The House | Manchesterism won’t survive the painful trade-offs unless it gets citizens on board

Andy Burnham takes a selfie with Labour MPs (Alamy)

4 min read22 min

But economic reform ideas are just the first hurdle and there are many more hurdles ahead: fiscal constraints, geopolitical instability, the artificial intelligence transition, demographic pressure. Each brings painful trade-offs, which demands political craftsmanship.

So the real question is not whether Manchesterism makes sense on paper. It is whether it has a politics to match its ambition.

Manchesterism has a storm ahead

The politics is already tightening. Commitments to the triple lock and manifesto tax promises are narrowing Andy Burnham’s room for manoeuvre. Without a strategy to manage trade-offs, every new ambition risks hitting a red line. Can Manchesterism persuade a country not just to hope for change, but to endure it?

And then there is the state. Public control of utilities is a grand ambition for the capacity of the British state. But the rhetoric of economic transformation has to face the institutional reality: a weak centre, an unwieldy stakeholder state and a powerful Treasury with an instinctive caution.

Look no further than HS2 for a warning. And why should this time be different? A new economic compact has to answer that.

We have seen this before

Britain is not ‘ungovernable’. It has dealt with worse in the past and it can do again.

After the 1930s destitution and a world war, Clement Attlee and William Beveridge overhauled fiscal orthodoxy and rebuilt the institutional landscape. After the 1970s stagflation and industrial disruption, Margaret Thatcher let unemployment rise over three million to forge a new consensus. The lady was not for turning.

Whatever one thinks of those economic visions, they shared something essential: a political project around a willingness to tolerate short-term pain, and not just economic reform, but shifting communities, culture, and the very meaning of citizenship.

When Keir Starmer warned that “things will get worse before they get better”, the public heard the pain but not the purpose. “Mission-driven government” promised a new governing philosophy, but failed to materialise.

The lesson? Telling people that change will be hard and branding it as “missions” isn’t enough. You have to convince them that change is worth it and build transformational institutions. For that, citizens need to be embedded in the change. We at Demos call it the “Citizen Economy”. It’s built on the idea that people aren’t simply units of consumption or production in the economy, they are moral agents rooted in communities, with the power to accelerate or put the breaks on progress.

We need a Citizen Economy

The new leadership should start by redesigning how economic policy is made around this new assumption. We need to rewire the state’s core frameworks to ‘think citizen’, from the Treasury’s Green Book to council procurement systems. We need to connect institutions with citizens, from regional authorities to the British Business Bank. We also need to engage the public directly in economic choices.

The next task is reshaping the foundations of the economy – targeting opportunities where the role of citizens has been overlooked. This means tackling the social drivers of rising NEET numbers – be it the low social status in apprenticeships or lack of social capital. It means building citizens’ consent for falls in short-term consumption to raise investment in national renewal. It means confronting difficult questions – be it the unsustainable triple lock and welfare bill or outdated council tax – through a new fiscal contract grounded in shared values.

Can Manchesterism survive?

Britain is becoming richer in economic ideas, but short of the political strategies to sustain them. The Citizen Economy offers a way through: an economic compact in which citizens’ relationships, consent, and contribution is no longer overlooked. It is central to the New Deal between citizen and the state that is needed to reverse the ‘democratic doom loop’.

Because if citizens are not part of the project, they will become its constraint.

Dan Goss is lead researcher at the cross-party think tank, Demos