Manchesterism is dead in the water

On Monday afternoon Andy Burnham let it be known that he would be sticking to all of Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules. Manchesterism, the noble cause about which so much ink was spilled, is dead. I don’t know for certain if the mayor and the bond markets convened in a railway carriage to formalise the deed, but they might as well have.

This is a pity, it really is —  and I say that as someone both sceptical both of the extent to which Manchesterism really existed as a coherent economic ideology and, to whatever extent it did exist, that it would work. There is only so much even the most formidable devocrat can learn from running the buses properly, and no obvious escape from Britain’s economic malaise in government owning more of the problem.

It would be so refreshing to spend the summer litigating the merits of a real economic alternative

But it was something. When Burnham repudiated Wes Streeting’s provocations about rejoining the European Union by saying that we needed to focus on the big, structural problems with the British economy, he was correct. Even allowing for the most flattering assessments of Brexit for the rejoin cause, we had a terrible economy inside the EU and we would have a terrible economy if we went back.

It would be so refreshing to spend the summer litigating the merits of a real economic alternative, even a mad one. But once again, Labour has run up against the fact that Rachel Reeves is spending every penny the OBR forecasts permit her to spend. Anything Burnham might want to do differently would require either spending cuts (good luck with that) or further tax rises. And if raising taxes faster or higher were easy, Reeves would already have done it.

Perhaps he imagines there might yet be a path through to sunnier pastures: a Burnham bounce after assuming the leadership, followed by a general election and a fresh mandate. But again, Sir Keir Starmer didn’t feel able to campaign on significant tax rises (i.e. those ordinary voters will feel) even when he was untainted by office and well ahead in the polls. Fighting an election on them now, after two years of continual tax hikes and with Labour’s reputation in the toilet, would be a very bold strategy indeed.

Manchesterism looks set, then, to be just a doodle on a prison wall, one man’s dream of what he might do were his circumstances completely different — the counterpoint, perhaps, to Kemi Badenoch’s diligent tinkering with second-order policies whilst remaining committed to the pension triple lock and all the other massive revenue expenditures that turned the Conservative Party into avaricious tax-hikers in their turn. 

One has to feel at least a little sorry for both of them, for they are not obviously worse than many of the politicians who have preceded them since the turn of the Millenium. It was easy to talk big, transformational talk when the economy was growing, and remained easy enough for a decade or more to coast on the afterglow of it as the fiscal consequences of treading water piled up. They might have been great, to a certain value of great, in kinder days than these.

As it is, the Labour leadership contest is currently shaping up to be a months-long spectacle of politicians walking the Overton Tightrope, finding some way to indict Starmer and promise fundamental change whilst accepting his economic and fiscal policy and trying not to scare the voters. That narrows the terrain of the contest to the various stairways to heaven we discussed before: either blaming everything on Starmer’s personal failings or… rejoining the EU. 

Which brings us to the tactical significance of all this. Makerfield is a Leave seat, and absent the particular circumstances of Burnham’s candidacy would be extremely likely to return a Reform MP at the next election. I don’t think this dooms his candidacy, because Leave voters are adults and thus perfectly capable both of supporting Brexit and not assigning it particularly high salience in a parliamentary by-election. 

Yet that does depend upon Brexit being a low-salience issue. You can bet that Reform UK will hammer away at it, but by itself that might not pan out terribly for Burnham if he spends the campaign talking about the economy, the cost of living, and other issues they care more about. But not signing up to the fiscal rules makes any exciting economic pitch much harder to make. Worse still, his rivals have every incentive to trap him in a debate on Brexit if they possibly can — Wes Streeting, in fact, is already trying.

No wonder then that Starmer is refusing to set out a timetable for his departure from Number 10. If Burnham wins then the consensus appears to be that there will be a coronation, but if he doesn’t then it seems increasingly plausible that Starmer survives, because for all its highly developed traditions of internecine warfare the Labour Party has not proven terribly good at coups. His position will be miserable — if anything, the defeat of their prince over the water ought to precipitate a full-on meltdown on the Labour backbenches — but it will be still he his; he will have won, his opponents have lost, and for a man who seems to reserve his steel for internal feuding that may be reward enough.