This is a big job – I don’t want to let people down
THE CITY’S NEW COUNCIL LEADER TELLS JENNIFER WILLIAMS OF HER ASPIRATIONS
MANCHESTER council’s new leader is under no illusions. After stepping into Sir Richard Leese’s shoes at the top of the town hall, she admits to some trepidation.
“I think a person without any self-awareness would just tell you it’s going to be fine,” says Bev Craig, asked how she feels, “you know - ‘it’s going to be good, I’m going to be great’.
“But I have self-awareness; I think that’s important in politics.
“Of course it is a big job. To me it’s one of the most important jobs in the country and I absolutely want to do it right. I absolutely want to be a credit to Manchester and to not let people down.
“So I’m going into it, I think, with pressure - but good pressure.”
Manchester’s top political job attracts so much attention not only because it is a big city, of course, but because of its history.
The town hall has had only two leaders in just less than four decades: Sir Richard himself and, before him, Graham Stringer, now MP for Blackley and Broughton. It has meant that for better or worse, Manchester council’s outlook has long been a comparatively known quantity.
Coun Craig, meanwhile, is an unknown quantity for most Mancunians, as well as for those further afield, including investors, who are watching to see what happens next.
She was brought up in Greenisland, a ‘generally uneventful kind of standard council housing estate’ eight miles outside Belfast, a place that shaped her politics in more ways than one. As one of only a handful of students who had grown up on free school meals, she recalls - debates around poverty are still now far from hypothetical. Her family remains in the same community and ‘when we talk about Universal Credit cuts, my sisters are having to navigate that in their budgets’. Not everything in her upbringing was as ‘uneventful’ as her estate. She came out aged 14, a process, in the mid-1990s, that was far from easy. “For many people I was the first gay person that they’d ever met.”
She recognises her status as the city’s first female and first openly gay leader is not only symbolically important but personally, too.
“I look back at [age] 14, 15, when I came out,” she says. “Everyone told me my life was going to be a disaster, no one would love me.
“I’d not be able to get married and nobody would employ me. So actually there’s something in that that’s quite powerful for me.”
Yet there is ambivalence. She is equally keen for her gender and sexuality, in 2021, not to define her leadership.
“The other side of it is actually, you know, I don’t want to be pigeonholed, to just be invited to panels to talk about how it feels like to be a woman. Talk to me about my economic policy, talk about inclusive growth, transport, infrastructure, business, like the stuff that I enjoy reading about. “
And after years of political debate about whether Manchester has focused too much energy on its city centre to the detriment of other communities, she signals a change of direction.
“What Manchester has done well is we’ve had a plan ready to go when the next bit of government funding pops up or the next wave of infrastructure arrives,” she says.
“That’s been one of our strengths - having ready-made things that we can say, ‘hey, government, give us some enabling funds and off we go’. And I just want to make sure we’ve got the balance right, between having high profile things in the city centre and things across the city.”