Andy Burnham is a lucky politician. And Nigel Farage has just given him another piece of surprising good fortune. The Reform leader’s decision to call a by-election so his voters can express their preference for him over a comedian in a dustbin is more than just a narcissistic farce: it is a blessing for Project Burnham. Just as attention should be focused on a man with neither a mandate nor a manifesto for running the nation, Westminster’s gaze is directed once more to the dreary beachfronts of Jaywick and Frinton. Burnham’s unscrutinised, unelected, unready administration moves closer to power while Reform achieves a feat hitherto thought impossible: becoming even more of a vehicle for the ego of its leader.
The one thing we do know about Burnham is his commitment to greater devolution across the United Kingdom. Cynics question whether the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, let alone Stormont or Sadiq Khan’s London, are really models of inclusive growth and human flourishing. But while cynicism is understandable, Burnham’s desire to rebalance power and wealth within Britain is not ignoble. If he learns the right lessons from devolution’s successes and failures, he may yet achieve some welcome progress.
If Burnham learns the right lessons from devolution, he may yet achieve some welcome progress
Since the first world war, Britain has become the most centralised nation in the free world, as the demands of the war and then state socialism meant a centuries-old tradition of robust local government was replaced with the sad presumption that the man in Whitehall knows best. Local authorities only raise around 5 per cent of tax revenue; in France, home of the heavy-handed central state, that figure is three times as high.
The capital’s hoarding of power has led to stark regional inequality. High-value and knowledge-intensive sectors are concentrated around London; the decline of manufacturing and mining hurt the north, Midlands, Wales and Scotland as the tide of the Industrial Revolution receded. Britain is more economically divided than eastern and western Germany and northern and southern Italy. From life expectancy to public investment, the capital is the outlier, flattering and skewing national statistics.
Successive governments have attempted to rebalance the economy. Burnham himself benefited from the Metro Mayors established by George Osborne’s ‘Northern Powerhouse’ and Boris Johnson’s expansion of local transport powers.
In 2022, the Johnson government published a ‘levelling up’ white paper diagnosing the interconnected nature of the problems holding regions back and outlining steps to stimulate private-sector growth across the country. The white paper set out 12 missions designed to reverse geographical inequalities by 2030, spreading opportunity beyond London, with long-term targets across living standards, R&D investment, transport and more. Investment commitments were combined with offering every part of England ‘London-style’ powers.
That agenda has not yet been fully implemented; it sits, ‘oven-ready’, on the departmental shelf. But when Labour took office it broke from levelling up, performatively stripping the phrase from the housing department and scrapping the targets.
Labour promised a ‘devolution revolution’ and wide-ranging ambitions on investment. Yet a rigorous recent paper from King’s College London’s Strand Group has exposed how Keir Starmer comprehensively squandered the ‘best opportunity for tackling regional inequality in a generation’ with a lack of leadership, funding or imagination. Burnham at least promises a break from Starmerite stagnation. Yet as Tali Fraser and Gus Carter report on pages 18 and 19, his success in Manchester has been driven not by the ‘business-friendly socialism’ he eulogises, but by the ‘neoliberalism’ he abhors.
From embracing Chinese and Gulf investment to waiving affordable housing targets to build as much and as swiftly as possible, Manchester’s success is rooted in the Thatcherism that Burnham defines himself against. Besotted with his yellow buses, he has misdiagnosed the secrets of his city’s success and overplayed his own role. He is now threatening to do the exact opposite of what prosperity requires, combining a nebulous commitment to ‘good growth in every postcode’ with further empowering Whitehall by nationalising utilities and creating bureaucracy by prioritising ‘social value’ in procurement.
Burnham should learn from the most effective examples of local leadership: Joseph Chamberlain’s Birmingham and Ben Houchen’s Teesside. In both the Victorian Midlands and the contemporary north-east, the state acts as a handmaiden to commerce, providing necessary infrastructure then getting out of the way. Both Chamberlain Square’s splendour and the industriousness of Teesworks, the UK’s largest freeport, are testaments to this. Not business-friendly socialism, just business-friendly.
If Burnham produces a genuinely radical devolution plan with sustainable funding and private sector backing, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage should promise to support it. But if he continues to misunderstand the success of the city he professes to love and keeps denigrating the market system that underpins its prosperity, his proposals will be no more useful than Starmer’s. The wait then begins to see if the next prime minister can do better.
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