Hundreds of school closures across England and Wales, train companies advising people not to travel, and businesses encouraging staff to work from home. Remind you of anything? It’s the Covid playbook, which is rapidly becoming the ‘new normal’ for how our supposedly advanced society responds to an unusual and difficult event. And given that in seasonal Britain, the weather can often be unpredictable and aggravating, the playbook now has plenty of opportunities for an airing.

The Covid playbook is not about taking sensible precautions to deal with challenging situations. Very hot weather, like that we experienced last week, is uncomfortable for many and dangerous for some. We might need to adapt some of our daily practices, and some infrastructure will struggle to cope. All this has happened in heatwaves past, too.

But since Covid, the response to both hot and cold weather – like the response to the occasional outbreaks of infectious disease – has followed a predictable formula. That is, a problem is quickly turned into a drama with dire warnings of a crisis. This is far worse for our collective health than a few days of intense sunshine.

The first step in the playbook is to exaggerate what’s new. With Covid, the clear danger posed by the emergence of a novel and highly infectious coronavirus was quickly escalated into the idea that a respiratory infection pandemic was itself ‘unprecedented’: something that made little sense, given the continual comparisons with the ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic of 1918-20. But because the Covid pandemic was seen to be unprecedented, this apparently justified the implementation of extraordinary and untested containment methods, from population-wide lockdowns to business closures and bizarre social-distancing rules and paraphernalia. The authorities didn’t draw on historical experience but on present-day panic. Those in power presumed that our society could not cope with this challenge, so we had better stop functioning as a society and send everyone home.

In the present heatwave, we’ve heard a lot about the Met Office issuing a rare ‘extreme heat warning’, and we’ve been treated to daily graphics of the regions under a red or amber blob. What we hear less is that extreme heat warnings were only introduced in the UK in July 2021, and one was issued as recently as 2022. We also find ourselves beset by severe weather warnings during the winter months, accompanied by the same demands: work from home, don’t travel, close the schools. This is another feature of the Covid playbook – the invention of a new metric designed to frame the current problem as more severe than anything that has happened to date.

The problem is not necessarily that these metrics are false – UK summer temperatures may well be higher than in the past, and Covid was very infectious. It’s that these techniques are used to simplify a complex situation and to promote measures that are fundamentally anti-social. Take the closure of schools and advice to stay at home and avoid travelling. Each of these decisions can make pragmatic sense on their own terms. We know that sweaty kids in overheated classrooms are unlikely to learn a great deal, and that it’s a bad time to be stuck in a traffic jam on the M1. But since Covid, the implementation of such measures has become uniform and routine, with little consideration of the knock-on effects for certain sections of society and for social life as a whole.

As we know from the pandemic, working and studying from home might be fine for those with particular jobs and nice airy houses – not so much for families crammed into stuffy city apartments with limited technology. The debate about whether WFH is good or bad for productivity is ongoing, but most of us know that in Britain today, very little seems to be getting done at the best of times. Whenever we have some adverse weather, we immediately enter a doom loop – employees are either encouraged to WFH or they demand the right to WFH, and even those who want to come into work may find themselves prevented from doing so because their kid’s school might close or the transport might break down. Air-conditioned trains, offices and cafes find themselves half empty, while families swelter in their over-insulated homes driving each other insane. Make it make sense!

There are some exceptions to this anti-social approach. In London, a ‘cool map’ has been produced to inform people about public spaces with shade and air-con. In Paris, as the authorities are trying to cope by banning alcohol in public places, residents are taking matters into their own hands by jumping into the canal. Still, it’s striking how these practical social measures for dealing with a heatwave have come to seem like a deviant afterthought, as if what people really should be doing is sweating it out alone, glued to their phones for news about when it all might end.

Predictably, the media has made itself into the story here. Rather than simply report on the facts about the weather and official advice that might be given, media outlets – particularly those ‘trusted’ sources such as the BBC, to which Keir Starmer wants to give an algorithmic boost to counter ‘disinformation’ – immediately create a cycle of competitive escalation. Right from the get-go, a suggestion of adverse weather leads to breathless reporting about what’s been closed, who’s died, who’s struggling to cope, where there’s a shortage of water, where public transport has gone down. And it’s all interspersed with inane bits of advice about ‘how to protect yourself’ and smug mini-commentaries about climate change.

All this contributes to the anti-social effect. Who, reading about disaster everywhere all at once, is inclined to schlep to the office or force their kids into school? It’s utterly sensationalist and irresponsible, and surely makes people feel worse than they would if they were just left to get on with working out how best to cool down and keep going with their lives.

For all the excitable protestations about unprecedented events, the Covid playbook is a response to a more mundane and depressing trend. While ordinary people are not trusted to make sensible decisions about their own health and wellbeing, social institutions and public infrastructure casually withdraw from their collective responsibilities.

