‘Mayors are not so much post-ideological as they are oblivious to ideology, seeing in ideology an obstacle to governance. Because in the city, governance is about solving problems, making things work.’
BENJAMIN BARBER, AUTHOR OF IF MAYORS RULED THE WORLD
Less than ten minutes after arriving in Manchester, I heard the sounds of The Smiths. Beside the Rochdale Canal running through the city centre, Andy Burnham and I found a metal bench well away from the teenagers enjoying a series of cans on a Wednesday afternoon. Dressed every bit the northern man in a short-sleeved shirt and matching black trousers, he embraced the scene. ‘It’s the perfect Manchester experience!’ The swans and geese circled the city’s mayor, threatening to snap at our legs before some gentle gesturing pushed them away. Burnham, fifty-one, was especially cheerful on this sizzling afternoon, having received his first coronavirus vaccine that morning. Yet as soon as we launched into the topic of Labour and the red wall, his spirits dampened as he set out his case for being the John the Baptist of Labour’s troubles. During the 2015 Labour leadership contest, when he came a distant second to Jeremy Corbyn, Burnham recalled he was the only candidate arguing the party should be concerned about its traditional heartlands, such as his former seat, the town of Leigh on the outskirts of the city.
‘I think it has been a long time coming,’ he said in his Scouse accent, softened by his years in Westminster and latterly Manchester. ‘People used to laugh at me because I was complaining about Labour being too London-centric. But eventually, the public started to feel the party was way too London-centric.’ In 2015, Burnham cited the fact he was booed for discussing immigration controls; a sign that ‘the party, internally, was increasingly not picking up the mood of how people felt.’ His prophecy came true: Leigh elected its first-ever Conservative MP in 2019 – a seat that returned a Labour majority of 17,272 as recently as 2005. Labour’s decline in Burnham’s old constituency mirrors another: Heywood and Middleton, a similar seat on the outskirts of the city that now sits in his purview as mayor for the Greater Manchester region.
After (again) edging away the aggressive swans, Burnham explained why the party was in denial about its situation in the north of England. He put the 2019 election outcome down to the party’s leadership and Brexit, adding that people ‘were emotionally making a break.’ The 2016 Brexit referendum was the moment ‘the umbilical cord was being a bit broken’. Referendum day was heartbreaking for Burnham because he sensed Leigh had left him. The results proved it had: 63 per cent of its residents voted Leave.
One of the ‘what ifs’ of recent political history is whether, had Burnham won the 2015 leadership contest and campaigned more forcefully than Corbyn for Remain in the referendum, Brexit could have been avoided. ‘I’d like to think I would have pulled some Labour voters back to Remain if I’d won the leadership.’ Burnham mentioned he pressed Corbyn on the Brexit issue and whether he would campaign ardently for Remain but ‘he wouldn’t answer’ and ‘it was getting late in that Labour leadership contest’ to change the minds of the membership.
Burnham professed to ‘loads’ of regrets about the 2015 leadership race, where he ultimately won just 19 per cent of the vote. He blamed conflicting advice and the pressure of being the frontrunner for suffocating him and ‘losing the sense of [him]self’. MPs faced ‘massive pressure’ on social media to nominate Jeremy Corbyn, he recalled. As soon as he was into the final contest, Burnham claimed that he knew his campaign was in trouble. ‘I remember the day when [Liverpool City Region mayor] Steve Rotheram, who was my campaign manager, rang me and said “Jeremy’s got in by one.” My heart metaphorically hit my boots, I thought, That’s it.’ The safeguards of the past, where MPs had the final say on which candidates made it onto the ballot paper, were ‘washed away a little by social media’ according to Burnham (also influential was Ed Miliband’s decision to allow registered supporters to vote in the contest for £3). He also felt some deeper feelings within the party aided the rise of Corbyn: ‘The Labour Party has an inbuilt love for the kind of dreamy radical romantic.’
