Britain’s new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, calls his proposed political model ‘Manchesterism’, repurposing an alternative name for the nineteenth-century Manchester School of free trade. The new version is intended to guide his governmental programme. From a standpoint in the city’s radical social and environmental movements, we can offer some observations about it.
In his speech of 29 June at Manchester’s People’s History Museum, he described the approach in three lines:
- Place-first, not party-first
- Problem-solving, not point-scoring
- Long-term, not short-term
Burnham achieved a lot in Greater Manchester
Burnham had been a successful Mayor of Greater Manchester. His wager is that what he did there offers a break from austerity, political paralysis and Britain’s extremely centralised government. He brought buses back under public control through franchising, coordinated action on homelessness, established an ambitious carbon budget, and built partnerships between councils, universities and the private sector. There were limits to what he could achieve. Many structural drivers of homelessness, welfare and housing are set nationally; bus services could be brought under public control through franchising but not through direct municipal operation; and many important sources of carbon emissions are shaped by national policy and wider economic activity. But with the executive power of the state, the argument goes, he could do much more.
His language is that of renewal and hope, but scratch the surface and the core economic assumption is unchanged: that the country’s future depends on economic growth.
Burnham emphasises ‘place-based collaboration’ and the primacy of place-based strategies. The idea is not his own but draws on a legacy that he encountered in Manchester. The Centre for Local Economic Strategies is based here and has, for decades, promoted methods for making local economies work better for local populations.
One of the key ideas is that of ‘anchor institutions’, organisations rooted in a place, such as universities, hospitals, councils and locally focused organisations, such as in Manchester, the Co-op. Anchor institutions can exert an influence over the flows of money, for example by procuring goods and services locally or by preferential employment policies for local people. They can also establish interventions, often in partnership, for local economic and social development, examples of which Burnham gave in his speech.
Community Wealth Building has limitations
While this has happened in and around Manchester, perhaps the best-known and most successful implementation has been in Preston under council leader Matthew Brown. The term used for this is ‘Community Wealth Building’. That idea, of ‘plugging the leaks’ so the ‘local multiplier’ can take effect, was promoted by the New Economics Foundation in its pre-Keynesian radical days, itself probably drawing on developments from as far away as Brazil.
Yet ‘Community Wealth Building’ is not quite what the term suggests. It is really the capture and retention of revenue for the local economy. That is its limitation. It does not change the underpinning economic system that relies on profit maximisation. So, while the strategy may capture more of the value generated locally, it does not fundamentally alter the wider system. It also remains vulnerable to the dynamics of mobile capital, geopolitical instability and ecological breakdown. Can Burnham offer anything that goes beyond these ultimately limited strategies?
Manchester Council partnered with investors and developers
The Manchester model also owed its evolution to a pragmatic bargain. During the long night of the Thatcher years, Manchester’s leaders responded to deindustrialisation and declining central-government support by forming partnerships with investors and property developers. The city competed for inward investment, cultivated and monetised its cultural identity, and filled the urban core with offices, flats and entertainment venues. A line sometimes attributed to former Manchester Chief Executive, Howard Bernstein, is that he judged success by the number of cranes he could see from the town hall. Burnham brought a more social approach, but it was still characterised by accommodation with commercial interests.
The Bee Network, a partially integrated transport network combining franchised bus services, Metrolink trams run under contract, and cycle provision, has meant real improvements. Commercial operators still run services under contract and make profits, despite the initial opposition of major bus companies to franchising. Moreover, the network has also been designed around economic goals, the mass movement of people between homes and workplaces and travel inwards to entertainment and shopping destinations.
Burnham speaks of ‘a long-term approach to rebuilding an economy devastated by the deindustrialisation of the Thatcher era. In Greater Manchester this has included five priority growth sectors: Advanced Materials and Manufacturing; Digital, Cyber and AI; Health Innovation and Life Sciences; Creative Industries; and Low Carbon. The announcement of these had been accompanied by claims about the high growth rate of Greater Manchester compared to the rest of the UK. These are to provide the pathways for young people into these sectors via the prioritisation of technical education, via partnerships between the region’s leading industries and schools and colleges, using the framework of the T levels established by the last Conservative government.