I really want the north of England to win. I’ve spent much of my life – including a stint as mayor of Middlesbrough between 2019 and 2023 – in the communities Westminster has abandoned. Which brings us to Andy Burnham and his plans, vaguely outlined in today’s ‘big’ policy speech, to devolve power throughout the UK, and even establish a ‘No10 North’ in Manchester.

I like Andy. He’s intelligent, a natural communicator and, most of all, he just seems like a good lad. After today’s speech, he’ll tour the country selling a fairytale about the growth he’s created as mayor of Greater Manchester. His grand thesis, dubbed ‘Manchesterism’, is that if you hand power and bags of cash to metro mayors, the North will magically boom.

There’s just one problem. It is absolute, total nonsense. Andy’s getting drunk on his own PR. If he continues to drink it and rolls out these devolution plans, the working class will suffer. Just as they have in Greater Manchester.

Burnham’s Manchesterism is just the latest iteration of age-old yearnings and dreams. Talk of rebalancing the North-South gap has been around since the Special Areas (Development and Improvement) Act of 1934. Yet so far, nothing has worked. Ninety years of political speeches have left us with the exact same maps and the exact same disappointment.

Burnham will no doubt claim over the coming weeks that Greater Manchester’s economy has grown by over three per cent a year during his mayorship, beating the national average. He boasts about this one a lot, as though it’s the result of mayoral genius.

But at best, it’s grossly misleading. The Greater Manchester economy did grow more than some places. This wasn’t because of Burnham’s economic nous. It is because Greater Manchester’s population has exploded over the past few years. Indeed, in the period since Burnham took charge in 2017, Greater Manchester’s population increased by over 250,000

Much of this growth has been driven by intensive international migration and high birth rates among these migrant communities. In less than a decade, Burnham’s patch essentially bolted on a whole new city the size of Southampton. That’s where much of his magical ‘growth’ comes from. It is demographic stuffing.

Another core source of the population explosion is the general ballooning of student numbers. Many of the city’s shiny new skyscrapers are actually 20- to 35-storey student blocks, built to cope with the 120,000 students crammed into the city centre. This isn’t high-quality economic regeneration.

Of course, there has been some genuine economic progress in Greater Manchester. It’s happened over 20 to 30 years, and some of it has been on his watch. But Burnham, and the mid-2010s regional devolution programme that created the metro mayors, aren’t responsible for this economic growth. The boom started long before Burnham became mayor in 2017. It is part of a global phenomenon of urban renaissance and big-city living. It’s happening across the world.

In fact, other British cities are doing just as well as Manchester. Despite lacking a slick PR machine and a metro mayor. The Glasgow city region is outperforming Manchester on certain key metrics. The Bristol city region also shows up the myth of Manchesterism. Despite the West of England metro mayor holding a fraction of Burnham’s devolved power, the Bristol area holds its own against Manchester’s ‘miracle’.

So, two city regions, without the Burnham sparkle, equalling Manchester’s achievement. The theory that growth requires massive PR and heavy devolution doesn’t hold up.

And look at the underlying stories that the Burnham PR machine keeps quiet about. Child poverty in Greater Manchester has skyrocketed during his mayoralty, far above the national average. Local wages have stagnated, stuck below the national average, and unemployment has risen. Similarly, Greater Manchester’s colossal homelessness crisis hasn’t improved at all. Visitors are quickly horrified by the sheer scale of rough sleeping and begging that confronts them.

I am from Middlesbrough, and I want to see England’s northern towns and cities thrive. I want everywhere else to thrive, too. But Manchesterism is clearly not the answer for the working class of the north or anywhere else.

Burnham has hastily manufactured this devolution crusade to create a veneer of purpose. It’s a very shallow start for our de facto prime minister.

Andy Preston was mayor of Middlesbrough from 2019 until 2023.

I always chuckle when media snobs say the little people are easy prey for demagogic trickery. Because no one is more likely to pant over a slick politician and his polished-turd slogans than these Oxbridge types. Witness their schoolgirl swooning over Andy Burnham this morning as he fluttered his famous eyelashes and spelt out his vision for a better, fairer Britain. His speech was a carousel of cliches, feelgood slogans, microwaved Blairism and what passes for leftism in the posher coffee houses of Manchester, and yet they lapped it up, all goggle-eyed and weak-kneed. I’m so embarrassed for them.

