Steve Rotheram should have been in the Leppings Lane stand in Hillsborough Stadium, Sheffield, for the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool FC and Nottingham Forest on April 15th, 1989.
He was no stranger to Hillsborough. He had been there the year before for the semi-final “with the same police force, the same crowds, but this year it was completely different”, he remembered in Dublin this week.
The turnstiles could not cope, so crowds began to build up outside the ground. Standing cheek by jowl with other Liverpudlian fans, Rotheram swapped a Leppings Lane ticket for one elsewhere in the ground, so three friends could stay together.
“I went to the stand where one of them was originally going to go to and they went down the tunnel,” says Rotheram, who still feels, like so many others who were there on that day, survivor’s guilt.
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Ninety-seven men, women and children died as a result of the match-day crowd crush at the stadium. They were eventually found to have been unlawfully killed as a result of the failings of the emergency services.
Hillsborough is always close to mind for Rotheram, who is now the directly elected mayor of Liverpool, and his fellow Liverpudlian, former Labour cabinet minister Andy Burnham, who holds the same position in Manchester.
The two are close friends. Rotheram ran Burnham’s failed campaign to become the Labour Party leader in 2015 after Ed Miliband resigned. That battle was eventually won easily by Jeremy Corbyn.
Burnham was not at Hillsborough that day. An Everton FC fan, the then Cambridge University student had travelled to Birmingham for the other FA Cup semi-final, between his club and Norwich.
“A lot of my friends were at Hillsborough, and I had been with them in the pub the night before,” says Burnham, who remembers going back to Cambridge University days after the disaster.
In Cambridge “nobody was talking about Hillsborough”, he says. “Hillsborough was the thing that radicalised me as a young person against the unfairness of how people from my part of the world were treated and blamed for what happened.”
Both men say Hillsborough matters because the north of England finally understood that London and its metropolitan elite did not care, would never care and that power had to be devolved from London.
The attitudes displayed – most notoriously by The Sun newspaper’s untruthful claims days later that some fans had picked pockets of victims and had urinated on police officers – reflected wider ills in British society “where they looked at people like us in the north almost as second-class citizens”, Rotheram says.
Burnham and Rotheram argue that the north of England is still unfairly treated – they cite the billions of pounds spent on building the Elizabeth railway line in London while Liverpool and Manchester still depend on Victorian-era rail systems.
During his time as a Labour minister under Tony Blair, Burnham had responsibility for some of the early planning for the Elizabeth line. He said he was not against the project, but kept asking about the absence of equivalent spending for the northwest of England.
“And I kept waiting and I kept saying, ‘Where’s the list? I want my list of regional projects to be announced alongside” the London project.
Today, Burnham has become a powerful figure in English politics, in charge for the last eight years of a rapidly growing Manchester – one of the few bright spots in the often-dismal picture of English regional cities.
Both politicians believe that politics must go local. “It’s place first rather than party first. I honestly think it’s the right starting point for politics, particularly in this highly divided century that we’re now living in,” Burnham says.
“Because place unifies people. However they are politically, wherever they are on the spectrum, everyone cares about the place where they live. Everyone wants to see it doing better.
“If you start with place, you create a space for everybody to walk into and work together. When it’s party first, with the prism of Westminster, you get people retrenching, pulling back and not reaching out, not collaborating.”
Offering an example of the change brought by greater local jurisdiction, Burnham points to bus services in Greater Manchester, now back under public control since January for the first time in 40 years.
He says privatisation under Margaret Thatcher’s time in power was a disaster. “I’d get a notice that a bus company was going to cut this route, or that. They just went. So, basically, what they’re doing is putting you over a barrel.”
Sometimes, Burnham says, bus operators would use route closures to force more subsidies from Manchester’s 10 local authorities. “We ended up throwing money just to prop up services, and they got all the commercial profit.”
Since January 1st, the city’s bus system is costing a third less to run, with better services, which they cite as evidence that the 1980s privatisations and deregulation wrought by Thatcher failed.
Burnham says these increased the cost of housing, energy, water and led to “crumbling infrastructure, fragmented railways, all of which is an unsustainable, huge cost burden on the taxpayer, and all with really poor services”.
So, do two directly elected mayors in the north of England have advice for their only Irish counterpart, John Moran in Limerick? “I really hope he succeeds. I wish him well. I’ve not met him. I’ve heard a lot of things about him.”
Having directly elected mayors in Liverpool and Manchester has helped life in both cities. “It does mean you get sharper focus on the public experience and delivery,” Burnham says.
Having such mayors in Cork and Dublin would spur “city-to-city collaboration” between Ireland and the north of England. “If there was one in Dublin, I would pick up the phone to that person every couple of weeks.”
