Why must everything move to Manchester?

Should the seemingly inevitable come to pass, I hope that Andy Burnham will prove to be a good Prime Minister. Yet the media ballyhoo about his northernness is starting to grate — and I say that as someone born and bred in the north.

Overstating northern stereotypes may not, however, be the wisest long-term strategy

Burnham’s by-election campaign, which included declaiming parts of Lemn Sissay’s “Anthem of the North” and talking a lot about local sport, evidently played well in Makerfield. As one wit on X, @deuxvingarian, wrote, Andy Burnham’s victory speech would go something like this. “Pies. Chips. Northern chips. Chips and gravy. Pints of beer. Cups of tea. Pints of tea. Yer mum. Yer mum taking the bins out. The telly. Footy on the telly. Yer mum playing footy on the telly”.

Overstating northern stereotypes may not, however, be the wisest long-term strategy. Labour are particularly prone to leaning hard into identity politics — will Bridget Phillipson ever stop talking about being “working class”? — and party spokespeople currently seem to be buzzing with the idea that being northern is somehow more “authentic” than being southern. But if he wants to succeed as Prime Minister, Burnham will need to find a way to speak to and for the whole nation.

The northern hype may not even sit well with all northerners. As Charlie Napier wrote recently here in The Critic, historically: “In both North and South, people were from a county, or a city, but rarely did they identify with such a broad and heterogenous region as ‘the North’.” Do people in Hull, or Harrogate, or Berwick-upon-Tweed see Andy Burnham as “the King of the North”? I doubt it. 

The media often give the impression of believing that the north is Coronation Street writ large: an undifferentiated place of flat caps and flat vowels where everyone is working class. But the north is very large and very varied. Yes, there are blackened back-to-backs and tired seaside resorts, but there are also elegant spa towns, Victorian Gothic town halls, rolling dales, rugged mountains and pristine empty beaches. And each area has its own distinctive identity: I’m from York and even Leeds, a mere marathon’s jog away, feels quite alien. Manchester barely appeared on my radar at all when growing up. It was simply a different kind of north, no more relevant to my friends and I than Swindon.

Now Andy Burnham, already talking about the “wrench” of leaving Manchester not five minutes ago, has announced plans to create “Number 10 North”. This is not mere personal homesickness but part of a broader contemporary drive to shift institutions, both political and cultural, northwards, usually to Manchester, occasionally to Leeds. The BBC has relocated parts of its news, sport, children’s and music programming to MediaCityUK in Salford, and English National Opera was forced by Arts Council England to move part of its operation to the north, inevitably to Manchester. 

I’ve never been sure what is behind this drive to move things out of London, one of the world’s greatest capital cities. Of course, being a United Kingdom of four nations requires devolved powers in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast, but England has never been an agglomeration of small states, like Germany or Italy — countries where regional cities have long had prominence and the capital is not necessarily the national powerhouse. (Milan is a more dynamic business centre than Rome, for example.) Burnham argues that centralising power in London drives regional inequality, but will it really make any difference to people in Darlington or, for that matter, deprived areas of Cornwall if government departments move to Manchester? 

Often, moving things out of London seems to be a rather patronising attempt to make people feel “represented”

Sometimes, in fact, it is harder for people to get things done if personnel are scattered around the country, forced to conduct all their business remotely. In 2020, the Conservative government committed to moving more than 20,000 civil service jobs out of London over the course of the decade. But we are not in the position we were during the pandemic, when home working as a norm was anticipated to be the future. As a recent report on civil service relocation noted, “the career benefits of ministerial exposure…have limited the ability of departments to persuade senior policy officials to head to – and stay in – offices outside London” and “some more ambitious relocations have caused enormous disruption for the work of government”. 

Often, moving things out of London seems to be a rather patronising attempt to make people feel “represented”, though in truth it may often really be about real estate costs and institutional overheads, or merely a tokenistic branding exercise. Transferring parts of the BBC to Manchester seemed particularly pointless in the case of radio. Does it make any difference to the listener whether the presenter’s voice is emanating from a studio in Broadcasting House or Salford? Surely not. And we shouldn’t take it as read that people working in London-based institutions actually want to relocate north. Yes, the houses are cheaper but many people simply will not be able to uproot their families and will inevitably be forced to resign. Some of this seems like change for change’s sake, and costly too.

Personally, I don’t see a problem with major national institutions being located in the capital. But if they really must move, how about we shake things up for a change and prioritise cities other than Manchester? My vote goes to Newcastle, a dynamic regional centre with a very different and distinctive type of northern identity, well-connected logistically to both London and Edinburgh. It’s a place with a vibrant sense of community, a rich culture and positive-minded people, but which also has pockets of deprivation on its doorstep, the collapse of shipbuilding and coal mining decades ago having led to enduring neglect and high levels of child poverty in the wider region. 

This is an area that is persistently overlooked and could genuinely do with a boost of investment and recognition. What’s more, from the perspective of Newcastle, Manchester is the Midlands. If you want to go north, why not really go north?