Opening the issue was an expansive and historically astute essay by Eric Hobsbawm, in which the historian charts the ascendency of neoliberalism as a governing doctrine in Britain, a doctrine that had taken first Thatcher and then Tony Blair to No. 10. Forged in the crisis-ridden Seventies, neoliberalism served to insulate the workings of the market from political control. It also created new forms of individualism, which undercut the collective solidarity that has formed the basis of the old labor movement.

Yet by 1998, a year into Blair’s first term, things seemed to be changing. The late Nineties saw financial crises in the once-booming economies of East and South East Asia, while in Europe and the US, the market economy was now producing increasingly unequal societies, as manufacturing jobs were offshored and communities decimated.

The special issue’s cover gave some clue as to what the writers of Marxism Today thought of New Labour’s Thatcher tribute act. Splashed in lurid red, and set over an image of a distinctly awkward and toothy looking Blair, was a single word: “Wrong”. For Hobsbawm, seemingly the only person who couldn’t see the way the wind was blowing was the man in No. 10. “If there is any way of losing the next election,” he wrote, “it is by not recognizing that the age of neo-liberalism is over.”

We know how that went. Now, nearly three decades on, we have a prime minister who is finally saying what none have said before: that neoliberal orthodoxy has failed the country. Andy Burnham’s speech at the Labour party conference in Liverpool may have been mawkish and light on detail. But it was remarkably radical in its forthright rejection of Thatcherism, with the Prime Minister proclaiming that “Britain has been on the wrong path for a long time”, before listing a litany of neoliberal ills from privatization to austerity.

Whether Burnham will be successful in stopping the rot remains to be seen; so far, nothing that Labour has announced has signaled the level of ambition needed to fundamentally reshape Britain’s ailing and deindustrialized economy. It will take more than cheap buses and electoral reform to undo the damage of 40 years of Thatcherism. Neoliberalism, it must be remembered, entailed a radical overhaul of the state, the economy and even personal identity. To overturn it will require an equally ambitious project.

As Hobsbawm’s essay implies, neoliberalism easily outlived its obituarists. Just how did it last so long? The easy answer is that Thatcher won. Her electoral success may have been as much the product of events as it was of her skills as a politician — in 1983, for instance, she relied on the warm glow of Mark VIII torpedoes in the South Atlantic, and on a divided opposition split further by the formation of the SDP — but you can’t argue with three electoral triumphs. Besides, success, by its very nature, can force the opposition to fight on terrain of your choosing. So much so, in fact, that by the early 2000s the New Labour stalwart Peter Mandelson was moved to declare that “we are all Thatcherites now”.

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But there was something deeper at work too. As Hobsbawm himself concedes, part of the success of Thatcherism was its strain of autonomy. It answered a previously unfulfilled wish on the part of the electorate, not least a desire to see fundamental changes made to a statist system that appeared both remote and unresponsive to their needs. In this way, Thatcher was able to draw on what a number of historians have called “popular individualism”.

This new individualism emerged during the Seventies in reaction to the hierarchies and inequalities of postwar Britain, and served to challenge them in more or less political terms. That decade saw the rise of new forms of mass politics in the feminist movement; in the growth of new forms of anti-racist organizing; and in radical forms of grassroots action within the previously hierarchical trade unions. Popular individualism also took more conservative guises, not least in the emergence of new modes of consumerism — think Habitat furniture, and the craze for dinner parties and DIY home improvements — as well as in the generalized and much remarked upon decline of social and political deference.

Importantly, these were not the products of Thatcherism; if anything, she was the product of them. Yet Thatcher herself skillfully exploited these forces, promising to give people a stake in the new system she was both formed from and was, in turn, creating. Nowhere is this clearer than housing. Thatcher’s Right to Buy scheme was part of the New Right’s promise to create a “property-owning democracy”, a foil for statist postwar social democracy. In the decade from 1980 alone, some 1.3 million council houses were sold at huge discounts.

In creating a new class of property owners, Thatcher struck a new political bargain with the electorate: give up the state-backed stability of the postwar decades, and in return enjoy home ownership and asset price inflation. All the while, Thatcher told a new story about ordinary life. The council tenant became an owner, even a landlord, while workers became shareholders. Dependence was now shameful; in place of an out-of-touch state, markets, we were told, would respond to what people actually wanted. In doing so, the relationship between citizen and the state was fundamentally refigured, while new voter blocs had a material stake in the order’s success. In this way, Thatcherism created not just a political settlement, but whole new political constituencies too.

Think, here, of “Essex man”. A term coined by Simon Heffer in The Telegraph in 1990, it described a kind of voter who had become increasingly influential over the past decade. As Heffer put it, Essex man was “young, industrious, mildly brutish and culturally barren”, a nouveau riche ex-Cockney working in the get-rich-quick City and now voting Conservative. To really hammer the point home, the image accompanying Heffer’s story showed an Essex Man standing squat and square in front of his shiny motor and his newly purchased ex-council house.

Yet if Hobsbawm was premature in his diagnosis of neoliberalism’s death — its demographic roots were far too deep for any single crisis to upend — Burnham’s seems belated. Since 2008, if not earlier, it has been clear that the old Thatcherite settlement is broken. Nothing has so far replaced it. No one seems to have either the will or the vision to forge a new economic consensus.

Perhaps this is why both the Right and the Left seem so haunted by the past. Burnham’s conference speech was brimming with nostalgic references to the stability of the Fifties and Sixties, when workers could earn a decent wage, and when ordinary people could feel confident that their lives were getting better. That postwar settlement produced the NHS; strong trade unions built on the foundations of solid industrial employment; and steady, even historically unprecedented, levels of economic growth.

For the Right, on the other hand, the golden age came in the Eighties, when Britain got its act together and the country reclaimed its confidence. Forget the miners’ strike and the dole queues: this was the decade when you could make it big, when wealth was made and flaunted, when Britain and its people were liberated from the albatross of national decline. All this happened before the advent of mass immigration. For much of the Right today, it is Blairism that is the wound, with the “Blairite revolution” ushering in a new statism of quangos and red tape while the world’s poor were allowed free entry.

Of course, there is a grain of truth here. Some people really did do well in the Eighties, and Blair really did produce a complex para-state system of regulations and subsidies that the energy historian Arthur Downing has called “Zombie neoliberalism”. But there is much missing, too. If anything, Thatcher was a response to the crises of the late Seventies, which saw the start of what the economic historian Robert Brenner has called the “long downturn”. Increasing international competition had, by then, begun putting a heavy downward pressure on profits, while the financialization of the global economy saw assets sweated even as investments dwindled.

Thatcher’s sell-off of state-owned enterprises, alongside a program of austerity and a steep rise in unemployment, bought some relief from the increasingly grim economic picture. But as Harold Macmillan put it, there’s only so much family silver to be hawked before the cupboards are finally bare. Another dose of Thatcherite medicine, with a bonfire of the quangos and a new free-market push, would therefore only deepen the malaise.

Likewise, the image of the relatively stable and prosperous postwar compact may play well against our increasingly precarious present — but there is no returning to postwar years. As the chancellor John Healey remarked in his own conference speech, “without growth, there is no social democracy”, a comment more apt than perhaps Healey himself knew. The political and economic conditions that confront the Chancellor and his boss are far more constrained than those faced by any of their predecessors. Britain’s economy, as economists like Brett Christophers have shown, is increasingly a rentier economy, with essential infrastructure converted into assets optimized for stable returns with minimal capital expenditure. For their part, climate and energy-induced inflation will only make these problems more acute.

Burnham therefore faces an unenviable task. A decade of austerity has failed to kickstart growth. The country’s privatized infrastructure is decaying, while industrial policy and nationalism are returning on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet if there’s clearly a broad public appetite for the state to do something about energy prices, water, rail and rents, Burnham’s politics must be based on more than fine words alone. The vacuum created by the fracturing of the neoliberal consensus must, instead, be filled by a democratic, ambitious and municipal-minded Left.

In this, there are lessons to be learned from the Thatcherite experience: to truly secure its revolution, a renewed Left must create its own political constituencies. A good start would be to relieve some of the pressure on renters. A wave of council house building — prompting a cultural shift that sees such accommodation as more than a last resort — would not only allow hundreds of thousands of people to live more stable and comfortable lives. It would also create a coalition of voters with a material stake in the system, just as Thatcher’s owner-occupiers once did. The same might be said of quality public transport; stable and clean energy; and indeed Burnham’s much-vaunted national care service.

At any rate, the stakes could not be higher. Failure from the Left now would leave the doors open to a Right intent on dismantling the last vestiges of the state, selling it off to whichever private contractor or crypto billionaire happened to be around at the time. God knows what Marxism Today would have to say about that.

