‘Manchesterism,’ Andy Burnham declared in his Makerfield by-election campaign video, ‘is the end of neoliberalism.’ The path to power, he believes, lies in the Mancunian Way. Not the ring road that sits atop Manchester’s actual Downing Street, but his record as mayor of Britain’s ‘second city’ – and the idea that it proves his philosophy of unlocking growth and productivity for the whole country. Yet the Mancunian Way is littered with potholes.
Manchesterism is not new. It did not begin with Burnham, nor with any Labour figure in Manchester. The name is borrowed – stolen, really – from the free-trade Manchester Liberalism of Richard Cobden and John Bright, who fought price-fixing, tariffs and protectionism in the 19th century. Disraeli sneered at what he called ‘the Manchester School’. No matter, the school only grew; Margaret Thatcher was practically an alumna, steeped in its ideas.
Burnham’s version is different, and comes with its own phrasebook – ‘good growth’, ‘business-friendly socialism’, ‘growth in every postcode’. That last one is too much for Graham Stringer, former leader of Manchester city council and now Labour MP for Blackley and Middleton South: ‘Nonsense like “growth in every postcode” is just ridiculous. How could you ever achieve that? It’s attractive until you think about it for two seconds.’
His clean-air zone swallowed a reported £104 million, before public backlash killed it
It’s not only the name that’s been lifted. What success Manchester has had, Burnham inherited. The city’s turnaround did not begin with a socialist rejection of neoliberalism, as Stringer, council leader from 1984, can attest. ‘We were elected on a very radical anti-Thatcher manifesto,’ he recalls. Ten days into the job, he delivered a speech to the chamber of commerce – ‘lead balloons would have floated high’ by comparison – before a building executive took him to the 22nd-floor window and taught him a lesson. ‘He said: “There’s not a single tower crane. You’ll be a success when you’ve got tower cranes out there.” And I really took that to heart. More or less since that time Manchester has had tower cranes all over the skyline.’
When Labour lost the 1987 election, Stringer and the council courted the Tory government and the private sector, and built the only major British runway constructed since the second world war. The Metrolink was approved under Thatcher. ‘We knew we were compromising with capitalism,’ Stringer says. Burnham has taken the earlier, unworkable anti-Thatcher version – the one Stringer buried – and is rebranding it in black and yellow stripes to the country. As one source puts it: ‘In so far as the city has outperformed other places, it’s because the original Manchester figures did a bunch of things Burnham would not approve of and which the left moaned about endlessly.’
The other men credited with building modern Manchester are Sir Richard Leese, council leader from 1996 to 2021, the methodical doer, and Sir Howard Bernstein, chief executive from 1998 to 2017, the charming fixer. They put the private sector at the heart of the growth plan, made planning decisions quickly and stayed relaxed about height, density and that classic Labour sore spot: affordable housing targets. When the IRA bombed the city centre in 1996, Michael Heseltine found them £90 million to rebuild. On their watch came Britain’s largest light-rail network, the Commonwealth Games and Etihad regeneration, Spinningfields business development, the £2.5 billion Oxford Road corridor connecting universities, and the BBC at MediaCityUK.
‘The two knights’, as one Manchester Labour figure calls them, also worked with Tory governments to build the devolution settlement from which Burnham emerged. Even the franchised buses – which do the heavy lifting in his Manchesterism story – came from a deal struck with George Osborne years before Burnham became mayor. The legal power was Conservative legislation; the money mostly came from outside the city. Burnham did get to choose the name and the colour.
Even then he wavered. He thought franchising would be ‘too difficult’ and ‘worried about a fight’ with bus owners. ‘He had to be threatened by Richard and me,’ Stringer says, ‘because that was the basis of the deal with Osborne. Eventually Andy understood the pressure, and he dealt with it. But two years later than it should have been.’
Where Burnham acted alone, it went badly. His clean-air zone, charging polluting vehicles up to £60 a day, swallowed a reported £104 million, before public backlash killed it. ‘An obviously terrible move,’ one Labour source says.
Then there’s the question of whose money built the skyline. UAE and China, prominent among the development backers, often build buy-to-let properties and not, notably, affordable housing – the rental earnings often flow overseas, including to accounts in Jersey.
But that is not the Manchesterism story Burnham wants you to know. And the story is what he’s been good at. ‘Dealing with the world and the media – he got it,’ Stringer says. ‘But his Manchesterism is quite confused.’
The growth figures he trumpets also wobble on inspection. A third of Greater Manchester’s recent output growth comes from ‘legal and accounting’ – 45 per cent of all UK output growth in the sector. Trace it and you arrive in one statistical corner of Trafford: Altrincham, leafy footballer territory, where the ONS records 21,000 new such jobs between 2019 and 2023.
The area couldn’t suddenly become home to that many workers – and it likely didn’t. Paystream My Max Ltd, an umbrella payroll firm based there, went from 5,226 employees in 2019 to 22,213 in 2023: contractors across the country who shut their limited companies after the IR35 changes. I spoke to two of them – they work in Canary Wharf. ‘This idea of a Manchester productivity boom is actually based on financial services in London,’ one source says. ‘It’s got nothing to do with Manchester.’
Strip out Trafford’s phantom workforce and Greater Manchester’s 2019-23 productivity growth slips from 14 per cent to 12. Adjust for suspect hours-worked figures – Mancunians apparently worked less in 2023 than in 2019, as jobs and output leapt – and it slides to 9 per cent. Ahead of the national3 per cent, but rather less of a Burnham Manchesterism miracle.
‘This idea of a Manchester productivity boom is actually based on financial services in London’
A productivity boom should show up in pay packets. It hasn’t. Real median wages in Greater Manchester are up just 1 per cent since 2019, mostly thanks to minimum-wage increases. The thinktank Centre for Cities ranks Manchester 12th for jobs growth over 2013 to 2023 – behind Luton, Mansfield, Peterborough and Basildon.
Look inward and the picture darkens. Since Burnham’s election, GDP per head in the borough of Manchester has soared by 26.6 per cent, while Tameside, Bury, Oldham and Bolton have all underperformed the English average of 4.5 per cent. Wigan – home of his new constituency – managed 1.1 per cent, and employment rates have fallen there, and in Bury, Bolton and Stockport, even as the city centre’s jumped nearly 12 points.
Which exposes the final irony. Burnham’s national pitch is a war on trickle-down economics. Yet his allies defend Greater Manchester in precisely those terms. ‘A lot of the growth comes from the city centre,’ his campaign co-manager Louise Haigh has said. ‘But then the proceeds of that are able to be distributed across Greater Manchester.’
Burnham has never really understood what the original Manchesterism was: free trade and peace through commerce. Nor has he grasped Labour’s more recent version: compromise with capitalism, deals with Tories and cranes over ideology. What he offers is a name lifted from Cobden, a record built by Stringer, Bernstein and Leese, a bus network enabled by Osborne, a skyline funded by Abu Dhabi and Beijing, and growth figures that dissolve under a satellite photograph of Altrincham.
Manchester’s Downing Street may be real. The legacy that has got Burnham to the one in London is not.
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