this kind of ground. And, you know, particularly if that then happens with, you know, Burnham going down to Westminster and sort of being coronated, if you will, uh to prime minister quickly, there might be some sort of like honeymoon effect in the immediate aftermath of Burnham coming in that also I think helps Labour a bit here. I think it's gonna be still a very competitive race, though. Labour will fight hard to keep it, but um both reform and the Greens in local elections and Greens in the Gorton and Denton by-election have been picking up uh seats all throughout uh Greater Manchester. We saw kind of massive swings to a particular reform, but also the Greens in the local elections a couple of weeks ago. So all three parties have been sort of um making moves here. So I think uh, you know, if Burnham wins and this happens, the political consequences for Manchester are also going to be, I think, very interesting to watch.

SPEAKER_03 46:22

Can I just ask, is there a world in your view in which Polanski himself stands as mayor for Manchester? Because, you know, Burnham will have just demonstrated the route from Manchester into Parliament is is potentially a viable one. It's a position, you know, where he will give the strongest chance of Greens winning that that position. But I don't know whether that's something people are talking about.

SPEAKER_00 46:42

I mean, I'm not sure what conversations are happening within the Green Party. I suspect that they will want to put up someone from that contest who is high profile and someone in that contest who they um think is going to get some sort of personal vote. I mean, I heard some discussions around maybe Hannah Spencer, now she's in, would be a good candidate for this. I suspect that um I suspect the Greens are probably not going to take their newly elected MP and put her forward to be the mayoral candidate. Um, but I'm sure there'll be a lot of conversations going on in terms of the party about who would be advising for that.

SPEAKER_01 47:15

Andy Burnham's a big fan of proportional representation. Um, and I had heard that there was this thing called the supplementary vote that might come into play in the Greater Manchester mayoral election, which is a local version, as I understand it, of PR, although presumably quite watered down. What what is it and how might it affect the outcome, if you can answer that?

SPEAKER_00 47:36

Yeah, so um it's uh it's supplementary vote sort of takes into account people's first and second preferences, as I as I understand it. Um at the moment, the system is first past the post, so the one that we're familiar with in terms of uh uh standard Westminster uh voting. Um supplementary vote's not in place at the moment. Uh there is existing legislation that means that Labour could bring it in if they wanted to. And um, I think the kind of the view is they probably do have time to do that if they wanted to. Um I think that uh reform potentially have an advantage under first past the post because um they're kind of the main competitor on the right. Whereas we have both then Greens and Labour on the left, right, who might be vying for different the same people's votes potentially. Whereas because supplementary vote takes into account people's um first and second preferences, although imagine a someone that's sort of voting green, they might put Labour as their second preference, for instance. So I think that helps Labour in terms of bumping them up in second preferences, even if the first preferences is split more between, you know, green, labour, or potentially Liv Dem as well.

SPEAKER_01 48:44

Well, it's another variable, isn't it, that could shape that election. Let's come on to cephology itself, um, which hopefully I've now pronounced correctly. Um, you know, it's very interesting to hear your use of the words might, maybe, could, you wouldn't want to predict, because obviously, in some ways, this is this is your science. So I'd be interested first to know a bit more about, you know, what are the tools of the trade that you use to try and analyse what has happened and what might happen. And then I have a supplementary question about local factors that we'll come on to in a moment.

SPEAKER_00 49:15

Okay. Uh so I guess the the most traditional kind of tool that we use for saying what might happen is a pretty standard variant of pollsters are some question that's if there was a general election happening tomorrow, uh, which party would you vote for? And then we use uh answers to those uh questions to say say something about what the kind of the headline vote figures look like, right? So we can say that of those we polled, 30% said reform, you know, 20% said Labour, so on and so forth. Um so that's kind of what we were using for a very, very long time. Um the kind of issue with that is that obviously uh elections in the UK are not really decided based on the national vote figures, they're decided on how things happen from kind of uh constituency to constituency. Um, and that's kind of why we saw this rise in this method called MRP, which is a sort of newer method, stands for multi-level regression with post-stratification. So we've seen a big rise in this. But um, we've seen a rise in this since the I think the 2017 election was the first time we ever saw it. But now you'll see this sort of thing happen. Um, you'll see a lot of these sorts of polls come out in advance of kind of general elections. And we saw this with the Scottish and the and the Welsh um uh parliament elections recently as well for the first time. So I suppose the the difference there, or if the goal of the sort of more traditional method is to tell you something nationally, the goal of the MRP is to think much more about the kind of constituency level element of this. So um it basically works by combining those kind of traditional um questions that we were talking about before. And then um you look at how groups or types of voters uh are um who different types of voters sorry are saying they would vote for. So if you've got young women who rent and they're saying they're kind of particularly likely to vote for some party, or you've got you know older, unemployed people who say they're going to vote for a different type of party. So that's kind of step one. And then step two is you link that with things like the census to look at how many of these different types of people are concentrated in different constituencies. Um, and then you use that to make seat level projections at the constituency level, and then you use that to kind of add up to what do things look like at the at the national level.