Like the comrade-citizens of the Eastern Bloc — taught all the ways of brotherhood and abundance, but used to sclerotic central planning — we’re about to find out what “actually-existing Burnhamism” looks like. The recess is over, and so is the honeymoon. Making his prime ministerial debut in the Commons yesterday, Andy Burnham experienced something of a baptism of fire. He’s already faced a global sovereign debt fire-sale, with Britain looking predictably exposed, as well as a grilling by Kemi Badenoch. And, more awkwardly, Burnham now faces a by-election in Holborn and St Pancras, courtesy of an ever-helpful former leader. The North London contest will turn into a Labour-versus-Greens showdown. Though Makerfield proved that Burnham could turn Northern heads away from an insurgent Faragism, facing off Zack Polanski in a liberal metropolitan stronghold is a different task entirely.

Over the summer, Burnham had the opportunity to prove that he’s at least superficially different to his robotic predecessor: he played The Smiths to Ukrainian squaddies, and masterminded an impeccable TikTok game. Plus, he announced a set of nice, small-scale retail policies focused on the cost of living.

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Now he bemoans Margaret Thatcher’s legacy in the Commons, linking privatization to the rise in water and energy bills, and deregulation on the decline of bus travel outside of London. It’s all cogent Left-populist diagnostics: Tory spivs sold England by the pound; austerity in local government compounded the misery; and Brexit cut us adrift in a harsh geopolitical climate. We already know what is on Burnham’s big to-do list: a reversal of “40 years” of neoliberalism, public ownership of the core utilities, investment in regional infrastructure, devolution, constitutional reform. But what will this all look like in practice, in a country that is currently spending more than the annual education budget on debt interest? How will Burnham finance his grand plans with an incapacitated, outsourcing state that few trust to deliver on the most basic services?

Disappointment lingers on the horizon. Signs were there over the holidays: “Our Andy” was forced to watch his beloved Everton play Crystal Palace last weekend from the safety of the director’s box — rather than his usual seat on the terraces. And so the man of the people became the man of the prawn sandwiches. The idea of Burnhamism is all about normie populist swagger: his easy charm says “one of us”. But now he’s no longer one of us. He’s Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. And, in the land of actually-existing Burnhamism, the security arrangements for a prime minister at a football game present a considerable headache — as does much else besides.

In the doctrinal version of Burnham Thought — “Manchesterism”, as it is sometimes known — we might expect to see some municipally owned water and energy companies, even a “gas-and-water socialism” revival in the tradition of Joseph Chamberlain’s Birmingham. In actually-existing Burnhamism, however, the Government has been advised that bringing an ailing Thames Water onto the public books would add another few billion to the debt pile and make the state vulnerable to legal action.

Burnham has long been a champion of big capital projects: full-fat HS2, Northern Powerhouse Rail and more tramlines, to name but a few. All of them could conceivably facilitate higher regional productivity, job creation and private investment for decades to come. But in actually-existing Burnhamism, any signs that a cool hundred billion might be expended on concrete and steel could be met with a gilt rout by twitchy hedge funds holding mountains of British debt. Yes, the Manchesterism schtick plays ably on a boomer-coded social-democratic nostalgia: remember proper bin men and pork scratchings? Except that under actually-existing Burnhamism, Ofgem has just raised the price cap again, and we’re still paying our bills to a hodgepodge of competing private outfits.

Defense poses similar questions. When John Healey, the Chancellor of the Exchequer,  first hitched his wagon to Team Andy after resigning as Keir Starmer’s defense secretary, he presumably thought Burnham would be sympathetic to his plea for higher defense spending. After all, Burnham, unlike his predecessor, had decried the limiting effects of fiscal rules and being “in hock” to the bond markets. But, again, in actually-existing Burnhamism, the bond markets do exist. Healey is already facing accusations of hypocrisy for not immediately setting out the route to 3% defense budgets. And, in order to pay the triple lock to the wealthiest generation in human history, to fund PIP payments to anxious twenty-somethings, and to ensure ambulances turn up, the Government must issue gilts and remain in the bond markets’ favor. This is, of course, a situation entirely of our own making — reflecting a national desire for Scandinavian services without the taxes to match, along with a public purse that splurges billions on shoddy procurement deals.

In this context, change is likely to be incremental rather than wholesale. Transferring whole industries onto the public books would require an enormous amount of trust from our creditors. It would likely necessitate an ample demonstration that, while large-scale public investment in assets and infrastructure was the new growth model, day-to-day government spending could readily be balanced through a combination of cuts and higher taxes. That would mean either confronting Labour MPs with hard truths that they would be unlikely to countenance, or potentially stymying growth with more financial burdens on employers and high earners.

A third, more radical, option exists, discussed in hushed tones on the outer fringes of Labour circles. Some within call themselves the “Based Left”, only semi-ironically, and they speak of a “politics of production” and “national preference”. The offer involves going to war with the Bank of England over quantitative tightening and rate hikes, infringing upon central bank independence to facilitate a program of stimulus spending and de-privatisation. That is beyond the realms of probability today. After all, it would mean pursuing a kind of Left-nationalist siege economy replete with capital and exchange controls, postwar-style price commissions, incomes policy, and fiscal-monetary coordination.

Rather than reversing the Eighties legacy as promised, with a genuine return to a properly social-democratic political economy, something more akin to gradual reform is likely — think less Tony Benn, more Roy Jenkins. We could see the train routes gradually come under the purview of Great British Rail, perhaps an expansion of GB Energy, and some more public, regional or municipal options explored for water. Since Burnham is hemmed in by the 2024 manifesto commitments on tax, an early election will be required to really be the “circuit breaker” leader he promises. But, for now, this is Burnhamism in essence: the adoption of fiery Left-wing rhetoric on economics accompanied by a slight Leftward pivot on fiscal policy in actuality, plus better vibes.

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And yet if the vibes have undoubtedly shifted from a lackluster Starmerism to a more dynamic Burnhamism, the latter has inherited the former’s central contradiction: the speeches extolling the end of globalization on the one hand, and a relatively limp policy offer to remedy it on the other. Though Starmer was said to have been captured by the Labour Right, he tried in vain to tell a national story not unlike Burnham’s: one of investment, the return of state ownership in energy and transport, and the failure of “trickle-down economics”. The problem was the story was told so inconsistently, insincerely, and with such a lack of gusto, that it was hardly noticed at all.

Burnham will be a better storyteller. But in the coming weeks, the unstoppable force of his grand projects will meet the immovable object of a recalcitrant Treasury and an economy on the ropes. Britain’s problems are still structural, requiring fewer technocratic tweaks and InstaReels from No. 10 North — and more of a systemic overhaul. We are experiencing a deep-rooted, overlapping polycrisis. The nation has experienced zero productivity or real wage growth since 2008. It still produces less than it consumes, and it remains dependent on inward foreign investment and the kindness of strangers in a world now beset by the end of liberal globalization.

So when an increasingly confident Kemi Badenoch walks into PMQs today, she’ll be armed with plenty of ammunition: one-in-one-out prisons, spiking gilt yields, expected tax rises in a putative “Red October” Budget. What, then, does a Big State man do when times are tough? We are about to find out what existing Burnhamism can actually deliver.

Manchester had always been Labour for as long as anyone cared to remember. It was pro-labor before Labour even existed. This was a center of Chartism, Radical Liberalism and mass, industrial trade unions well before the Labour Party proper had even been conceived. But the King in the North had transformed it into an impenetrable Red Fortress, nested on the edge of the Pennines, with even the salubrious middle-class suburbs voting for the Left-wing Mayor. The narrow, New Labour apparatchik had transformed, butterfly-like, into a broad, avuncular tribune of all the Mancunians, fighting their corner against the Great Wen. He had transcended his bland ministerial origins, and mastered the art of the floating signifier, the vibes politician, letting people transplant their own desires onto his person. And yet such was the unique unpopularity of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, then barely 18 months into his premiership, that it was genuinely proposed that the mayoralty in Greater Manchester might be lost to the national-populist teal tide, should the Labour candidate not be named “Andy Burnham”. Rarely in politics does one hear such a willing confession of weakness. 

Labour’s hapless bigwigs were right to be afraid. In May, the local election results seemed to bear out their worst fears. Across the 10 Greater Manchester councils, Reform’s aggregate vote was 30% compared with Labour’s 24% and the Green’s 20%. Labour didn’t win the largest share in any of the local authority areas, with its voters pulled between the siren populisms of Left and Right. The old bloc had been blown apart by a tragically inept, dithering lawyer, who had sullied the party brand with his refusal to project any sense of purpose to a beleaguered nation desperate for an active response to falling living standards.

But barely three months later, Andy Burnham is Prime Minister, and Labour has retained Greater Manchester at a canter. Its candidate in the mayoral race, Bev Craig, won the election last night by a sizeable margin. In Labour’s first electoral test since the new Prime Minister entered No. 10, we see a glimpse of the Burnhamite electoral bloc coalescing: the Greens squeezed into a humiliating third place after boasting that they were in contention to win; the Liberal Democrats barely registering and subsumed into Labour’s orbit; and perhaps even some soft Reformers peeled off from the Faragist insurgency now that the national face of Labour is no longer so lacking in verve. We can see the Labour coalition being tentatively restored.

