Last month at the UN general assembly, Andy Burnham spoke movingly about Manchester’s statue of Abraham Lincoln, which stands outside the offices of No. 10 North. The oversized bronze commemorates the decision by Manchester’s mill workers, at great personal cost, to boycott slave-picked cotton from the South during the US Civil War. ‘In 1862, people with little power used it to help those with none on the other side of the world,’ the Prime Minister told delegates.
It is an unfortunate irony that, two weeks after his UN speech, Burnham is facing a reckoning over his adopted city’s deep links to the UAE, a country with one of the worst records on modern slavery in the developed world.
The story, as is often the case in Manchester, begins with football. Last Tuesday, an independent commission found Manchester City guilty of 114 charges related to its finances. A day later, rather unwisely, Burnham said he would be ‘really concerned’ if City’s owners decided to sell up as a result of the scandal, and cast doubt on the club’s guilt. Downing Street hastily clarified Burnham’s comments but the damage was done. Attention soon turned to City’s owner and UAE vice-president Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan and the part his investment company, Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG), has played in Manchester’s construction boom.
The UAE has one of the worst records on modern slavery in the developed world
There were signs as far back as 2019 that Manchester was becoming uncomfortably close to the UAE. At a commemoration for the 200th anniversary of Peterloo, a performance about the massacre – which saw hundreds of protestors for male suffrage mown down by the cavalry – remarked on the city being ‘bought’ by the UAE: ‘Man City, Etihad Campus, Emirates Old Trafford; our housing, our streets, our silence on human rights, you can’t keep selling, if you’re already selling out.’ After the council complained, the offending line was removed. One Labour councillor told the Sunday Times: ‘For our council to seek to remove a voice of protest from the Peterloo event is unconscionable.’
So far the scandal has largely focused on Abu Dhabi’s property empire, and with good reason. Ever since Manchester City was taken over by the Emiratis in 2008, Abu Dhabi has been able to buy up vast swathes of Manchester for development. In 2014, it even formed a joint venture with the city council called Manchester Life, which aimed to invest £1 billion over a decade to build homes in the previously rundown Ancoats and New Islington areas.
It has since been revealed that a year later ADUG was given a ten-year ‘right of first refusal’ to land the council was planning to sell between the Etihad Stadium and the city centre. For some, this sums up the way Manchester is run, with, as one industry insider says, ‘selective deregulation for a small number of favoured parties’. The insider adds: ‘If they like you, you get every favour possible… you get cheap/free land, you get planning in no time at all, they waive all the affordable housing requirements, they waive everything else they can and then they lend you a load of money.’ This would, perhaps, be justifiable if the council was getting a good deal. But a scathing report in 2022 from the University of Sheffield argued that when it came to the Manchester Life developments, the council ‘sold the family silver too cheap’, with ‘leaseholds for land… sold to Abu Dhabi interests at values below comparable rates’. The researchers expressed particular concern that it was impossible to know how much Abu Dhabi was making from the ventures because of its use of Jersey-domiciled subsidiaries.
The miasma that surrounds the various dealings between Manchester and Abu Dhabi hangs heavy over one site in particular: the former Central Retail Park in Ancoats, which was recently mooted as a potential permanent home for No. 10 North.
In 2017 the site was purchased for around £35 million by the council, which reportedly spent millions more than the next highest bidder – and millions more than the estimated value of the site. At the time, Abu Dhabi had first refusal rights over the land in question, and the council signed a ‘collaboration agreement’ with ADUG to develop the site shortly after the purchase. In the event, the Abu Dhabi project did not go ahead for reasons that are unclear, and part of the site was sold to the government instead.
As is becoming clear, Abu Dhabi had an incredibly close relationship with Manchester city council. The former CEO of Manchester council, Sir Howard Bernstein, even became a strategic advisor to City Football Group just over a year after leaving the council. Bernstein, who died in 2024, had a road leading to the Emirates Stadium named after him in 2017.
As mayor of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), Andy Burnham would certainly have been aware of the city’s dealings with the ADUG. After all, the GMCA directly offered the Emiratis and city council financial support. As part of the ‘Greater Manchester Housing Investment Loans Fund’, three Manchester Life projects received a total of £55 million. These loans were meant to fund, according to the GMCA, ‘housing projects that would otherwise be difficult to fund from elsewhere’. It is hard to believe this applied to the Gulf nations.
