Green Party Manchester Mayoral Candidate Pledges To Twin Manchester With Palestinian City Of Ramallah
Geraldine Coggins is the Green Party candidate for the Greater Manchester mayoral by-election (Alamy)
5 min read
Exclusive: The Green Party candidate for the Greater Manchester mayoral by-election will pledge to twin Greater Manchester with Ramallah, the administrative capital of Palestine, if she wins the contest.
Geraldine Coggins will unveil the proposal on Friday, saying that a partnership with the West Bank city of Ramallah would create opportunities for long-term collaboration between the cities.
On 30 July, voters in Greater Manchester will head to the polls to elect a new regional mayor to replace Andy Burnham, who left the role to become the new prime minister of the United Kingdom.
The mayoral by-election is a hugely significant contest for the Labour Party, which wants to prove it can maintain its stronghold in the region, and Reform UK and the Green Party, which both made significant electoral gains in the local council elections in May and want to show they can challenge Labour on its home turf.
With Andy Burnham as the new Labour leader and prime minister, the Green Party is having to rethink its strategy to retain left-wing voters who have moved from Labour to support them during Keir Starmer's premiership.
Asked by PoliticsHome how the party might have to change its campaign messaging to adapt to a Burnham premiership, Coggins said it would "depend on which version of Burnham we get" but insisted that the Greens had a clear dividing line with Labour over the war in Gaza, which the party believes resonates with voters in the Greater Manchester region.
"We've not seen the serious recognition of what is happening in Gaza, and a lot of people will not go back to Labour and really see Labour as morally bankrupt," she said.
"That's what we hear from people. That is not a thing that people just get over.
"We are still funding and fueling this war and sharing military intelligence. Our government is still complicit in that, and people are not just going to get over that because there's a new prime minister at the front."
The Greens included a pledge to partner with a Palestinian city in their mayoral election manifesto. The party has now chosen Ramallah as the proposed twin city because it has growing technology, creative, professional services, and education sectors which could create opportunities for collaboration between the cities.
Coggins will announce the pledge outside the Dar ul Uloom Mosque in Manchester’s Longsight District on Friday, where she is expected to say that Manchester has a "proud tradition of international solidarity, from the campaign against apartheid to welcoming refugees fleeing conflict".
A Green Party source said: "People up and down the country have been outraged by Labour's complicity in Israel's genocide.
"It's clear that this isn't going to change now Andy Burnham has become Prime Minister. Greens will always stand up for human rights and international law. And, as mayor of Greater Manchester, Geraldine would continue to call out the government's failings and show there is a different way."
The Manchester mayoral by-election is shaping up to be less closely fought than was initially expected following Labour's devastating losses in the region in the May local elections.
Lib Dem mayoral candidate Richard Kilpatrick, Labour candidate Bev Craig and Green candidate Geraldine Coggins spoke at an LGBT hustings in Manchester on Tuesday evening (PoliticsHome)
A YouGov poll on 17 July put Labour candidate Bev Craig at 62 per cent in the second round of the by-election voting, ahead of Reform UK’s Sian Astley on 38 per cent. The poll also showed Craig leading on 38 per cent on first preference votes, compared to Astley’s 24 per cent and the Greens in third on 17 per cent.
Nevertheless, the Greens say they are continuing to campaign hard after their former leader Caroline Lucas told PoliticsHome it was the party's intention to "throw everything" at the contest.
Speaking to PoliticsHome in Manchester this week, Coggins criticised Burnham's announcement to cut VAT on household electricity as a measure that would only save the average household less than a pound a week.
"That's a continuation of the sort of incrementalism that we had under Starmer," she said.
"It is not the wholesale change to the rip-off Britain model that we really need. I don't think people are going to be fooled by that."
Coggins highlighted suggestions that Burnham intends to continue drilling in the North Sea, and his failure to eradicate homelessness in Greater Manchester during his time as mayor, with the new PM now making the same pledge from Downing Street.
She also criticised Burnham's approach to 'Manchesterism', arguing that the way housing development had been carried out in Manchester was seen primarily as an "investment opportunity for wealthy individuals and big corporations".
In contrast, she said the Greens see housing as "bringing back homes for people" in Greater Manchester, with a pledge to create 20,000 "genuinely affordable" homes over 10 years.
At an LGBT hustings in Manchester's Gay Village on Tuesday evening, Coggins was keen to draw a dividing line between the Greens and Labour on housing in particular. PoliticsHome previously revealed that the Greens were hoping to target unease about gentrification in the region to attack Labour in the contest.
"Unlike Bev, I can tell you what genuinely affordable means," Coggins told the hustings.
"That means that if you are on housing benefit, you will be able to afford to rent them."
She described a system where housing benefit money was being "funnelled into big corporate landlords who own these shiny towers in other countries who aren't even paying tax here" and said she wanted to "really radically change our housing".
Craig responded by saying that Coggins' comments got a "little bit personal".
"If you want to know what I think genuinely affordable homes look like, you can look at the Manchester living rent," the Labour candidate said.
"And you can look at the record numbers of council and social homes that we built last year, building more in the city than we've done in 25 years."
The full list of Greater Manchester Mayoral Candidates:
Sian Astley (Reform UK)
Geraldine Coggins (The Green Party)
Bev Craig (Labour and Co-operative Party)
Phil Eckersley (The Conservative Party)
Marcus Farmer (Independent)
Richard Kilpatrick (Liberal Democrats)
Marlon West (Restore Britain)