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The winner of the Greater Manchester contest matters now more than ever, as new fiscal levers are devolved to regional representatives. Two of our last five prime ministers have used their respective mayoralties as a springboard for national leadership. As a relatively new constitutional addition in Britain, combined authority leaders have, up until now, often acted as beefed-up ambassadors for their locales, corralling councillors and the private sector into some semblance of partnership, trying to drum up FDI, and bidding for investment from Whitehall in what the West Midlands Mayor Andy Street called a “begging bowl culture”.

But mayors will be beggars no more. Now that a proportion of income tax revenues are set to be devolved, regional executives will suddenly find themselves with the ability to implement their visions without sign-off from Westminster’s mandarins. Where previously Britain was an international outlier in terms of its political and fiscal centralization, the new policy puts the country more in line with most advanced democracies in which city and regional leaders are able to use local initiative to a far greater extent.

We are perhaps living in a new age of mayors. Zohran Mamdani has become an international figure, studied by anxious Leftists for translatable lessons and a winning formula. (It helps to stand a charismatic frontman in a liberal megalopolis, eschewing typical Leftist campaign obsessions in favor of strong, cost-of-living-first message discipline.) Burnham is consciously emulating Mamdani’s media strategy, communicating via vertical video rather than obsessing over the lobby, unread press releases, or meandering speeches that rarely cut through anywhere outside of Fleet Street and wonk-land. Mayoralism, based on a blurring of the personal and civic identification — “who do I call when I want to call Manchester?” — lends itself to TikTok-enabled soft personality cults. Meanwhile, Britain toys with the notion that mayoralism and English devolution could also solve a growth conundrum that has bedeviled politicians of all stripes since 2008.

In this regard, the work of two of Burnham’s reportedly close economic advisers is instructive. The former Goldman Sachs economist, Jim O’Neill, and the former Bank of England economist, Andy Haldane, have advocated for increased mayoral and city-regional powers as a productivity and growth-booster for many years — and the idea is finally in vogue. A recent well-received paper, co-authored by Ed Balls, made the case for an intensification of a regional rewiring of the British state, coupled with a lot of infrastructure spending. In line with O’Neill’s and Haldane’s long-term thinking, the formula of increased capital expenditure plus bolstered levers for local leaders is held up as a solution for the anemic economic performance over the last two decades. A figure of £200 billion over two decades is cited for transport upgrades outside of the capital, while it is calculated that bringing second-tier cities up to the standard of Western European counterparts would add £70 billion per annum to the receipts of the Exchequer.

Burnham’s heavy focus on devolution stands out in these early, honeymoon days of his leadership. The public clamor for increasing the powers of mayors is minimal. Most people are as likely to feel as estranged from their local Town Hall as they are from Whitehall: each represents a failing state monolith, long shorn of any vigor or capacity, rather than the latter being seen as an unfair colonial imposter on the rightful terrain of the former. Burnham’s dogged pursuit of this agenda, then, is a sign of his convert’s zeal. 

Those old-fashioned Labourites hoping for a premiership focused on old-school nationalization and state-backed reindustrialization will likely be disappointed. Burnhamism will be technocratic, not revolutionary, with any fiscal space or wiggle room on investment prioritizing infrastructure spending and mass transit in and between the great cities of the North and Midlands, not on transferring privately held natural monopolies back into the public sector. In office, Burnham will attempt to do the old model better, extending it outside of London, and pursuing the real economic drivers of “Manchesterism”: metropolitan agglomeration, city-based service and knowledge economy growth, and the so-called “triple-helix” model of innovation through partnerships between the local state, universities and business. 

But there is a difficulty buried in all this, and the story of Greater Manchester epitomizes the problem. The agglomeration model works, in the narrow sense that it has already worked: central Manchester’s impressive skyline is the product of three decades of precisely this formula. What it has conspicuously not done is reach the same impressive heights in Rochdale, or Leigh, or the stretches of Oldham where the promise of spillover from the core has been renewed at every electoral cycle, without ever quite materializing beyond the improved Bee Network: all roads lead to Piccadilly Gardens. And yet Burnham’s political achievement as mayor was to hold both constituencies at once — the defender of the left-behind town and the apparent originator of the glass-and-steel city boom — without ever being made to say that the growth model had a primary beneficiary in the Northern laptop class. That is a considerable trick. The question is whether it can be repeated on a national scale. 

The academic Paula Surridge’s extensive quantitative research into the British electorate reveals a majoritarian appetite for the active state, public investment, and the economic populism of the Left. And yet Labour’s potential voters are split according to their divergent values, between the cultural conservatism of (broadly speaking) the patriotic, non-graduate working class, and the liberal-progressivism of the graduate urban salariat. If Burnhamism can bridge those gaps with an inclusive social imaginary of dad-rock, professional Northern cheeky-chappiness, football, pints and pies — molding the projected cultural offer with the common-sense social-democratic nostalgia that forms the vague political economy of his normie populism — then the Right has cause to be very afraid.

Reform is in disarray nationally and has been roundly beaten in Greater Manchester, where it was ahead just in May. And this coincides with a symbolic turning point: the first polls in over a year in which Reform has lost its lead. The contradictions within Burnhamism are real, but only as real as those on the Right, which is suffering its own version of tribal-electoral fragmentation. Permanently welding together the post-industrial, provincial proletariat with the petit-bourgeois and affluent middle-classes of the Home Counties and Southern England was always a tall order, which Boris Johnson’s Tories only momentarily succeeded in doing for a short-lived “realignment” in 2019. Those discrete blocs have since bifurcated into a more plebeian populist movement and remnants of Sensible Conservative ultra-loyalism. The current state of politics is this: Reform is in defensive mode, the Tories have stabilized, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats are going backwards, and Burnham is outpolling every rival leader by margins Starmer never once managed.

In 2007, a new Labour prime minister with an inherited mandate and a commanding lead decided against going to the electorate while he was ahead. Burnham was sitting in the Treasury when it happened. Now, he finds himself in a similar position. He could extend his own lead over the coming months — but only as long as he is able to maintain his everyman status, as long as the ambiguity of a difficult-decision-free Burnhamism allows him to ride two horses at once. That won’t be easy: at present, we have a perilous fiscal inheritance that means promises will be reneged upon. We have a Downing Street staffed by former Blairites; a soft-Left and Brownite Cabinet; and Socialist Campaign Group, Progressive Britain and Blue Labour MPs alike on the government payroll. Those elite-level contradictions are accompanied by deeper, population-level fissures in the composition of Labour’s electoral demographics. Greater Manchester has taught Burnham that the Labour coalition can be rebuilt, but not how long it holds. In September, when Parliament returns, with a Budget due soon after, we will see how good a floating signifier Burnham can be.

“Blue”, we are variously told, refers to the small-c conservatism of the movement, as well as to “blue-collar” voters themselves. Suffusing Blue Labour discourse is an understandable nostalgia for old-fashioned ethical socialists, influenced by such mainstream texts as Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum of 1891. And so “blue” also connotes the group’s inherent melancholia: how could it not, when their successors operate in a party overflowing with all the technocratic dreariness and cultural coding of contemporary liberal progressivism?

But forget the melancholia and the suffering and penance for the moment. There’s a glimmer of hope on the horizon. And not just because the bone-dry managerial style of a Remain-campaigning Surrey lawyer has been replaced with the more palatable normie populism of the Manchester everyman. Whether the Westminster chatterati believe the affectations of Andy Burnham’s persona or not, the incoming PM can at least earn Labour the chance of a second hearing with its former supporters in working-class Britain.

Hope begins in Burnham’s Makerfield constituency. Just 25 miles separate the Stubshaw Cross Labour Club on the outskirts of Ashton, and the high street in Gorton, a diverse, multicultural area south of Manchester city center. But the political distance between the two could have huge ramifications for the future of Britain. Stubshaw Cross — a flat-roofed working-men’s club with England flags, cheap lager and sun-faded banners of Bobby Moore lifting the 1966 World Cup — was the center of the Labour firmament for several weeks during Burnham’s recent by-election campaign. Gorton, of course, was the scene of the Greens’ first ever by-election triumph earlier this year.

The former Mayor of Greater Manchester, according to all the polling evidence, would have trounced the Greens’ plumber-turned-parliamentarian Hannah Spencer in Gorton, just as he eventually trounced Reform’s plumber-turned-candidate Robert Kenyon in Makerfield. But he would likely have done so having been dragged Leftwards by the Green insurgency, into the social and cultural space of the young, ultra-liberal Left, and their incongruous Muslim allies.