SPEAKER_01 51:35

That's really helpful. But I mean, I guess that leads us on to so how do you then account for local variations and what's happening within social environments and daily interactions when you're trying to actually think about what's going to happen within these elections? I was I had a Google to see if there was such a thing as an urban sophologist, and I didn't come across anything, but there's a whole literature around electoral geography that's quite interesting.

SPEAKER_00 51:57

Uh so I guess uh those that are proponents of MRP would claim that this sort of approach is better in that you are at least taking into account like who lives where, and you can take into account things not just like the census, but also kind of other features of um constituencies. I think like I spoke to people that did this and they kind of put things in like does a constituency have a peer or whatever, or how many fish and chip shops are there in a constituency is like a measure of things we might matter, think matter politically. Um I think that where uh where MRPs struggle um is that they can't take account of things that are hyper-local. So uh they can't take account of things like really who the candidate is locally, and if that person is sort of particularly popular, unpopular, contentious. So um, you know, if we have someone from the cabinet standing, those sorts of people tend to do better than you know the national um expectation. We can't take into account that. Um, and I think the other thing that is maybe um gonna be sort of increasingly important now we see sort of the five-party politics is that they can't take into account people voting tactically uh in this. Um and uh we might actually see a situation where voters use MRP seat level projections as a way to decide how to vote tactically. Um so I guess in that sense, these sorts of things can sort of not just measure people's preferences, but they can also shape them a bit as well. So um so they have certain advantages. There are definitely things that they that they kind of can't capture. And ultimately, with sort of forecasting, it's always gonna be some level of uncertainty here, right? It's not gonna be sort of absolute in terms of what they're saying.

SPEAKER_03 53:38

I think, I mean, so many things we could we could follow up on. I think uh we're gonna have to wrap up, unfortunately, but thank you so much for coming on. We'll see what happens is in this election. Looking at the way things have been in this country and the way they may continue to be, there will be many more elections and we might have to talk to you again. But uh yeah, we've been so grateful to have you on.

SPEAKER_00 53:56

Thank you. No, thank you so much for having me. It's been great.

SPEAKER_01 53:59

Thank you.

SPEAKER_03 54:12

That was good.

SPEAKER_01 54:13

Yeah, really interesting, isn't it? I mean, the the science of prediction um and uh the limits to that as well, but such an interesting insight into what could be or couldn't be. You know, we all wouldn't want this crystal ball, don't we? You know, we're all so impatient to know the future, but actually, in many ways, we're just gonna have to wait because maker field are going to decide for us.

SPEAKER_03 54:31

And it's such a I mean, talk about I think we've talked about multi-level governance on this podcast, and there's a whole literature on that, but multi-level politics, like where you really like voting for something that's way beyond what you're really voting for, and you know, the national and mayoral and local constituency levels. I've I've never seen them so intertwined in my lifetime. Is it nothing like this?

SPEAKER_01 54:49

No, absolutely. And I mean, it does seem likely that Andy Burnham, you know, he could be our new Prime Minister at some point in the future, couldn't he? And if that's the case, then we've got a podcast, haven't we?

SPEAKER_03 55:01

We have got a podcast. I was gonna because we we we uh we could have talked a bit about Westreating or Angela Rayner or people, but I mean in the end it's like it's all about Burnham, and that's clearly what's coming coming through in all the analysis. But we do have that unique situation of Beth having interviewed Andy Burnham before he was I mean, he was already kind of in the conversation before.

SPEAKER_01 55:19

Well in the green room we were chatting about this possibility. Not exactly, but it was definitely a sort of like wink and a nod, how am I going to go for it? And do you remember that question that I asked him at the end about um heading south in order to sort things out? And while I was talking about global south politics and like whether or not the future of northern industrial He was just thinking about Westminster. He was thinking about Westminster. You know, but it's really interesting, isn't it? Because in that podcast it was all about um devolution, it was about Manchesterism, uh, you know, as in being kind of like a contrast to neoliberalism, which not everybody buys, let's be frank. Um but equally, these are difficult choices, you know, and Manchester has done very well under his tutelage.

SPEAKER_03 56:00

I think that Manchesterism will come back because I mean the way this idea is now being thrown around as some kind of business-friendly socialism, I heard someone call it. I thought, hang on a minute, this doesn't quite sound like what I hear about Manchester. So for listeners who do want to think more about this, episode six, Beth interviewing Andy Burnham and Steve Rotherham about their book Look North, a really interesting conversation with in front of a ladder.

SPEAKER_02 56:19

Head North, actually.

SPEAKER_03 56:20

Head North, sorry, head north. I'm thinking of the bit of the news that comes and also episode two on Manchester's development model.

SPEAKER_01 56:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 56:27

With um our colleagues Rich Golding and Adam Lever, who really critically interrogate this idea of what the Manchester model is, and it may not be what a lot of people think based on media coverage.

SPEAKER_01 56:38

Well, I'm sure we're going to pick this up again when results finally come out. Um I don't think we're out of election frenzy yet, so uh we'll come back to it in future episodes, but for now I think we have to wrap up, don't we, Tom?

SPEAKER_03 56:47

We do, we do.

SPEAKER_01 56:48

Yep.

SPEAKER_03 56:48

So thanks everybody tuning. Tuning next time. Bye. Bye.