Burnham’s Manchesterism recognises that markets do not, on their own, provide adequate housing, transport, employment or balanced regional development. Government, nationally and locally, must intervene, invest and coordinate. Hence his call for a major council-house-building programme.
GM Mayor powers are limited
As Mayor, Burnham had to make use of power exercised through relationships. The Greater Manchester Mayor has limited formal powers and no authority over the other council leaders, although together they comprise the executive team. Convening and ‘soft’ power have therefore been essential: a form of management without direct authority that is well established in Greater Manchester’s inter-organisational culture. Burnham’s accessible affability no doubt helped, as did his willingness to work with people who do not share his political orientation.
Yet this strength brings dangers that are likely to be more salient in the high-intensity Prime Ministerial context. A political practice organised around keeping everyone at the table can descend too readily into compromise when firmness is required. Greater Manchester’s retreat from a charging clean air zone illustrates the tension. The charging proposal was dropped after opposition, and in January 2025 the government accepted an £86 million investment-led, non-charging Clean Air Plan which it said would meet the legal nitrogen-dioxide objective faster than charging. The package includes cleaner electric buses, support for cleaner taxis, traffic-management measures and monitoring.As a result, unlike London, Birmingham, Bath, Bradford, Bristol, Portsmouth, Sheffield, and Newcastle and Gateshead, Greater Manchester does not have a clean air or low emissions zone that restricts classes of motor vehicle through charging. Yet the Strategic Case made by Greater Manchester Combined Authority to the government for their alternative approach (Figure 1-1) showed that the greatest contributors to both nitrogen oxide and particulate matter were actually petrol and diesel cars, although which vehicle class contributes the most does vary from area to area. That does not end the political argument. It remains reasonable to ask whether a non-charging approach can deliver the broader reductions in traffic, pollution and carbon emissions that a more ambitious transport strategy would seek.
Compromises may not give the best outcome
The possibility of changing course and then presenting the compromise as the better option will be something to watch out for. In his first summer in office, Burnham chaired COBR during extreme heat, wildfires and drought, and the government subsequently announced £65 million of drought support for farmers alongside other emergency measures. Campaigners nevertheless criticised the initial response for not matching the scale of the climate crisis. Since then Burnham has used that language explicitly and, in September, his government announced ‘People’s Power’ community-energy projects as part of its clean-energy programme. However, while switching to clean energy is important, and support for it will be improved by ensuring economic returns for communities, it targets just one aspect of the climate crisis, and just one source of carbon emissions. The government has not ignored climate change altogether, but its stated climate ambition competes with decisions that pull in the opposite direction.
Heathrow is an obvious test. The government is supporting expansion and has advanced a draft policy framework for a third runway, although any runway would still require planning permission. The Climate Change Committee warned in September 2026 that Heathrow expansion would make the UK’s climate targets harder to meet and said that expansion could only be consistent with carbon budgets and net zero if aviation were required to address its emissions much more fully. That is a substantial challenge to any attempt to present airport expansion as uncomplicated ‘good growth’. We have yet to see whether the government will permit drilling in the rosebank oil and Jackdaw gas fields, but Burnham has stated that he will take a ‘pragmatic’ approach: climate scientists, however have urged him to deny permission. : significantly, they appeal to ‘manchesterism’, which they say is charaterised by “honesty, integrity, fairness and the willingness to confront difficult challenges”,
Housing provides another example. On taking office Burnham said that rent freezes and other cost-of-living measures were being considered. Four days later, Housing Secretary Angela Rayner ruled out rent controls for the time being. That sequence does not prove bad faith or hidden motive, but it does illustrate how quickly a radical-sounding option can be narrowed once the machinery of government starts moving. The political question is how far Manchesterism is prepared to confront powerful interests and institutional constraints when its social ambitions come into conflict with them.
Economic growth – good or bad?
Burnham talks about decentralising government but with an agenda still built largely around the fragmented model of sub-regional mayors, alongside possible reform of first past the post and the House of Lords. In my view, that does not go far enough. With the intractable challenges of this century and a deeply divided society, there has to be a more fundamental reinvention of democracy: an informed citizenry able to resist hateful and malevolent propaganda, to deliberate on the real dilemmas facing us all. That will not happen overnight, but the foundations can be laid now. That is a test of political leadership.