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Makerfield is different. The Green insurgency is nowhere to be found, and until our PM-in-waiting was elected, the seat was near the top of Reform’s target list. There was an image of the constituency as a post-industrial wasteland — a quintessential Northern outpost, “left behind” and populated by the angry and white working class. Never mind that it’s far wealthier than Gorton, its rougher estates leavened by villages scattered among green fields, new cars in driveways, and neat front gardens overlooked by well-kept pebbledashed semis. For a certain breed of Labourite, seats like Makerfield remain ideological catnip: the collieries have long closed, but the area still represents something romantically assumed must always be fundamentally Labour. It’s the Britain of the non-graduate workers, the blue-collar salaried staff, the tradesmen.

Gorton and Denton, of course, was prime Labour territory too, until the Green victory anyway. But there’s always been a slight embarrassment in some of the more nostalgic party circles about Labour’s relationship with metropolitan Britain. For one, there’s an electoral logic to it: there’s no route to Downing Street through the inner cities alone. But there’s also an ideological aversion, a feeling that Labour can’t simply be the party of what Michael Lind calls “the hubs”, full of rootless “anywheres”. While the cities house the demographic fusion that makes up the party’s newer base — graduates, public-sector employees, the youthful urban precariat and ethnic minorities — Labour support among older, less mobile, and whiter workers in the smaller towns has long been in abeyance. Their struggles in seats like Makerfield, at least without Burnham on the ballot, is a sore reminder of what the party has become: the vehicle of choice for the buzzy urban citadels, while old proletarian Britain abandons them in droves.

That’s what makes the victory in Makerfield remarkable, and what makes some Blue Labour figures hopeful. A week after the by-election, on the hottest June day on record and in the upstairs of a Manchester pub aptly named The Briton’s Protection, I chaired a meeting of two Blue Labour MPs, 30 of its local supporters, and a gaggle of the politically curious gathering to discuss the tendency’s future. The room was full of an unusual positivity, as a strange unity broke out between warring intra-party tribes.

Burnham’s candidacy in Makerfield had seen him renounce his previous positions on rejoining the EU and gender self-identification. Last week, he posted about the release of a Rochdale grooming gang leader from prison, telling followers that “like everyone, I want this vile criminal out of the country”. Burnham is combining this no-nonsense, Rightward tilt on culture with a robust critique of what he calls “40 years” of market-liberal economic logic.

The unofficial radical pole of Burnhamism’s prescription has already been set out in “The Productive State”. The brainchild of Mathew Lawrence and Alex Williams, a pair of Left-leaning thinkers, it’s a detailed document that advocates for a whole new growth model based not on ever-increasing, welfarist distribution of tax revenues — but on a reassertion of public control over core sectors and natural monopolies, including the privatized utilities, transport and social care.

This will, the authors say, facilitate a new social infrastructure: one based on national investment rather than rentierism and dividend extraction by endless outsourced corners of the public-private para-state. From there, out-of-control departmental budgets will soon be brought to heel, as layers of procurement parasitism are removed in favor of in-house delivery. The growing benefits and post-hoc subsidy regime will be reined in too, once the state has made the transition from distributism and entitlements to production and investment.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, these proposals have caught the eye of Blue Labour, with whom there’s significant ideological overlap. In the sweltering upstairs function room of The Briton’s Protection, Jonathan Hinder made the case for a more robust, workerist socialism based on public investment, trade-union power and a developmentalist state that just builds things. “We’re a socialist tradition,” he tells the comrades, “against an economic consensus we’ve had since 1979” — an echo of Burnham’s own pronouncements. “Some people call us socially conservative,” Hinder adds, in a nod to what we might call the incoming PM’s Radio 6 aesthetics. “I’d just say we’re ‘normal’.”

There’s every likelihood, of course, that this vision will be eclipsed by a less radical interpretation of Burnham’s fledgling “Manchesterism”. That could constitute something like a mild increase in capital spending in the regions — made possible within the fiscal rules by allowing arms-length bodies such as the National Wealth Fund to issue their own bonds — alongside extra devolution and symbolic moves like No 10 North. Certainly, the Blairite Right of the Parliamentary Labour Party would love to strangle Hinder’s ideas at birth, as would a media establishment hostile to transformative economic policy. Those dreaded bond vigilantes wouldn’t mind a go at the garrote either. All the while, some on the Left have called for more radical measures still: fiscal-monetary coordination, financial repression, price controls, and nationalization.

The substance of Burnham’s agenda, then, is yet to be fully formed. Just weeks away from Downing Street, as advisers still jockey for influence, the direction of the project is still very much in flux. Indeed, that question of personnel could prove decisive. There never was a consensus among its backers whether Morgan McSweeney’s flirtation with Blue Labour’s broad messaging was based on a genuine ideological position or hard-nosed politics — the public, British Social Attitudes surveys regularly show, lean Left on economics and Right on culture.

McSweeney’s recent interview with Nick Robinson suggests the latter, with Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff expressing open hostility to any politics based on ideas, and showing himself to be little more than an adept campaign organizer, possessing no political economy, no theory of state, and little interest in policy. With the disappointments of Starmerism finally interred, the new Blue Labour lodestar within the incoming camp is Josh Simons, the former MP who gave up his seat to force the Makerfield by-election, and who is tipped as head of a No 10 policy unit. Several Blue Labour sources describe him as “aligned”, adding that he “gets it”. One says “Simons is broadly a good thing, but I don’t know him well”.

Burnham’s future cabinet sparks greater uncertainty. One Blue Labour-adjacent figure tells me that “loads of Northern MPs” are “very concerned” about the potential appointment of Ed Miliband as Chancellor. “It’s not just his policy,” they explain, “but his actual personal unpopularity with a large chunk of the electorate.” Miliband is, in their estimation, “a real bogeyman”, confirming the worst suspicions of those “who already worry that Labour are full of luvvies”. To be fair, some Blue Labourites tell me the Energy Secretary’s monomaniacal Net Zero obsessions are fueled by a genuine belief that climate policy can be used as the fulcrum of social-democratic industrial policy, a catalyst for building a new, green, big state capitalism. Again, though, not everyone’s convinced: one insider simply calls Miliband “a crank”.

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There are broader questions too. The progressive wing of the PLP will make welfare reform a difficult sell. Burnham is said to support Alan Milburn’s much-vaunted review, but any tweaking of benefits rules will have to be accompanied by genuine pathways to work, to avoid rebellion on Labour benches anyway. Similarly, there’s a disconnect between the public’s desire for harsher immigration and asylum policy and the soft-Left’s queasiness on Shabana Mahmood’s Home Office reforms. A staffer from her camp tells me she’ll “probably” stay in the role. Time will tell.

The truth is that whatever the success of an emergent Blue Burnhamism, it won’t be because the faction — if we can start calling it that — revives flat caps, smokestacks and Catholic social teaching. The industrial proletariat of old has gone, and the old Labour Party with it. The new working class of Britain are as likely to live in Gorton and Denton as they are in Makerfield. They don’t work in factories or down pits, but in call centers and shops, construction sites and care homes, warehouses and soulless offices.

Burnham the endlessly protean politician understands the performative nature of politics, and the necessity of broad-based appeal. As a Home Office minister in the Blair era, his stances on crime were so tough that he earned the nickname “flog ‘em and Burnham” from civil servants. He then went on to tease the Corbynites by attending Universal Basic Income fringes at conference, and positioning himself as a born-again Leftist. Where Blue Labour has had a tendency to over-correct, to lean into outmoded political archetypes, Blue Burnhamism can shapeshift on culture. The New Left sage Perry Anderson has written that political movements must be “capable of synthesizing heteroclite demands that [have] no necessary connection with each other… into a national-popular unity”.

That is the task of leadership. Burnham must succeed where Starmer failed and simultaneously appeal to the old and new working classes by articulating a positive national renewal project, a normie populism combining civic, progressive patriotism, matter-of-fact socio-cultural positioning and comfortable regional identity with a new economic direction for the country. But if Makerfield has given his leadership some early ideological shape, the challenge will be in translating Burnham’s cosmetic difference into a real-world, concrete politics. Fail, and Blue Burnhamism will be remembered as little more than a Northern campaign dialect.

This is a grave error, and Burnham’s Manchesterism speech on Monday — his first major intervention as Prime Minister presumptive — acknowledged as much. Alongside his eyecatching plan for a Northern wing of Number 10, he lambasted the UK’s public sector for “chasing cut-price deals around the world” as opposed to helping our own “British-based suppliers”, and promised to make taxpayers’ money work “harder for them”. This was a theme Burnham aired repeatedly during the byelection campaign in Makerfield. He cited Britain’s “wasted decades” of neoliberalism and the need to end “forty years of failed economic policy”, raising the prospect of a Britain in which wealth will be rooted in actual production, far more evenly distributed across its regions, and democratically controlled.

The significance of his argument is that it points towards a different economic future from the Blair-era comforts that Starmer and Rachel Reeves have been selling us: essentially, spend more, tax fairly, regulate better. This assumes that Britain’s problem is essentially one of distribution and inefficiency, and could be corrected by a more competent management of the existing settlement.

