Don Flynn on getting to the heart of Manchesterism
Bit by bit, things are becoming clearer with Andy Burnham and his plans for government. Most of it concerns his wish to be seen as the “cost-of-living” prime minister, guided at every point to improve the household budgets of the UK’s wage-earning citizens.
He entered Number 10 with both a theory and a degree of experience that might allow him to achieve these goals. Place a check on the rampant extractivism that converts large portions of the bills for such essentials as energy, water, housing and food into unjustifiably large profits for private equity firms and their shareholders and allow more of wage income to circulate in the competitive sectors of the economy. Those that produce the sorts of goods and services that make people think things are getting better in their lives.
If that’s the theory – best described as the Manchesterian approach to the foundational economy – the practice comes from Burnham’s stint running a major British city as its executive mayor. The question is whether they can make the transition from the experience of being “King of the North” to being held captive in the padded cell of the British premiership.
Tackling a cost-of-living crisis – which has become entrenched from the impacts of the 2007-8 financial meltdown, the inept response to its aftermath in the form of austerity, the damaging Brexit deal with the EU, and the Covid epidemic of 2020-21 – would be possible if Burnham was confident that he stood at the helm of a united Labour Party. Equally, if confident he had won the intellectual argument that sustained a radical assault on “business-as-usual-government” and had huge buy-in from networks of civil society organisations across the country.
In reality, he must double-check his programme for government against a parliamentary party packed with resentful Starmerites as well as newer groupings working to promote their favoured daughters and sons of the Shabana Mahmood/Wes Streeting variety. For them, a few stumbles would be welcome, and there are contenders for exactly that. Indecision over licences to drill in the North Sea; the mess being generated around the early release of prisoners convicted of the manslaughter of police officers; mega-size dinghies bringing refugees across the Channel. At a more refined level, the argument about how best to orientate towards the EU and its single market is yet to get off the ground: don’t doubt it will generate problems for Burnham when it does.
Neal Lawson’s recent interview on the News Agents podcast sets out the troubled terrain which Burnham has got to navigate in the years up to the next general election and is helpful in suggesting the ways he might be facing up to the challenges. Lawson describes the man he knows well as “emotive” in his approach to politics, rather than intellectual. The idea that a leftist politics advocating change must strive for the formation of a new “commonsense” probably hasn’t preoccupied him as much as pegging public transport across Manchester at £2, but it needs to become a topic of conversation at some stage – preferably very soon. The “Big Tent” tradition which has been dominant across its history tells us that a common sense it can work with is already in place, and it would be downright impolite to suggest citizens should open their minds to anything more expansive.
This sniffy distrust of new thinking has weighty advocates who operate with outlooks which can be made to sit alongside Manchesterism and twist it in a much more conservative direction. Burnham’s support for decentralisation of the British state is one area which will lead very quickly to a fork in the road: one branch leading to an increase in capacity for local communities to establish where they really stand in the modern world, but the other making a virtue of localist exceptionalism which shuts down any discussion of change.
On this point, too much responsibility currently devolves onto the role of executive mayors who are expected to embody in their own personalities the fundamental character of the communities which elected them. Political discussion risks becoming the sort of haranguing seen in London, where the mayor is seen as either an all-seeing saviour or a deranged idiot threatening the well-being of tens of thousands. Devolution to elected assemblies would be better, appointing their leaders after debates with representatives who in turn would be alert to well-informed lobbying, research, citizen assemblies and similar initiatives.
A Cost-of-Living premiership might be a good, populist way of summing up what Burnham is planning for the rest of his time in Number 10. But it will be disrupted as a narrative if Trump persists with his inane wars and the current climate-change-induced drought turns into higher food prices in the autumn and winter months. It needs to be supplemented by a programme which brands itself unashamedly about Change (let’s start writing that with a capital “C”), which will need to be promoted across the country by a mass membership, democratic socialist Labour Party, allied with trade unions and civil society organisations working against poverty, inequality, and for social injustice.