Steve Rotheram

Yes, I think you'll find the taxpayer-

... and is making Steve Rotheram, and elsewhere

... and I think you'll find the taxpayer in the rest of the country have to subsidize the yellow bus service.

I think London gets a fairly big, uh, transport, uh, subsidy, and I, I'm not, I'm not criticizing that London generates a lot of wealth.

I'm very proud, very privileged to be Labour's leader of Liverpool City Council.

And it's great that today I'm joined by my very good friend and colleague, Steve Rotheram, our mayor of the Liverpool City Region.

Steve, how you doing?

Very good.

How about it's all coming out of the same mayor's office and therefore, yeah, it, it's no...

That fragmentation of things living in silo and, and one organization not speaking to another and people working to sort of different agendas that maybe we start to reduce some of that in, in sort of Rotherham's office having sight of, of all of that stuff.

So yeah, to your point, I think that would be fascinating.

You know, g- are these sort of decent test cases and guinea pigs for hooking up with, with local colleges and, and bringing-

Last one, last one.

I started with the, the, the miniseries we did about you with Steve Rotheram, who knows you as well as pretty much anybody outside your family, and I want to go very briefly to this book that I've-

Oh, yes

... been talking about right now.

Right

... meantime, because there was- Like you just said there, like even we had the Metro Mayor, Steve Rotheram saying, "Well, we didn't bother sorting the trans- the transport out because we didn't actually know it was gonna be finished." And he said that in the November, and it got finished in the December.

[laughs] Yeah, a month beforehand.

So it was like, you know, he said that on, I think he was on Radio Merseyside.

We've also got an AI task force that we've now set up.

Uh, Steve Rotheram, as our mayor, is very, very keen we harness the power of AI for good.

How is this an enabler, not a kind of something that, that leads to sort of negative, uh, consequences? So, you know, from our perspective at, at local and regional level, we always want to be part of that conversation a- and share everything that we've got.

Uh, in terms of digital in- inclusion, yes, completely agree.

And he makes the argument that it is consistent to say that, well, yeah, of course everything is out there, including just staying where you are.

Because he said in his book that he wrote with Steve Rotheram that within his lifetime he'd like to see the UK back in the, in the EU.

So if he'd then said to me and others, well, I mean, no, I mean, we wouldn't have another referendum.

Mm.

This time around, people are going Beatlemania over mayors and a book making the case for devolution, for goodness sake.

It is a complete energy 180.

I finally get a word in with Steve and ask how it feels to see his BFF in Downing Street.

And you always say he's your bezzie.

Yeah.

My God, what a difference a year makes.

I remember standing in this exact spot one year ago thinking, "Hmm, not sure Keir Starmer's that long for this world," and lo, he was not.

[laughs] And what, what really struck me the last two Labor Party conferences with Starmer in charge is just how downbeat the whole thing felt considering that the party had won a fairly historic landslide.