The decision to walk away from Westminster in 2016 to run for Greater Manchester mayor was not a difficult one for Burnham. Although he served in Corbyn’s first shadow cabinet, he was not ‘particularly on board with a lot of the policy direction’, particularly ‘the lack of patriotism’. Although claiming to be ‘economically more left wing than New Labour’, he insisted, ‘I am a patriotic person, pro-police. My great-grandfather died in the First World War, it’s a bit inbuilt for a lot of people in the north-west of England.’ He also ‘struggled’ with Ed Miliband’s leadership due to the fogginess that clouded his policy agenda (Burnham noted he ‘loved’ Miliband and the pair remain good friends). ‘Why did I leave? If I’m just honest with you, I was falling out of love with the Westminster world pretty much from 2010 onwards, even before the election.’
Burnham has no regrets about leaving the national stage, describing his current role as ‘energizing and liberating’ and lambasted Westminster for ‘making a fraud out of you’. He has also deeply fallen out of love with party politics. ‘You end up in a place that you’re not sure of yourself anymore, because you’re voting in ways that you don’t always believe in. You’ve been told to say things that you’re iffy about sometimes, that’s the effect of being a front-bench politician in this country.’ Ministers are not able to speak personally and passions about issues that concern politicians are stymied in his view due to the need for party unity. ‘I guess my character isn’t suited to that in the long run.’
His first term as Greater Manchester mayor was hectic, including the Manchester Arena bombing in its first weeks, the 2018 wildfires on the outskirts of the city and the coronavirus pandemic. But Burnham said, ‘It’s been draining at times but I’ve loved it, I’ve genuinely never looked back.’ His public profile has never been higher. During the coronavirus pandemic, he was dubbed ‘King of the North’ for his tough stance in negotiating with Boris Johnson over the terms of further coronavirus restrictions for Manchester. He was very comfortably elected for a second term in May 2021, but could he imagine returning to Westminster? ‘I think I’ve got a lot of work to do. I wouldn’t rule it out. I do expect this to be my last job,’ he said, adding that his wife would not be entirely happy with the prospect. The left-wing parts of Labour disaffected with Keir Starmer’s leadership were particularly eager to talk up his candidacy. Reflecting on his failed leadership bids of 2010 and 2015, he has a single motivation to return to Westminster: ‘I’m not going back to just go back [to national politics for the sake of it], if you know what I mean. I’d be going back to try and reconnect Labour to the north if that’s what was needed at the time.’
As Labour’s most prominent national figure, Burnham was worried that Labour was not taking the Johnson government’s economic and devolution agenda seriously. With George Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse project, for example, Burnham was worried his party was outflanked (something I put to Osborne himself later on this stop). ‘I’ve been saying to the party they need to get behind what we’re trying to do here, that this is the way to reclaim Labour’s lost emotional connection with large parts of the north that it needs to get serious about regaining.’ Although he would not openly admit it, Burnham was palpably pleased that regional politics are now central to the UK’s discourse. ‘For good or ill, when the Tories talked about the Northern Powerhouse, they have now opened up regional divides as an issue. The Tories are not fulfilling it now they’ve started it, but it’s still a slogan to people here . . . there is a bloody big hole for the Labour Party to say “we come in and we do this properly”.’
His proposals for ‘true levelling up’ trade off Disraeli’s one-nation philosophy. ‘What the pandemic has shown us is that a third of people in the UK, possibly closer to half in parts of the north, have lives that are fundamentally insecure because of poor work and poor housing.’ The two nations divide was demonstrated during the Brexit debate. ‘There’s almost people living parallel lives in this country, the lives of some people are unrecognizable from others. And I think levelling up post-pandemic should be about lifting people into much better circumstances, to a position where they have better mental health and wellbeing.’ Burnham agreed with Neil Kinnock that economic security is key for any new Labour message. ‘A lot of people in this city are living in a very precarious position, unsure about their income, unsure about their housing situation, and that eats away at their mental health all the time. I think the way back is to speak to that reality and be clear about regional identity.’
