Andy Burnham is three weeks from Downing Street, and he has chosen to lay out his vision from Manchester – the city where a decade in local government finally delivered the prize that twice eluded him. In a speech billed as economic but centred on power, the presumptive prime minister announced the creation of a “Number 10 North” in Manchester, a new prime ministerial office with specific responsibility for the “biggest council housebuilding programme since the postwar period”. That announcement, the BBC’s Henry Zeffman noted, raised questions about the role of the Ministry of Housing and hinted at a wider shakeup of government machinery – questions Burnham declined to answer by skipping media queries.
Burnham promised to give new powers to locally elected leaders across the UK, including in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, calling it the “biggest rebalancing of power” in political history. His approach, which he labelled “Manchesterism”, would use his record as Greater Manchester mayor as a blueprint for the nation. He also pledged to raise living standards, reform business rates to support pubs and other businesses, and offered a vague hint of giving people “a bit extra” to cope with rising costs.
“Andy Burnham vows to create a No 10 North in Manchester and devolve power in what he calls the biggest rebalancing in political history.”
The speech follows a pattern established long before his return to Westminster. In 2008, when Burnham was culture secretary and the author of a New Statesman piece was Lord Mayor of Liverpool, the two became friends. That relationship deepened after the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, when Burnham was invited to speak at Anfield. As the author recalls, a lone voice from the crowd of 37,000 shouted “we want justice” – but what mattered was what Burnham did next. He stopped, listened to the families, and understood that “a whole city had been crying injustice for two decades”. That experience, the author writes, stayed with him, later culminating in his efforts to secure a Hillsborough Law.
Burnham’s vision also draws on the postwar record of Clement Attlee, who by 1951 had nationalised 20% of the economy. In a Guardian series on nationalisation, Larry Elliott notes that Burnham, like Attlee, thinks state ownership is part of the solution to Britain’s economic woes – but he will have to go some to match Attlee’s transformation. Attlee’s government took over the “commanding heights of the economy”, as the Labour party had argued since its original clause IV in 1918 called for “common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange”.
For all the vision, however, details remain scarce. Channel 4 News hosted a debate on whether Burnham can deliver his bold promises, featuring Avnee Morjaria of the left-of-centre IPPR North thinktank and Henry Hill, political editor of the conservative Critic Magazine. The presumption that he will be in Downing Street in three weeks is now the starting point for every discussion; the question is what he will do when he gets there.