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This was always inadequate, and it is encouraging to see Burnham embrace the concept of Manchesterism, as laid out in The Productive State, by Mathew Lawrence and Alex Williams, one of the most serious economic frameworks to emerge from the Labour center-Left in many years. Nevertheless, Manchesterism, even in its most developed form, does not go far enough. It remains primarily a program for rebuilding the foundations of the economy through better public provision. But Britain’s crisis runs deeper, and Burnham needs to go much further if he is to arrest Britain’s decline and build an economy that rewards rather than punishes its citizens.

What Manchesterism gets right — and where it stops

Manchesterism starts from the observation that the neoliberal model for public services has failed on its own terms. The classic approach of the Tony Blair era was to invite private companies to bid for contracts to run public services, on the theory that competition would drive down costs, via the “cut-price” deals Burnham cited. What it produced instead was a helpless state, stripped of the capacity to do things itself, at the mercy of private companies far more skilled at exploiting contract law than any harassed local authority. The fundamentals of British life — care, energy, housing, transport, health — have become commodified, run by companies more interested in extracting wealth from the public realm than actually helping people lead productive and dignified lives. The tendency is visible all over the economy: in private equity firms making billions from dysfunctional care homes; in train operating companies extracting profits from lucrative franchises while services deteriorated; in “health services” companies milking NHS hospitals as infection rates rise.

The Manchesterism alternative is public corporations borrowing against their own revenue streams at the UK government’s borrowing rate, investing in infrastructure, and running services in the public interest. The Bee Network — Greater Manchester’s integrated bus system, which Burnham brought back under public control — works. Thames Water, by contrast, is a monument to scandalous dysfunction that follows when essential infrastructure is placed under financialized private ownership.

But while bringing the foundations of daily life under public control is welcome, it will only go so far. The only way to rebuild the engines of wealth creation and ensure that productivity gains translate into broadly-shared prosperity is to restore working-class power through secure, well-paid, productive jobs. GB Energy, if properly capitalized, could begin to change the terms on which Britain generates power. But it can only do so if Britain has the domestic manufacturing base to build the turbines, cables, and grid infrastructure required. There’s no point in trading a reliance on imported gas for a reliance on imported “clean” technology.

Instead, we must recognize that Britain’s political dysfunction is really a reflection of our failure to answer two fundamental questions: namely, who owns and operates the foundations of the economy? And in whose interests? Today, the economy serves shareholders, management consultants, financiers and property owners. The real challenge is to create an economy that instead serves workers, and rewards the creation of real wealth. In other words, Britain’s crisis goes deeper than Manchesterism — and the debate must be conducted at the level of rigor and ambition appropriate to the moment.

The productive crisis

Britain’s fundamental economic problem is structural and specific. Labor productivity has been essentially flat since the financial crisis of 2007-9. British workers produce less output per hour worked than their counterparts in Germany, France, or the United States — and the gap has been widening. Net national savings have been in negative territory for nearly two decades, and we have meanwhile been consuming our accumulated capital stock — letting factories rust, railways decay, and infrastructure crumble — rather than investing to expand it. Our trade deficit in goods has also been persistent since the mid-1980s. We have become a nation of consumers, and we are consuming on credit.

The scale of the destruction that created this situation is still not adequately appreciated. In 1979, manufacturing accounted for close to 30% of British GDP. Today, that figure is 8-9%, with employment in the sector falling from 6.8 million to 2.6 million workers. The well-paid, unionized factory jobs that sustained communities across the North, the Midlands, Wales and Scotland have meanwhile been replaced by insecure, non-unionized work in call centers and distribution warehouses. These are the communities that have voted for change at successive elections — including Brexit —and have been repeatedly disappointed. In the regions that bore the brunt of the destruction, economic inactivity among working-age people now runs at between 24 and 28%.

The financial sector that subsequently grew did not magically compensate for this destruction. Rather, it profited from it. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher’s new government implemented one of its signature policies in removing controls on the international flows of capital. This enabled the City of London to speculate with the wealth that had been generated by British production in international financial markets. When steelworks in Sheffield or shipyards on the Clyde or car plants in the West Midlands closed, the banks and asset managers were not passive bystanders. They recycled the capital — putting it into property speculation, consumer credit, and financial engineering.

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One notorious instance occurred in 1991. Hanson Trust quietly acquired a stake in ICI, then Britain’s largest manufacturing company, in what was widely seen as the opening move in a hostile takeover. Hanson had no interest in building Britain’s chemical industry. Instead it hoped to unlock shareholder value through the break-up of one of Britain’s great industrial companies. Although the takeover never materialized, the episode accelerated a profound shift in ICI’s strategy. Within two years it had demerged its pharmaceuticals business as Zeneca and embarked on a prolonged restructuring driven increasingly by shareholder value rather than long-term industrial development. Hanson exited after making a substantial profit, having contributed precisely nothing to Britain’s productive capacity. This, in microcosm, has been Britain’s industrial policy over the past 40 years.

But this hasn’t just been bad for British industry. Financialized capitalism has also had consequences for equality. The richest 10% of the population now receives 35% of Britain’s income in yearly bonuses, dividends, capital gains, and rents. The richest 1% holds more than 20% of the total wealth, while the poorer half of the country holds around 5%. Real wages in 2023 were barely higher than they were in 2007. A third of children now live in poverty — more than half of them from working households.

This escalating inequality is not only the result of an unfair distribution of the proceeds of growth. An economy built on Serco contracts, Deliveroo riders and Cavendish Square hedge funds does not present us primarily with a distribution problem — which is why the old Blairite formula of spending more, taxing fairly and regulating better isn’t going to do much to improve it. This is, instead, an economy that has stopped growing in ways that reach most people. Stressed workers scrabble for gig work between insecure care-home shifts while those who own the businesses extract ever more wealth. This is because the productive base that once made broadly shared growth possible was deliberately dismantled.

So Britain cannot create prosperity, reduce inequality, or regain genuine sovereignty without rebuilding its productive base. Manufacturing is where labor productivity rises most systematically through mechanization, automation, technical change, and information technology. It is where workers’ power has historically been strongest, allowing productivity gains to translate into wage increases rather than shareholder returns. And it creates deeper growth around it too, since manufacturing doesn’t just create jobs in factories — it also supports jobs in the businesses that supply materials, transport goods, and sell finished products.

Moreover, services, including finance, which have become the mainstay of the British economy, will never correct the persistent trade deficit in goods. The alternative to reindustrializing Britain is not the economy of highly-paid knowledge workers that we were once promised. It is a low-tech, low-paid service economy in which finance continues to dominate and inequality persists. In other words, the Britain we live in now.

The skills catastrophe

Integral to Britain’s productive failure is an acute crisis of labor skills. The destruction of manufacturing did not simply eliminate jobs but extinguished the knowledge that lives within workforces, apprenticeship networks, and technical colleges — as well as the relationships between firms and the people who build and maintain things. The steel towns of South Yorkshire, the shipbuilding communities of the Tyne and Clyde, the sheet-metal and toolmaking traditions of the Black Country had distinct identities built on skill, pride in craft, and knowledge passed down over generations.

Once this knowledge is gone, it does not return automatically when investment arrives. British manufacturers regularly report the absence of welders and metal fabricators, toolmakers, electrical and instrumentation technicians, mechatronics and robotics engineers, and CNC programmers. These are the foundational competencies of any modern industrial economy — and without them, reindustrialization is far harder even when the will and the finance exist. The technical education system that might address this gap is fragmented and poorly funded. England is particularly weak on post-16 higher technical training — the kind of provision that Germany delivers through dual vocational apprenticeships and the Berufsschulen system. Worse, mainstream commentators have consistently failed to grasp the depth of the problem because they treat skills as a training policy question rather than a structural consequence of forty years of productive decline.

The coming wave of artificial intelligence displacement makes the urgency greater still. Without a deliberate and funded redeployment and retraining of workers, tied to real posts in expanding industrial sectors, Britain will face a hollowing out of its services workforce. We need a national labor plan, offering long-term training programs, mid-career conversions, and apprenticeships of a kind Britain has not had for decades.

The bond market as political test

One argument commonly ranged against public corporations is the idea that they will spook the bond markets. The specter of Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget of September 2022 is never far from such discussions. But the bond market panic Truss unleashed was a response to unfunded sovereign borrowing without specified supply-side returns. This was effectively a subsidy for the wealthy, not targeted public investment in productive assets.

By contrast, public corporation financing is usually acceptable to bond markets — as long as it is credibly structured and borrows against its own revenue streams. The Netherlands finances public corporation liabilities equivalent to nearly 80% of GDP without sovereign disruption, though, to be sure, the institutional framework is different from Britain’s.

Burnham has taken a position on this issue, even stating that “Britain is in hock to the bond markets” — though he has also sometimes tied himself in knots trying to reassure financial markets that an ambitious program would not alarm them. The Dutch example shows it need not be the dire problem it is often made out to be.

