Like Mamdani, whose campaign called for fast and free buses, Burnham has also championed investments in public transportation. One of his signature initiatives in Greater Manchester was seizing control of the region’s privatized bus services, cutting fares, setting and coördinating routes, and providing free passes to certain groups, including people aged sixteen to eighteen, and discount prices to people aged eighteen to twenty-one. His Bee Network, an integrated transport system of buses, trams, walking routes, and rental bikes, is a big hit with the Mancunian public. “The thing that ties Mamdani and Burnham together is a focus on how you make life more affordable and dignified for households that are relentlessly squeezed,” Mathew Lawrence, the founder and director of Common Wealth, a progressive transatlantic think tank, told me.
To be sure, Burnham has his doubters and critics. Some of them point out that the economic rebirth of Manchester began before he became mayor, and that it hasn’t necessarily benefitted the city’s surrounding towns, some of which still have declining populations. Many of the housing units that have been built in Manchester’s city center, sometimes with support from public loans or loan guarantees, are expensive market-rate apartments; more affordable units are still hard to find. “Greater Manchester, far from representing a story of a dynamic break with the neoliberal consensus, instead represents a crystallisation of it,” Isaac Rose, a local tenant organizer, wrote in The New Statesman.
That’s a questionable verdict. Like virtually all mayors, Burnham encouraged and welcomed private-sector investments. But he also used the power of his office, which is relatively limited, to move his city in a progressive direction, creating what some of his supporters see as a template for action at the national level. “Andy Burnham’s Greater Manchester programme—the Bee Network, expanded council housing, the Good Growth Fund—has begun to show what the logic of public control produces in practice: lower fares, more routes, restored connectivity to communities the market had written off, and the fastest-growing city economy in Britain,” Lawrence and a co-author, Alex Williams, wrote in a recent report titled “The Productive State: A Framework for Manchesterism.”
Over time, Lawrence and Williams argue, the interventionist approach that Burnham has adopted in Manchester could be developed into a new way to manage the entire British economy in the public interest. In the vision that they present, the economy would ultimately be divided into three tiers: a “decommodified foundation,” in which local authorities and publicly run corporations provide essential goods and services; a “stabilized market middle,” incorporating most of manufacturing and retail sectors, which would remain in private hands, with the government playing a stabilizing role; and an “innovation frontier,” also privately run, but with the government actively enforcing competition policies and providing financial support for research and development. Such an economy would not only be more equitable, Lawrence and Williams claim, but also more efficient because it would tackle some chronic market failures, such as corporate rent-seeking, financialization, and growing regional disparities.
The extent to which Burnham himself is invested in the ambitious version of Manchesterism laid out in the Common Wealth report isn’t entirely clear: Lawrence said that he has briefed Burnham’s team on the paper, and Burnham has previously cited some earlier work that Common Wealth did on the impact of privatization, but the organization has no formal links to the new Prime Minister or his fledgling government. Moreover, Burnham will now have to deal with many of the same obstacles that handicapped Starmer’s government after it won a big majority, in 2024: stagnant living standards; a largely hostile press; political challenges from the right (Nigel Farage’s Reform Party) and the left (the Green Party); a hefty budget deficit; and wary financial markets, which, in 2022, rapidly put an end to the premiership of the hapless Conservative Prime Minister, Liz Truss. (After Truss’s government introduced a tax-cutting budget that investors consider irresponsible, bond yields surged and the value of the sterling plummeted. She was forced to resign.)
Burnham has described his ascension to 10 Downing Street as “the biggest change in forty years of British politics.” He vowed to give local governments “greater public control” over some key sectors of the economy, including water, energy, and housing, and he explicitly called for the nationalization of Thames Water, a public utility that supplies Greater London and the Thames Valley. (In 1989, the Thatcher government corporatized the regional Thames Water Authority and floated it on the stock exchange. Since then, Thames Water has had a number of owners, including an Australian private-equity firm, and it has become notorious for underinvestment, leaks, sewage spills, and the extraction of hefty dividends.) At the same time, though, Burnham has been keen to reassure the markets that he won’t do anything financially irresponsible. Indeed, he has promised to abide by two important fiscal pledges that Starmer’s government adopted: balancing day-to-day spending and revenues within five years and reducing the public debt as a percentage of G.D.P. in the same period. Burnham has also said that he won’t immediately raise taxes on the wealthy, a policy option that, at least in theory, could help pay for a more progressive spending agenda. (He did also say that “at some point” he might have to ask wealthy taxpayers “for a little more.”) “The financial constraints are still in place, and I don’t think the over-all policies will be radically different from Starmer’s,” one veteran Labour policy adviser told me.
John Cassidy
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