It was Burnham’s first major policy speech since he launched his bid to usurp Sir Keir and become PM. It’s been rolling news all day. As I write this my TV screen is split between a gurning Burnham getting a standing ovation from his assembled acolytes and a flushed Beth Rigby giving her ‘analysis’ (TLDR: it was fab, fab, fab). Reading the BBC’s coverage, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a ‘fight them on the beaches’ moment for our knackered nation. His speech was ‘bold’ and ‘affectionate’ and best of all there was no ‘adverse reaction in the markets’. In fact, the Beeb gushed, there was a ‘small positive one’. Capitalism has spoken! King Andy may ascend to the throne!

They all need to turn up the air-con and cool down. His speech was deathlessly platitudinous. It was full of those technocrat-era cliches that evaporate upon the merest investigation. ‘Place first, not party first.’ ‘Problem solving, not point scoring.’ ‘Long term, not short term.’ Up not down, sun not rain, forwards not backwards. Starmer himself was a master of such fag-packet Boomerish bromides. ‘Look forward, not back’, he was fond of saying, leaving the rest of us wondering: look forward to what? Infinity ‘asylum seekers’ and more sly sabotaging of Brexit?

Under Starmer – and both Tory and Labour PMs before him – such PowerPoint drivel was a stand-in for actual policy. Will it be the same under Prime Minister Burnham? Everyone likes a bit of ‘problem-solving’, but what problems? Our broken borders? The cult of welfarism that indulges young people’s fever dreams about suffering from ADHD? Our refusal to frack for gas in order that we might appease the gods of weather and hold back ‘global boiling’? Will those problems be solved? I won’t hold my breath, especially if Net Zero nutter Ed Miliband becomes Burnham’s chancellor.

Even the more substantive-sounding parts of Burnham’s speech raise more questions than answers. His key focus was on restructuring public life. He desires nothing less than the ‘biggest rebalancing of power our country has seen’. I don’t know, the 17th-century revolutionaries who got shot of the king and abolished the Lords might have something to say about that. In Burnham’s ‘rewired Britain’, there will be oodles more devolution, meaning we will ‘take the power out of the centre’, he said, and disperse it across these isles. There’ll even be a ‘No10 North’ – a PM’s seat of power in Manchester to show that London isn’t the be-all and end-all of Blighty.

This is a continuation of the Blairite project of devolving ‘power’ to the nations and the regions. It sounds enticing – who wouldn’t want to loosen the political stranglehold of the SW1 wankerati? – but it is an illusion. Far from democratising the kingdom, the ironically top-down enforcement of devolution always ends up empowering the lanyard classes. Power is sold off not to everyday people but to the officious and the sharp-elbowed and the thirsty guzzlers of the Kool-Aid of woke. Look at Scotland, where the gift of Blairite semi-autonomy birthed not a new, democratic nation but a Tartan tinpot regime run by corrupt twats who put money in their banks and rapists in women’s prisons.

Far from ‘rebalancing power’, as Burnham dreams, devolution merely disperses it, and that can make it harder for we the people to hold the powerful to account. Power becomes more veiled, not more visible. There are untold problems of unearned power in 21st-century Britain. The imperious, bloated civil service is a law unto itself, frequently scuppering the democratic dreams of the electorate. Binding global treaties prevent us from behaving like a sovereign state and removing undesirables from our territories. Judges hubristically override policies drawn up by those we elect. The House of Lords remains a medieval pox on our liberties, elevating the ‘wisdom’ of the unaccountable over the wishes of the people. Anyone serious about ‘rewiring Britain’ would be addressing all of that, not empowering yet another Pride lanyard priggish they / them to become a micro-mayor of some northern town.

It seems Burnham wants to follow up his ‘Manchesterism’ – which no one can actually define – with Leicesterism, Sheffieldism, Glasgowism… breakaway mini-regimes that would further concentrate power in the hands of the credentialled classes. The result would not be a ‘rewired Britain’ but a fractured Britain, overseen by a thousand woke fiefdoms. Have you ever wondered why the graduate classes squeal with glee over devolution even as they wring their hands over the ‘low-information’ masses and our dumb votes for Brexit, Boris and all the rest? It’s because they know devolution empowers people like them, not riff-raff like us.

Burnham has a ‘10-year plan’ for Britain. Strewth. Even Stalin only went for a five-year plan. Upon whose authority will he ‘rewire Britain’? He won a vote in Makerfield, not the United Kingdom. Fancy talking about ‘rebalancing power’ even as you sweep to power in a coup that would make Pinochet blush. But the liberal media couldn’t give a toss about any of that. They’ve gone all mawkish for King Andy. They follow him around like tragic ducklings. They gasp with juvenile wonderment when he says ‘Long term, not short term’. They’ve succumbed to his cult and we know why: they pray he’ll hold back the tide of populism. Imagine bigging yourself up as a warrior for the democratisation of Britain when really you’re motored by a blind terror of the democratic anger of the masses. The arrogance. The duplicity. That’s Burnhamism.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.