Andy Burnham’s Manchester: A Defining Spirit Britain Needs More Of

Among the lesser-known later works of Manchester’s beloved band The Smiths, a striking song titled “London” captures a Mancunian boarding a train to the capital, full of ambition but gripped by ambivalence. Andy Burnham, whose affinity for the band is well known, may recognize not only the song’s central theme but also its accidental reflection of his own journey to Parliament, with Morrissey crooning: “And do you think you’ve made the right decision this time?”

Despite some observers giving him only a 45% chance of winning, Burnham’s pitch for power appears resolute. Eleven years ago, a different version of the future Greater Manchester mayor was one of four Labour leadership candidates, alongside Jeremy Corbyn, and chose to launch his campaign at the City of London headquarters of Ernst & Young. There, he suggested he might support further benefit cuts and claimed too many people associated Labour with “giving people who don’t want to help themselves an easy ride.” In 2022, he told the Guardian this was the result of bad advice: “I listened to people that I shouldn’t have, really. It was tone-deaf … it wasn’t me. It wasn’t authentic.”

Some view the 2026 model as the same unabashed shape-shifter. But having observed him closely, I argue his progress over the past decade—since becoming mayor of Greater Manchester in 2017—has been a story of rising certainty and self-confidence, deeper engagement with center-left forces like Compass, and an ability to connect with crowds most politicians leave cold, evidenced by recent appearances at Glastonbury. His most important attribute, however, reflects the dead end reached by Keir Starmer: Burnham has actual ideas.

This week, he spoke at the Great North Investment Summit in Leeds, an event focused on devolution. He discussed people’s complete loss of faith in politics and reiterated a familiar argument: for 40 years, the country has been on the wrong path. He lamented the “draining away of economic, social and political power” from northern England, compounded by “deregulation, privatisation … and austerity,” and local economies whose wealth was siphoned “into the hands of people for whom life was already very good.” This shift, he said, includes “people paying over the odds for the daily basics: energy, housing, water, transport.”

This is not particularly sophisticated, but that is part of its power. Burnham’s conception of the north’s recent past is the crux of “Manchesterism”—a work-in-progress credo with a nod to 19th-century free-trade Manchester liberalism. It begins with deindustrialization and the convulsions of the 1980s, referencing Margaret Thatcher in the first 35 seconds of his first Makerfield campaign video, soundtracked by Elbow’s “One Day Like This.” It also emphasizes social housing and the idea that rising welfare bills indicate economic and social failure, not worsening national delinquency.

Burnham insists the worst of modern capitalism is cynically extractive and socially damaging, echoing Ed Miliband’s old argument about “predators” versus “producers.” Meanwhile, Manchesterism offers a specifically English critique of broken systems of politics and power—something previously monopolized by Nigel Farage—born from Burnham’s reinvention as a political outsider.

The core of this is what Mathew Lawrence, director of the thinktank Common Wealth, calls “the productive state” in a new co-authored book about Manchesterism. “Where the market coordinates and the welfare state redistributes, the productive state produces: directly owning and operating capital in essential sectors, participating in markets as builder and provider rather than as regulator or redistributor,” Lawrence says. “It is the return of sovereign economic control of the economy’s foundations.”

Reflected in Burnham’s pledge to bring energy and utilities under “stronger public control,” this principle partly inspired the Bee Network—the yellow buses with a uniform £2 fare that have brought order to a public transport system torn apart by the Thatcher government’s 1986 deregulation. There is an interesting historical parallel: just as Margaret Thatcher avenged postwar social democracy at 40 years’ distance, so Burnham is set on “rolling back the 80s.”

Then there are the overarching vibes and what “Manchester” evokes. No one should see the city as a progressive utopia: rough sleepers have long bedded down in the shadow of expensive apartments, and painful income and influence gaps exist between Greater Manchester’s north and south. But Burnham’s Manchesterism builds on successes from the regeneration delivered by former city council leader Richard Leese and chief executive Howard Bernstein. It conjures images of a city center where consumerist wonderment sits amid a culture that is both entrepreneurial and collectivist. If Manchester has a prevailing spirit, this is probably it—and the UK could use more of it.

Perhaps in response to Burnham’s radicalism, things are moving fast at the top of Labour, as evidenced by Rachel Reeves’s new commitment to a summer of cost-of-living activism and supposed Blairite Wes Streeting’s conversion to the idea of a wealth tax. Meanwhile, Burnham’s naysayers sneer about the gilt market and question how much his agenda might cost.

Personally, I like Manchesterism for much the same reason as I like that Smiths song: its ferocity, bile, energy, and sense of purpose. Who knows what will happen in Makerfield, where the odds are finely balanced? If Burnham became prime minister, how would he reorient Whitehall to deliver his vision in short order? So far, we only know this: his ideas have brought ideological oomph—and hope—to a Labour party in danger of reducing politics to technocratic misery. And for that, we should be truly thankful.