Inside The Hive: What Manchesterism Actually Means

Andy Burnham and Manchesterism (Illustration by Tracy Worrall)

7 min read46 min

The first hint of Manchesterism in the public consciousness came at an outdoor press conference in October 2020, when Andy Burnham heard about the latest Covid restrictions to be imposed on the city and the money available for it. In a moment that launched a thousand memes, the mayor looked down at his adviser’s phone bearing the news and grimaced. “I mean, it’s brutal, isn’t it?” he said. “This is not right. They should not be doing this – grinding people down: £22m to fight the situation we are in is frankly disgraceful.”

Boris Johnson was the prime minister then, but the refrain has persisted: ‘Manchester is being done down by Westminster and Whitehall, deprived of the autonomy it needs to thrive and I, the city’s elected mayor, will not roll over and keep quiet about it.’ As Burnham has grown more confident – poised, were he able to do so, to challenge Keir Starmer – Manchesterism has become a way for him to express how he would run the country differently.

What, then, is Manchesterism? What relevance does an idea rooted in one city have for governing a nation of 70 million? Does it owe anything to Manchester Liberalism, the other big political idea to have emerged from the North West? And given how little power British mayors have, how much has Burnham been able to do to flesh out his philosophy?

Doubters say it is mostly vibes and boosterism, rooted in a belief in Manchester’s thwarted potential (axing HS2 to Manchester fuelled that disaffection) and relies on a bottom-up localism that would be hard to translate to the national stage. Enthusiasts believe it would permanently reshape the relationship between Britons and their elected representatives. Rachel Reeves’ tentative plans to share income tax revenues with local government, mentioned in her recent Mais Lecture, hint that Burnham’s message is getting through.

Yet Manchesterism is a “governance rather than an economics question”, says Marc Stears, director of the Policy Lab at UCL, and a former adviser to Ed Miliband. He describes it as “an essentially collaborative way of working” where government allies with trade unions and business to “dismantle roadblocks”. He says this approach is impossible when the country is governed overwhelmingly from Westminster: “The short-termism and antiquated nature of our governing stops you having a growth plan which is going to be successful.”

Stears, who has spent time in Australia, admires the “healthy rivalry” between cities like Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide, compared with the relatively unproductive British cities beyond the capital. “If we’re reliant only on London and the South East, we won’t be able to get growth above 1.5 per cent.”

In practice, working more closely with unions and business has meant trying to bring services back into public control. Burnham’s signature reform has been to bring Manchester’s buses back into local authority control, calling them the Bee Network. He has also been planning more social housing to replace the stock lost to sell-offs. “It’s been difficult,” says Ryan Swift of the think tank IPPR North. “There’s been a mix of local government taking the lead on that and financially empowering social housing companies.” Efforts to reform skills and education have been less successful, largely because of the limited powers a city mayor has and difficulties in bringing opportunities and transport to some of Greater Manchester’s outlying boroughs, like Wigan.

Burnham has fleshed out Manchesterism by calling for constitutional changes like abolishing the House of Lords and replacing it with a senate of the nations and regions. Gordon Brown championed this plan, but very few of his proposed reforms survived contact with the Starmer government. Burnham also wants to reform the whipping system so that MPs can vote in the interests of their constituencies, and he has “come round” to proportional representation.

Critics ask how much of what makes Manchester relatively prosperous today is down to Burnham himself

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Last autumn he called for higher taxes on the better-off, the renationalisation of utilities and more government borrowing, telling the New Statesman: “We’ve got to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond market.” It was a bold move for a “governance” rather an economic project and raised questions about the cost of Burnham’s aspirations. With borrowing unlikely to get cheaper until the war in the Middle East is resolved, Manchesterism looks even more expensive. The market’s lack of confidence frustrates him. “The focus on the longer-term returns on delivery is something that’s held back investment in the North in recent years,” says Swift.

Critics ask how much of what makes Manchester relatively prosperous today is down to Burnham himself. The Labour-controlled council took several key decisions in the decade before he became mayor. It welcomed foreign investment in property, especially from the Abu Dhabi United Group investment fund, a lot of it unaffordable to most Mancunians. By 2011, the BBC was already moving into Salford and the Beetham Tower, for a while the tallest UK building outside London, had gone up. Burnham’s focus on the ‘social economy’ is in part a reaction to the feeling that central Manchester has prospered from a huge injection of oil money, not necessarily to the benefit of locals. “Kids can’t see a path to those skyscrapers,” he told the Social Mobility Commission.

Abu Dhabi still owns Man City, but Burnham has attracted foreign direct investment from the US, EU and India. The UK Biobank and a GCHQ base have moved in. Universities are heavily involved in the planned ‘Atom Valley’ in Rochdale. They represent the scientific, trade and manufacturing side of Manchesterism – an echo of the Manchester Liberalism of the mid-19th century and the emancipation of workers through international trade. Burnham is notably enthusiastic about reindustrialisation. Asked whether he identifies more with Richard Cobden or Friedrich Engels, he chooses Cobden, the Mancunian Radical and free-trader.

The Greens’ by-election victory in Gorton and Denton shows that Labour’s record in Manchester has not been enough to counter Keir Starmer’s unpopularity. Burnham will take comfort from the fact he was barred from standing, and that the Greens won through a very Labour appeal to working-class solidarity and the pain of the cost of living. Should he become PM and need to govern in coalition after the next election, Burnham is ideologically flexible enough to do it: for his part, Zack Polanski has said he could work with him.

But ‘Manchester’ localism carries risks. Regional and fiscal devolution means taking power away from Westminster – perhaps even a devolved England of German-style Länder. What if, as in Scotland, some regions choose to entrust it to parties that are not Labour? The prospect of, say, the East Midlands being run by Reform makes many on the left shudder. “There would have to be a change in the way people feel about politics,” says Swift, “and an acceptance of different politics in different areas. The argument still needs to be made for why devolution is a good thing in the longer term.”

Manchesterism is partly a howl of civic pride, an echo of The Fall’s “big, big, big, wide streets; those useless MPs”. “The wiring of the country isn’t right,” says Burnham, who couldn’t get a job in journalism in Manchester when he graduated. But it is also a model for radical devolution and a renationalisation and reindustrialisation project. Where it breaks from some of the early 21st century left is its lack of interest in expanding individual rights. 

Social mobility is vital to Burnham, but industry, education and infrastructure drive it forward, not rights-based law. Tellingly, the foreign cities to which he compares Manchester are outside Europe: Austin, Texas and Osaka in Japan.

To its fans, Manchesterism’s possibilities lie in the aspiration for an England that is not defined by the capital’s appetites, where “people feel settled and at ease with themselves”, as Stears puts it. It remains a work in progress – and that might suit Andy Burnham very well.