Whether Burnham sees it as a problem or not, the elephant in the room is the ecological cost of pursuing economic growth on a finite planet. This is the central contradiction of the Manchester model. Burnham qualifies the idea as ‘good growth’, Greater Manchester even has a ‘good growth fund’. Nobody wants bad growth, surely. Good growth is an attempt to suggest that it is possible to pick and choose, so that only good things grow: it is a flawed concept. However, the impact of endless GDP growth cannot be so neatly partitioned into good and bad.
The economy isn’t like that: it is not selective, since to produce ‘good things’ means that bad things will happen: for example, the more the digital economy grows (one of the foci of the Greater Manchester ‘Good Growth Fund’), then the extraction of minerals and energy (rare earths, copper, cobalt, lithium, aluminium, oil, coal……) increases, with all its attendant impacts (spoil heaps, tailing ponds, air pollution, destruction of forests and of communities and livelihoods elsewhere). That also applies to the switch to ‘renewable’ energy in the absence of massive energy demand reduction. We live in a world with absolute limits, already overshot, so not only does overall growth have to be capped, it probably has to be reversed.
We can’t keep growth going indefinitely
At the very least, if you want some things to grow on a finite planet, then you have to be prepared to make some things contract. Burnham’s 29 June speech treated defence as one of the critical sectors in which Britain should safeguard sovereign manufacturing capability. In his first weeks as Prime Minister, the government announced an £8.4 billion investment in the Dreadnought submarine programme and explicitly presented it as both a security policy and a source of jobs, apprenticeships and ‘growth in every postcode’. From my perspective, that is Military Keynesianism, and it sits very uneasily with the idea of ecological limits. The resources devoted to military expansion are resources unavailable for other social and ecological priorities.
Government after government promises growth, but none seems to possess a reliable lever for producing it. Using the ONS annual real-GDP growth series, annual UK growth from 2010 to 2025 averages about 1.6 per cent. The path was anything but smooth, especially through the pandemic collapse and rebound, but on average, it has been weak. Growth also depends on global supply chains for energy, petrochemicals, minerals and food, all exposed to geopolitical disruption and increasing environmental pressure. Greater Manchester has performed comparatively well on several measures and has attracted substantial investment. Key contributors appear to include its universities and skilled workforce, the city-centre building boom and its partnership model. But can that really be a recipe for national success, for ‘growth in every postcode’, rather than a strategy in which some places inevitably attract activity from others?
Even if, despite ecology and feasibility, strong growth were achieved, there would still be winners and losers. Burnham himself has repeatedly acknowledged that the visible wealth of Manchester’s urban core has not reached many surrounding towns and communities. The same distributive problem would arise on a national scale, notwithstanding the proposed de-centring of government administration from Whitehall through ‘Number 10 North’. Moreover, a model based on competition between places becomes difficult to generalise nationally. . Not everywhere can be a winner. Indeed, the very possibility of growth relies on there being winners and losers: that’s the hard reality of capitalism.
Manchesterism should dump the growth fetish
Burnham could represent a serious challenge to the exhausted neoliberalism and managerialism of successive governments. His commitment to public transport, council housing, regional devolution and long-term investment is a break from much of what has characterised Westminster. Yet, if Manchesterism is to realise that promise, it must go further than replacing deregulated markets with a more interventionist and geographically dispersed strategy for growth. It must combine an alternative to growth-centric economic policy with a thoroughgoing democratic and egalitarian approach: a new settlement for people and planet. The larger task is to build an economy capable of meeting human needs while using far less energy and materials. That means deciding democratically what should expand, what should be protected and what should deliberately contract. And that would mean a change of direction from neoliberalism, which Burnham calls for.
Until Manchesterism faces those realities, it will remain a potentially valuable new politics constrained by what I regard as a dangerously outdated economic model.
This article is a major revision and extension of an earlier piece which appeared on the Steady State Manchester website in July.
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