Cometh the hour, cometh the “Manchesterism”? Rumours of a return by Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham to the Commons have resurfaced with a vengeance, as they periodically do given the serial disappointments of actually existing Starmerism (the Prime Minister is less popular than Liz Truss was after her mini-budget debacle). Gorton and Denton’s MP Andrew Gwynne is now set to resign from his seat, triggering a by-election in which it’s widely believed Labour’s putative King of the North will at least attempt to stand. “Winter is coming”, indeed, for Keir Starmer.

But there’s a problem. A backbencher tells me there’s “not a hope of it happening” because the National Executive Committee “won’t let it pass”. For the uninitiated, the NEC is Labour’s ruling body — a politburo of MPs, trade unionists, grassroots affiliates, and constituency activists, packed mainly with machine loyalists and Starmer sycophants. And so the thinking goes that Downing Street will block Burnham’s candidacy, lest an openly ambitious leadership contender be thrown into Westminster’s already mutinous mix. This could happen through the imposition of an all-women shortlist, a Blair-era device that has historically had a twofold purpose: first, to improve the gender balance of the parliamentary party; and second, perhaps more crucially, to conveniently prevent factional rivals from winning selection in safe seats (of which there are now few, in any case).

The contemporary Labour brand is now far more commonly associated with the obsessions of metropolitan liberalism than with industrial organising, worker representation, or old-fashioned class politics. And therefore, while preventing the country’s most popular politician from becoming an MP because of a putative commitment to diversity quotas may look foolhardy to outsiders, it is in fact in keeping with a broad party culture that is resolutely determined to keep up the appearance of obedience to “shared progressive values” while really being at each other’s throats.

Another Northern backbencher with a slender majority texts to say: “If they block him, I think it would weaken KS and others would move in for the kill.” We wait with bated breath.

But what function would a Burnhamite ministry serve? He’d certainly be the likeliest contender for the top job once the House of Keir inevitably comes crashing down, but to what end? In Number Ten, Burnham would face the same structural impediments as the current PM: a cash-strapped leader of a declining middle power at the edge of solvency, over-reliant on high finance and global trade flows in an unstable, deglobalising world which is more focused on securing rare earths and semiconductors than paying for our domestic expertise in financial and legal services.

In aptly-timed speeches and articles this week, Burnham has called his alternative vision “Manchesterism” — a model of what he calls “business-friendly socialism” which takes utilities and transport back into public ownership, but which also works positively with the private sector. Manchester itself — with its crane-filled skylines and breakneck development, coupled with newly regulated bus and tram travel in the “Bee Network” — is the fledgling test case.

Yet the so-called “Manchester model” has attracted the ire of some on the Mancunian Left for years. A 2024 book, The Rentier City, described Manchester as the ultimate “neoliberal metropolis”, vainly chasing the trickle-down effects of inward private investment. “Manchesterism” in the 19th century was a byword for freewheeling capitalism. Among local governance aficionados today, the city’s governance model is seen to be centred on an acquiescence to the logic of market urbanism — hence the Northern metropole’s undoubted success in attracting corporate headquarters and outside talent from afar.

Burnham’s hour may have come, but the jury’s out on whether his inchoate offer of “Manchesterism” is the answer to our precipitous trajectory of national decline.

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Jonny Ball is a Contributing Editor at UnHerd. He formerly wrote under the name Despotic Inroad.

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