But a Labour government that begins to implement a truly ambitious industrial policy can expect a different order of response from the City of London — which will inevitably generate pressure on gilt yields, pressure on sterling, and pressure on the political class to abandon ambition. That pressure will not be a market verdict, however — but, rather, a political intervention by concentrated financial interests whose position would be threatened by the program.

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In other words, the barriers to taming the bond markets are political, not technical. A government that issues debt in its own currency and is prepared to use its central bank cannot be forced into default by bond market pressure. Central bank independence is a shibboleth of the neoliberal era — a constraint entrenched by Gordon Brown’s decision in 1997 to grant the Bank of England operational independence. However, its time has now passed. The Bank of England is a public institution, and part of its mission must be to deploy its control over the nation’s credit to rebuild the nation’s productive base. Since the crisis of 2007-9, the Bank has created vast amounts of money to bail out failing banks and manage stagnation. There has always been money for that. The Bank should be at least as forthright in rebuilding Britain’s productive capacity.

An ambitious Labour government should be able to rely on the Bank to continue holding its gilt stock rather than unloading it at loss-making prices, as it is currently doing at vast cost to public finances. The Bank ought to reinvest maturities and keep interest rates low and stable while Britain rebuilds its productive capacity. A break from the Bank’s current posture is a break from New Labour’s foundational economic settlement and should be named as such.

But even a cooperative Bank of England would be insufficient without a wave of public investment in key infrastructure capable of “crowding in” private investment. It would further require a well-capitalized Public Investment Bank with preferential access to the Bank of England. It would thus raise immediately the issue of some degree of capital controls, in order to ensure that money generated in Britain stays in Britain rather than being spirited away to accounts in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands the moment a government pursues policies that threaten the returns of mobile capital.

Capital controls are neither exotic nor radical. This was standard policy in Britain from 1945 to 1979, the period of the country’s strongest growth performance in recent decades. They are currently used by China, India, and many other successful industrializers. Even the IMF has acknowledged their legitimacy under conditions of financial instability. Their purpose is not to cut Britain off from the world but to change the incentives for fast-moving speculative capital, preventing it from disrupting the productive sector and limiting the power of finance over elected governments.

A Labour leadership candidate who cannot articulate a credible strategy to prevent capital flight, including the readiness to use targeted capital controls as and when they are necessary, has not yet answered the fundamental question about surviving contact with the City of London.

The policy space Brexit created

Beyond finance, a serious industrial strategy will also take advantage of the policy space that Brexit created and that no government since 2016 has exploited in the ten years since the vote. This failure makes Labour’s continuing internal paralysis over the question of rejoining the single market all the more damaging. Britain is now free to align trade policy with domestic investment and employment in ways that EU single market membership foreclosed.

An industrial strategy that hopes to deliver results will need time for productive capacity to take root. In the meantime, the risk is that new capacity will be killed through cheaper imports from countries with lower wages, laxer standards, state-sponsored overcapacity and so on. This is how capitalism works, and there is no point pretending otherwise.

Nevertheless, there are several tools available: WTO anti-dumping measures and safeguards; a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism that could equalize the carbon price of imports in steel, aluminum, cement and other foundational sectors from 2027; procurement rules requiring domestic content and supply chain traceability. If necessary, tariff-rate quotas, national security designations, and domestic content conditions can be attached to public subsidies and grid connections. Donald Trump has made managed trade a normalized reality in the world market — and there is no going back to the free-trade consensus of the previous, now defunct, era. Britain should use the space available to it and stop wasting time.

Organized labour as key mechanism

There is one further dimension of this debate which has been less visible so far, but is crucial to whether Britain can come up with a genuine alternative to an extractive economy— trade unions. Organized labour is not simply a constituency to be won over but a key mechanism for restoring Britain’s wealth-creating capacity. Union representation on the boards of public corporations is the lever through which public ownership serves the interests of workers and the public. Union power in Britain is how regional rebalancing becomes real rather than rhetorical. The skills crisis cannot be addressed without organized labour either — for workers tend to understand the needs of their own industries better than those outside them.  The reconstruction of apprenticeship frameworks, the rebuilding of technical education, the link between training investment and union density that coordinated market economies have consistently demonstrated — all of this requires workers’ collective power, organizational capacity and crucially, their practical knowledge.

The tests of seriousness

Andy Burnham could run on Manchesterism and offer a better-managed version of the current settlement. That would be an improvement — but it would not be the breakthrough that Britain truly needs. The country desperately needs policies that address its deep productive crisis. If a radical Labour government is to go down that path, four specific commitments will be the test of its seriousness, as we show in detail in our forthcoming book.

First, a target to raise manufacturing’s share of GDP to an achievable and sustainable level that could act as a base for further increases. This should be backed by a costed investment program that includes public equity stakes, a properly capitalized Public Investment Bank, and union board representation as a condition of public finance.

Second, graduated and targeted capital controls to protect democratic economic decisions from speculative financial attack.

Third, trade regulation that uses the policy space Brexit created and no government since 2016 has seriously exploited.

Fourth, a national labor plan for rebuilding skills and training, with long training programs, mid-career conversions, and apprenticeships with high completion rates, as the vital human foundation without which an expanding industrial base cannot exist.

Britain has had nearly five decades of neoliberal failure, punctuated by the periodic realization that its decline is worse than previously acknowledged. The debate that Manchesterism has opened is the right one, and the left should deepen it. The central challenge remains Britain’s crisis of production, from which its crisis of provision ultimately flows. The four commitments we have outlined are the minimum conditions for a genuine break. Anything less is a better-managed version of what we already have — and we know that it does not work.

Costas Lapavitsas, Larry Elliott, and Doug Nicholls are the authors of Reindustrialise Britain: A Strategy for Wealth Creation (Polity Press), forthcoming, September 2026.

Yet in this battle between the two visions of the nation, it’s ironic that Burnham himself holds the rare distinction of having been directly scolded by his musical hero. The would-be prime minister, who once rather Pooterishly wrote that while “not in tune with his views now, I can’t deny how important Morrissey was to me”,  faced the singer’s wrath for imprecisely characterizing the 2017 Manchester bomber as merely “an extremist”.

The Manchester Arena bomb, for Morrissey “England’s 9/11”, and the subject of his unreleased song “Bonfire of Teenagers” — in which “the silly people sing: ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’… I can assure you I will look back in anger ’till the day I die” — came only two weeks into Burnham’s tenure as mayor of Greater Manchester, in what already feels like a different country. Were it to happen today, it is hard to imagine a restive public responding as warmly as it then did to the comforting platitudes of swaying “togetherness” rolled out by Burnham. In his 2024 political manifesto of no-nonsense Northernness, Head North, co-written with Liverpool mayor Steve Rotherham (whose own daughter was at the concert), Burnham discusses the atrocity more or less like an unfathomable act of God. Particular censure is reserved for the slow response of the emergency services, presented as yet another failure of Westminster state capacity.

That the bomber’s very presence in this country — as a member of a family granted asylum precisely due to their involvement in jihadist opposition to Gaddafi; who was himself returned to Britain from Libya by the Royal Navy while an object of interest to MI5 for his jihadist activity; and who paid for his bomb’s components with taxpayer-funded benefits doled out to his mother — of course represents an infinitely greater state failure. None of this figures in Burnham’s manifesto. Yet it is precisely this grievance — against the strange and cruel punishments that the British state, through a perverted sense of benevolence, wreaks against its own people — that has underwritten Reform’s rise and Labour’s catastrophic fall. Only in his 2025 postscript does Burnham note that, “One of the features of the age in which we live is its extreme volatility… The appalling murder of three young girls in Southport was sickeningly exploited and, for several days after, Britain felt like a country we have not known before… it feels as though we are approaching a political reckoning.” If the numbers are right, Burnham will soon find himself ruling this strange and unknown country. Yet uneasy lies the head that wears the Northern crown: according to the polls, if he enters power at all, it will only be because the threat from Reform, in this once dependable Labour heartland, has been dissipated by the electorate’s unexpectedly strong interest in the more radical Restore party.

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Burnham himself warns of the “risk” that “a progressive government could serve only one term and be replaced in 2029 by the most right-wing one Britain has ever seen”, presenting his Northern manifesto as “the Left’s only viable answer to the radical Right.” Is Burnham’s localized success replicable nationwide? As others have noted in their dissections of Burnham’s self-proclaimed “Manchesterism”, presiding over a booming and dynamic citystate is not quite the same as being the cause of its success. That the Northwest, with its Irish links so lauded by Burnham, has become the epicenter of violent revolt against the asylum system and its unintended consequences, first in Knowsley in 2023 and then after the Southport murders, suggests other narratives are possible.