Either way, for all the focus on controversial development deals, the Emirati influence over Manchester has never just been about real estate. In fact, the way it has undermined the city’s sense of itself as a place with a social conscience – the home of the Peterloo massacre, trade unions, co-operatives and workers’ rights – has arguably been far more insidious. It is this side of the city with which the Prime Minister most identifies. He launched his premiership at the People’s History Museum, dedicated to democracy and the downtrodden.
Peterloo is not the only part of Manchester’s history to have been caught up in the weft and warp of the UAE’s influence. Around 25 years after the massacre, a group of 28 men created the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, and the basis of the modern co-operative movement in Britain. Soon after, various co-operative societies came together and formed in Manchester what is now known as the Co-operative Group, which has been a fixture of the city ever since.
The Co-op still insists it is guided by the ethical principles of the Rochdale Pioneers. Only last year, it voted to boycott goods from Israel and other countries where there are ‘internationally recognised’ rights abuses and violations of international law. In 2021, it launched a ‘climate justice’ campaign and swung behind net zero. Yet the company was happy for a petro-state with a dubious human rights record, via ADUG, to own a significant stake in its new Co-op Live arena on the Etihad Campus. Co-operation, it seems, now goes a rather long way.
Then there is the University of Manchester, which celebrated its bicentenary in 2024. The university proudly highlights its commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), with the university boasting that you can ‘select your preferred gender marker – this includes the gender-neutral title “Mx”’ when applying and encourages students to report any hate or micro-aggressions to university authorities.
Yet in 2014 its new Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre was co-funded by an Abu Dhabi energy company owned by a state investment fund. Even before then, the University of Manchester had opened a campus in Dubai’s ‘Knowledge Park’. Admittedly, it’s not exactly unusual these days for a university in Britain to sell out to a dubious regime abroad. But the deal doesn’t quite fit with the university’s boast: ‘From Manchester, for the world.’
Supporters say the Emiratis have spent a nine-figure sum regenerating heavily polluted industrial sites
It’s hard to know what Alan Turing, whose statue on Sackville Gardens sits in front of the university, would make of all this. An inscription below his statue describes him as the ‘father of computer science’ and a ‘victim of prejudice’ – a nod to his conviction for gross indecency following a sexual relationship with another man. Turing was chemically castrated as a result and two years later, killed himself. In 2015, Andy Burnham pledged to issue legal pardons to all men convicted under historical homosexuality laws following Turing’s Royal Pardon. But that doesn’t exactly square with the way Burnham’s city embraced the UAE – a country where homosexuality is illegal – during his time as mayor.
For some of Manchester’s key figures, the city’s relationship with Abu Dhabi is easy to defend. As they see it, parts of Manchester desperately needed to be developed, and the only way to make that happen was for the council to relentlessly pursue private investment from abroad. As Sir Richard Leese, who served as leader of Manchester city council for 25 years until 2021, puts it: ‘One thing about working with Abu Dhabi is that everything that they’ve promised, they’ve delivered. They have real credibility in the city. That’s something we want to maintain.’ He added that the Emiratis had spent ‘nine-figure sums’ regenerating ‘lots of derelict, heavily polluted industrial land’.
As for Andy Burnham – who appears much more comfortable talking about Manchester’s radical roots than its neoliberal pursuit of growth in recent decades – it’s not clear he is truly ready to accept the moral trade-offs that come from working with compromised regimes abroad.
Asked about Abu Dhabi (and its penchant for torture, arbitrary detention and criminalising gay people) on a podcast in 2023, Burnham gave an intriguing answer, that brought to mind a toddler without object permanence: ‘I’ve got to judge what I see, and what I see in Manchester and how I see the owners run Manchester City and what they do to improve life here. Those issues are for the government to raise… They’ve been huge partners for the city and they’ve improved a lot of lives here.’
Focusing on your own constituents rather than the wider world is certainly a position a mayor – or even a prime minister – can take. But neither Manchester, nor Burnham, can pretend at the same time to be following in the footsteps of the mill workers all those years ago who faced financial ruin for supporting the vulnerable on the other side of the world.
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