Newly elected Makerfield MP and former Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham walks at Manchester Piccadilly station as he leaves for London, on Monday.Temilade Adelaja/Reuters
The last time a Manchester mayor assumed such a prominent role in British affairs so quickly was 1838, when the city’s inaugural mayor, the liberal industrialist and Guardian newspaper co-founder Thomas Potter, became a key figure in the left’s successful movement to end trade protectionism.
That is nothing compared to the mythic status of Andy Burnham, who until last week was mayor of Greater Manchester and suddenly appears very likely to become the next Prime Minister of Britain. So powerful is his aura that days after Mr. Burnham became an MP in a by-election last week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Monday announced plans to step down after winning a majority election two years ago, to clear the way for Mr. Burnham to succeed him in a leadership contest.
A thick cloud of inevitability has surrounded Mr. Burnham since, kicked up by an avalanche of conventional wisdom. For those on Labour’s left who believe Mr. Starmer has failed because he has leaned too far right and capitulated to the insurgent Reform UK party, he is a socialist saviour whose political philosophy of “Manchesterism” will ring in a state-centred economy reminiscent of the 1940s; for others, within and outside the party, he is an alarmingly left-wing figure who will crash the economy and lose the 2029 election.
If you examine his actual positions and record, however, those hopes and fears appear to have been built on a teetering platform of Westminster-village rhetoric. All signs suggest that his actual policy would differ little in substance from Mr. Starmer’s – only perhaps in a better articulated, better negotiated, more voter-pleasing form. As an editor of the New Statesman concluded last month, Britain “will have the same government with a different accent.”
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Mr. Burnham was never part of Labour’s hard left – in fact, he spent the 2010s campaigning against the ideas of former party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who lamented Britain’s membership in the EU and NATO, opposed any support for Ukraine, and wanted huge sections of the economy re-nationalized. Mr. Burnham, like Mr. Starmer, has long been a figure of the social-democratic “soft left,” which opposed both Tony Blair’s conservatism and Mr. Corbyn’s revolutionary factionalism.
The big difference is not in ideology but in electoral competence. During his nine years in mayoral office, a period that included the pandemic and the post-Brexit economic crisis, Mr. Burnham’s popularity has remained sky-high and led him to win a popular-vote majority in the by-election.
During that time, he has pushed Manchesterism as a concept, and some of his language has indeed served as catnip to the party’s left: He has referred to its set of activist, public-led, decentralizing proposals as “the end of neoliberalism” and “business-friendly socialism.”
But it is very clear, both from what he is actually proposing and from how he has governed Manchester, that “business-friendly” is the significant half of that equation. Manchesterism’s central goal is the promotion of economic growth at any cost, and Mr. Burnham has concluded that only a strong public role in encouraging economic activity and removing institutional barriers will restore growth.
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He does call for a greater public role in transportation, utilities and low-cost housing – but only because those uncompetitive sectors have become inefficient and money-losing (and therefore more expensive to taxpayers) and are dragging down the economy. That would not be a shift to the left: Mr. Starmer’s government is already in the process of nationalizing Britain’s railways, which have been private for all but 40 of their 200 years of operation but have required huge public-sector bailouts and subsidies.
Mr. Burnham’s approach is actually less socialistic than this; as a recent Cambridge University panel concluded, his approach in both Manchester and nationally is not public ownership, but rather greater public control over private-public monopoly services. In housing affordability, he has moved sharply away from the social-housing model long advocated by the Labour left, instead using public funds and subsidies, along with deregulation and incentives, to entice private developers to build affordable market housing: Public control as a prerequisite for growth, rather than a reward for it.
Mr. Burnham’s successful “Places for Everyone” housing policy in Manchester strongly prioritized private development over public housing. His Mayoral Development Corporations leveraged private funds for the attraction of major employers in finance and global capital, including 2,000 JP Morgan employees, using public-private commercial developments. His policing reforms used a back-to-basics, law-and-order approach focused on more CCTV cameras, stop-and-search policies and facial-recognition technology. And he abandoned some ecological policies when they alarmed business leaders.
Mr. Burnham would not likely be a PM who does things very differently. At best, party supporters hope he will just be a PM who does things.