Yet Burnham’s contributions to Head North are more interesting than the Westminster discourse, focused on the economics of Burnhamism, would so far imply. Buried in the text is a one-line summation of the Nairn-Anderson thesis, in which the root of British decline, and latterly its political dysfunction, is traced to the Westminster state’s anomalous failure, when compared with peer nations, to have undergone a successful bourgeois revolution.

“Britain,” Burnham declares, “unlike other countries, has never had a moment of modern nation-building. Our system of governance has slowly evolved from the feudal state, the remnants of which are still clearly visible in Parliament today.” The result, Burnham writes, is that “Britain is one of the most politically centralized and economically unbalanced countries in the developed world.” Rather over-egging Manchester’s distance from the capital — we are led to imagine him like Robert Bruce sheltering from the rain in his cave, ruminating on London’s iniquities — Burnham declares that only in his Northern exile did he reach the conclusion that “the Westminster system was our problem and, in its current form, could never be our solution”.

While Farage and his Right-wing challenger Rupert Lowe echo, in southern English accents and perhaps unconsciously, the discourse of Britain’s peripheral nationalists, Burnham’s critique of the failing Westminster state is more startlingly explicit. The Celtic comparisons are fully intended: his “experiences outside of Westminster”, he tells us, have inspired “a much better understanding of the feeling long building in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland”. He rails against an “establishment prepared to play public opinion against parts of the North of England, Northern Ireland, Wales or Scotland whenever it has suited them”. He claims that “they do it because they fear nothing more than the regions and nations uniting in common cause against a system that doesn’t have their interests at heart”. The Hillsborough disaster is repeatedly likened, rather dubiously, to Bloody Sunday. Northern Ireland “has big similarities to the North West of England,” Burnham asserts, without informing the curious reader what these similarities might be.

Yet Burnhamism, in its constitutional sense, represents something that does not meaningfully exist in Northern Ireland: he is an Irish Catholic Unionist, a Home Ruler through and through. This Redmondite quality comes through most clearly in his 2025 interview with Tom McTague. Proud of his great-grandfather’s self-sacrifice in the First World War, “it is Burnham’s Irish roots that help explain his British identity,” we are told, fueling “his insistence that he is British first rather than English”. Bearer of an identity more commonly found among non-white minorities and Ulster Protestants than Labour’s defected voter base, now merrily flagging their neighborhoods with St George’s Crosses, “Being British rather than English”, Burnham tells McTague, “allows him to keep all the ‘layers’ of his identity intact: British first, north-west second, Liverpool third, and English fourth.” Or English last, Morrissey might archly note.

For having outlined the similarities between the North — and for Northern England, Burnham only ever really means the urban Northwest — and the Celtic nations, Burnham suddenly tacks in a different direction: insisting that “unlike some in those places, we would never advocate for the break-up of the UK”. He thus utilizes the Nairn-Anderson thesis for novel Unionist purposes, using it to save what its originators believed could not be saved. The answer to Britain’s many problems, he argues, is a further round of devolution, breaking up England into powerful city-regions with their own hinterlands, each comparable in size to the Celtic nations. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, in turn, are to be encouraged to devolve more power away from their parliaments towards their towns and cities, which, “collaborating” across the UK’s internal borders in a hazy fashion, would weaken the “inevitably tense and political” relationships between their national governments and Westminster. For all that Tony Blair’s latest intervention in national politics is read as an assault on Burnhamism, Burnham’s own constitutional experimentation is a turbo-charged Blairism, both completing New Labour’s unfinished revolution and, Burnham believes, ameliorating the centrifugal pressures it introduced.

But it is here that we see Burnham’s characteristically Labourite weak point, his absence of national feeling except towards the very Westminster state he claims to oppose. Burnham’s assertion on the outdatedness of nationalism is not borne out by political events, as the May elections showed. The very building block of electorally ascendant Scottish, Welsh and Irish nationalism is their sense of national sentiment and the sense of political destiny it leads towards, a destiny its adherents believe to be frustrated by Westminster rule. Rather than cooperating with a Burnham government, won over by his misty-eyed Celtic reveries and performative distaste for the capital from which he must rule, Burnham’s proposed strengthening of Unionism through devolution would present peripheral nationalists with a mortal threat. Why would they give up their hard-won power to serve explicitly Unionist ends? Why would they abandon their political projects at the behest of Westminster’s latest (and surely short-lived) ruler, thrust to power only as a result of crisis and desperation in the political center?

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And what is true of the Celtic nations is also true of England. Burnham’s analysis of the urban Northwest as the artificially suppressed engine of British modernity, laid low by the rentier capitalism of Southeast England and a creaking and antiquated Westminster state, equally overlaps with that of Tom Hazeldine in his excellent 2020 book The Northern Question. Its history punctuated by occasional rebellions, its dialects divergent from the state’s prestige form, its governance marginal to distant London, Northern England in many ways presents an analog to the Celtic nations. Yet it never developed its own comparable nationalism. The reason, Hazeldine never quite clarifies, is surely that the inhabitants of Northern England are, politically, English before they are Northern. As such, Northern English dissatisfaction has always expressed itself in trying to reform Westminster rather than seceding from it: and for all that he claims to be Northern first and English second, this is also Burnham’s chosen path.

Yet to save the United Kingdom, Burnham must carve up England, an instinctively conservative country, into a collection of urban metropoles whose cosmopolitan voters will outweigh their suburban and rural hinterlands in the exercise of power. Why would Reform, with its keen if unspoken appreciation of the demographic limits of its appeal, agree to such gerrymandering? Perhaps the march of history compels us, Burnham muses: “If the nineteenth century was the century of empire, and the twentieth was the century of the nation state, the new thinking was that the twenty-first would be led by a network of cities around the world,” he declares, revealing himself as less a daring avatar of national rebirth than as a provincial Sadiq Khan.

We can, no doubt, expect all manner of constitutional novelties from a future Burnham premiership. In its terminal throes, Labour is making the explicit choice to replace a leader who believes the Westminster state still fundamentally functions with one who demands “nothing less than a complete rewiring of Britain”: even Labour now accepts that Britain needs reform. Yet beyond England — for Burnham merely an unappealing menu option between dynamic city-states, the wider Union and an even greater European union still — none of the dominant peripheral nationalist parties have anything to gain from Burnham’s vision of “the regions and nations uniting in common cause”: unless it is to accrue more power, to be utilized in the service of secession. A Westminster creature through and through, to save the Labour project it is England Burnham must dismantle, whose own brewing bourgeois revolution he feels history commands him to suppress. If Northern England is now the engine of the nation’s politics, its voters’ ever more determinedly-expressed wishes present far more of a threat to Burnhamism than an endorsement.

Nevertheless, there is something, and potentially something of great power, to be found in appealing to shared conceptions of British identity beyond the reach or confines of the Westminster system. Yet attempting to do so from Whitehall, exerting power through the same system he condemns, will prove as challenging for Burnham as it later will for Farage. Once ensconced in Downing Street, he will no longer be the King in the North, but just another Labour prime minister, trying and failing to manipulate the broken levers of the state. More likely, the English revolt will soon do for Burnham as it already has for Starmer. Even so, Burnham is significant as a waypoint on the road we are condemned to travel: it is a marker of our political moment that to rule from Westminster, our next prime minister must claim to despise it.

Whatever you thought of the millennial socialist experiments of the Corbyn years, it was hardly a hostile environment for ideological radicalism. Post-graduate hipsters in Carhartt advocated four-day weeks, universal basic income and a loud, often bizarre identity politics; they rubbed shoulders with old-fashioned trade union big-wigs on board for extra spending, nationalizations and higher minimum wage. A cottage industry of Verso paperbacks and new Left-wing media outlets theorized “post-work futures” and attempted to reanimate the corpse of Bennism for the modern age, calling it “socialism with an iPad” and “fully-automated communism”. In other words, mad as it may have been, there was a hinterland to Corbynism; roots, intellectual scaffolds, a mess of competing intellectual strands.

But if the Corbyn years were defined by a surplus of (often fantastical) ideas, the subsequent half decade was spent whittling them down into an empty husk of a project. “There’s no such thing as Starmerism and there never will be,” our beleaguered Prime Minister once quacked irritably, to confused colleagues. Rather than representing a philosophy, his motivation was simply to wrest factional control of the Labour Party from the loony Left. For Starmer himself, it was about fulfilling an unshakable belief in his own moral probity and punctilious legalism. If there were a governing agenda, it was rooted in an erroneous analysis that growth and stability could be restored via administrative competency. But that analysis failed upon contact with reality. Growth, stability and competence remained elusive. It quickly became clear that Starmer had outlived all his possible uses the minute he ejected the Conservative Party from office.

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Just about surviving two years of aimless floundering, Starmerism is now reaching its mortifying denouement. To replace it, new prospectuses have emerged that promise deliverance from our impasse, roughly correlating to the whack-a-mole candidates that have emerged and disappeared, up-and-down and up again, as the Prime Minister once more attempts to disguise his own ineptitudes and deny political realities with reference to procedure and proper process. For Starmer is that Japanese soldier still at war long after the armistice has been signed. A pettifogger till the end, the stricture of the rule book must be followed. He is, he says, going nowhere until the bureaucracy is completed in legal triplicate.

Despite No. 10’s hunker-in-the-bunker approach to political crisis, three schools of thought have already emerged, vying to constitute a new, post-Starmer Labourism. There’s some overlap between the three models and their advocates, but they can roughly be summed up as follows: a pro-business, pro-entrepreneurial supply-side agenda likely to be associated more with the Labour Right (and encapsulated most appropriately by Labour Growth Group’s An Honest Day report); the “new fiscal framework” promoted by the Tribune faction of soft-Left MPs, enabling more investment spending by embracing longer debt reduction horizons and “fiscal-monetary co-ordination” (i.e. forcing the Bank of England to halt quantitative tightening to give the Treasury fiscal space – as set out in the Renewal journal); and finally, the “Manchesterism” promoted by one Andy Burnham, pushing for the reversal of many of the privatizations of the Eighties, for publicly owned transport, utilities and social housing, with a “pro-business socialism” approach to free market actors.

The most significant, if only because of its main proponent’s loud intent to become the next leader of the Labour Party, is Manchesterism. Followers of the local politics of Britain’s most successful regional metropole will cast a wry smile that its name is becoming synonymous with a kind of 21st-century socialist alternative. After all, under pragmatic, moderate Labour leadership stretching back decades, Manchester itself has acted as the poster child of municipal Yimbyism, pro-business and pro-developer entrepreneurial growth, public-private partnership and a collaborative and collegiate approach to working with Tory governments.

Nevertheless, those Corbynites who remain in Labour, having not joined the mass exodus to the Greens, have put their faith in this idea. Jez the Magic Grandpa has left the building, decamped to the Your Party disasterzone, and Andy is their last great hope. A protean politician, Burnham has undergone a radical Mr Benn-style transformation in recent years: from a bland New Labour apparatchik who twice failed as a leadership candidate, into a kind of bland Northern everyman — a normcore tribune of the people, blokey-but-unthreatening, railing against an effete Westminster elite.

Most of SW1 balks at this, scoffing at the smart-casual clothes and emphasized Northern vowels that make up the aesthetic imaginary of Burnham’s Next menswear populism. But that is beside the point. He polls better than any other metro mayor by a country mile, and better than any other Labour option to boot. “He’s a Cambridge graduate!”, they rightly point out, “A Blairite spad!”. But he has still managed to build a personal popularity that vastly outmatches his own party’s. If he wins in Makerfield — about as difficult territory as can be found in his Greater Manchester turf — then he will be prime minister within months.

Manchesterism, then, might be coming for Britain. Bond markets are already pricing in the chances of extra gilt issuance if, and when, a more Left-leaning Labour administration begins taking water and energy into public ownership.

If Burnham is beaten by Reform — and Britain Elects polling indicates that the Faragists would trounce any other Labour candidate but the Mayor — his ambition may be quashed. But the danger for Starmer will not abate. The Prime Minister is way beyond the point of no return, and another figure of the soft Left is sure to challenge him. And those that could beat him in a contest — Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband, or some combination of the two — would draw heavily from Manchesterism’s promises with the addition of Tribunites such as Louise Haigh taking prominent roles in policy formation. The soft Left Tribune’s analysis of fiscal and monetary policy is, ironically, shared by some in Reform. Both have criticized the Bank of England’s role in creating a pressured environment for any Chancellor: the independent central bank offloads gilts from its balance sheet, pushing yields up even as public finances feel the squeeze; and inflation-linked gilts issued in the Osborne era leave the taxpayer on the hook for enormous interest payments, with the governor not countenancing a more tiered interest rate system. Echoing the Right-populist calls for a more pliant, accommodative central bank that facilitates spending, the Tribunites call for a debt-financed investment in infrastructure and capital projects, while promising to keep current spending within those famous iron-clad fiscal rules.

It would be wrong, though, to present Manchesterism and the Tribunite Left’s vision as somehow antagonistic towards the Labour Growth Group’s more pro-market agenda. While the latter might trace its intellectual genealogy to the Labour Right’s tradition of social-democratic reformism, and while Manchesterism and Tribune’s proposals are more rooted in the Left-Keynesianism of the soft Left, the return of public ownership and investment-led growth doesn’t contradict supply-side reform.

A consensus is emerging that Britain is locked into a worst-of-both-world’s Frankenstein economy, displaying all the negative features of neoliberalism but with a cumbersome, meddling, bureaucratic state that impedes business agility and individual initiative. We have critical national infrastructure and assets held in private, often foreign ownership, and twin trade and sovereign deficits that make us dependent on the kindness of strangers. UK plc is an extremely open, over-financialized, unbalanced economy, exposed to volatility in global trade and relying heavily on imports, not least energy and cheap labor. Britain built an economic model designed for the “end of history”, ever-increasing liberalization and reduced trade frictions. But it now finds itself, as the historian John Bew put it, as the “last man at the bar in Davos”, watching in horror as the Washington Consensus collapses. Meanwhile, successive generations of legislators have attempted to ameliorate our current predicament by regulating, dictating and redistributing the diminishing proceeds of a broken growth model via the pensions and benefit system.

This is a model that blends a socialism of permanent welfare and the retrospective palliatives of cash transfers with Thatcherite models of ownership. In its place, Labour factions are beginning to coalesce around the articulation of a politics of national production, of creating the conditions for market dynamism and overcoming the long-term, sclerotic doom-loop by facilitating investment-led growth. Even the nationalization proposals of the Burnham camp are framed as a solution to rising fiscal burdens on the entitlement state — an energy, housing, work and transport subsidy regime that compensates workers and consumers for the failures of the very privatization model that brought arms-length regulatory omnipotence into being.

But unlike previous incarnations of Labour Leftism, this combines with the recognition that pro-market measures are necessary. The Labour Growth Group wants to harness the dynamism of the private sector by implementing the kind of full-fat planning reform that constrains any building, as well as shifting the tax burden away from work and productive investment and towards the beneficiaries of unproductive rentierism. Similarly, Tribune has signaled that planning reform is “central to any growth strategy”, and that the tax burden should incentivize work, employment and patient investment over rent-collecting and short-term speculation.

Where, though, has this maelstrom of ideas emerged from? Why, barely two years after an election that delivered the Labour Party a decisive majority, is the policy model being relitigated? In orthodox Marxism, the social and political “superstructure” of any given society is taken to be a reflection of its economic “base”. The economy, Marx wrote, was “the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure”, corresponding to “definite forms of social consciousness”. Or, as Bill Clinton might have had it: “It’s the economy, stupid!” Whatever you think of Nineties New Democrats or bearded 19th-century revolutionists, the framing provides a sharp insight into what has been happening to Britain since 2008: our growth model broke back then, and our politics along with it. It is the pecuniary fundamentals that defines our politics. And the fundamentals are broken.

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The reason why we are cycling through prime ministers with the attention span of a Love Island contestant isn’t just down to the personal shortcomings of the contemporary political classes. It is because something structural, something more tectonic than mere personal idiosyncrasies is taking place.

Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers and Northern Rock almost two decades ago, Britain has seen virtually no real wage growth. Productivity, perhaps the most important underlying metric of economic wellbeing, has stagnated. Through Labour’s post-war social democracy, Harold Macmillan and Ted Heath’s big state Tory paternalism, and indeed through Thatcher and Blair’s liberalization projects, British workers could roughly expect their pay packets to grow neatly along an ascending 60-year trend line. But that trend line is now a two-decade plateau. The lack of any increase in our per-capita GDP has combined with the inexorable march of demographics to push taxes upwards even as services deteriorate. Britain is broken. We have been promised various means of salvation: fiscal tightening, deregulation and privatization under Cameron; Brexit-means-Brexit under May; post-Brexit leveling up under Johnson; deficit-funded Reaganite tax cuts under Truss; and now an amorphous technocratic reformism under Starmer. All have looked like different versions of managed decline.

This battle of ideas, then, is Labour’s first honest reckoning since 2019. But the danger is that it is just too late, and that none of the Left’s new projects will alter the path of Britain’s secular decline. If so, as the spiral quickens, the party risks existential crisis at the next election. But for Labour, that is a risk worth taking, as messy as the current Westminster travails appear. For if there is no change of course, a vengeful electorate is poised to punish the entire political class with a blunt instrument of anti-politics: Reform. The victory of Faragism with a new base of support among the British working class would represent a final nail in the coffin of social democracy. It would signal the last conversion of the political Left from a project aimed at representing the labor interest, into one focused on the discourse and neuroses of the professional managerial strata. Continuing with managed decline will invite the whirlwind, and Westminster will reap it. We’re in a populist age, business-as-usual won’t cut it, and drift is no longer an option.