I was curious about the concept of Greater Manchester. Where I sat with Burnham was like any other major city, yet his conurbation includes dozens of smaller towns that don’t feel like that at all. He made the case there was a ‘growing feeling of a Greater Manchester identity’, with Greater Manchester policies – citing his success in reducing homelessness. He also pointed to the bee, the city’s symbol, and lifted up his arm to show it tattooed on his biceps. ‘It appears everywhere, even in Leigh, you see the bee everywhere. If you look at the bin there,’ he said, pointing to one, now full of empty beer cans, which had the bee logo engraved on it, ‘that’s a Manchester symbol, but it’s now a Greater Manchester symbol.’ For anyone under the age of forty-five, Burnham thought the Greater Manchester identity trumps that of the traditional locales of Lancashire or Rochdale that envelop the towns outside of the city. This identity passes the holiday test, he thought. ‘People often say that anyone on holiday from anywhere in Greater Manchester when asked, “Where are you from?”, they will all say Manchester. That identity has been built.’
Changing employment has also reshaped these identities. When the primary source of employment was the coal mine in a north-west town or village, its residents did not have to think or travel beyond their locale. But as more people in towns such as Heywood and Middleton were employed in the city, they increasingly looked outward. ‘I think they see the excitement of cities . . . buying into the Greater Manchester identity.’ In Tory towns such as Leigh and Middleton, which Burnham acknowledged are fiercely proud of their independent identity, he said he continues to promote the GM ideal.
One area where that identity has not built up is within the Labour Party. Burnham remarked that ‘city Labour’ is markedly different from the constituency parties in small locations. ‘Labour Manchester is more modern, if you like, in terms of sensibilities. It’s more green in terms of placing a higher priority on zero carbon . . . it’s not had the same loss of emotional connection that your town Labour had.’ Mayors, for Burnham, are vital for Labour in rebuilding the party’s ties in such areas. ‘Speaking through the party, the public don’t really connect with that at all . . . when I do this role, people can connect.’
The Heywood and Middleton constituency brought me into contact with the only major city in the red wall journey. The constituency was created from two previous seats that separately represented the two towns, both of which had returned Conservative MPs in the past, but the combined seat has been solidly Labour since 1983. It is spliced north to south by the M62 motorway, which speaks to its split identity. The constituency has grave health issues: depression, obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure are all several points above the national average.1 Twenty-one per cent of the constituency is classified as highly deprived.
I began in Middleton, a town on Manchester’s periphery. Having boarded no buses on this journey so far, I hopped on the 163 from Piccadilly Gardens to the town’s bus station. The mid-century shopping centre was moderately busy, masked shoppers weaved in and out of Costa, the WH Smith newsagent and vitamin outlet Holland and Barrett. Underneath a community sculpture called The Moonraker – not related to the James Bond film, but local poachers – Chris Clarkson was waiting.2 The thirty-eight-year-old Tory is a former member of Salford Council and was working as part of Virgin’s corporate development team when he took the seat in 2019 with a mere 663-vote majority. He did not believe he was going to win. ‘I didn’t quit work. I was expected to go in on the Tuesday. I actually had to ring my boss to tell her what had happened,’ he said. Clarkson was a Brexiter on ‘strictly constitutional grounds’, matching his constituency, which voted 62 per cent to leave the EU.
We set off on a walking tour of Middleton. Judging by the range of shops, Middleton is well stocked for the local residents but does not have enough to entice other people here – particularly with Manchester centre six miles away. Clarkson’s first point of note was that the two towns of the seat are very different. Middleton is larger, with more of a high street and affluence – both due to its size and its Manchester-facing status. Clarkson explained the differences in the seat: ‘Middleton is historically Manchester, it is an M postcode, 0161 dialling code and a Mancunian accent. If you talk to people around here, they sound like they’re from Manchester. But you cross the motorway to Heywood and it’s entirely different. Proper East Lancashire.’ There are tensions between the two towns too: ‘There’s a perception that if one gets something the other doesn’t.’
He felt the transport links were ‘utterly crap’ – noting the bumpy bus ride takes forty-five minutes. It is the same distance again across the M62 to Heywood. ‘It’s really poorly served for an area that is so well geographically located.’ He is hopeful that better links could make the seat more akin to leafy Altrincham, which is linked to the city centre via tram. He hopes the light rail network would be extended to his constituency and ‘didn’t mind’ Andy Burnham’s plans to take full control of Greater Manchester’s buses.
We wandered out of the town centre and into the streets of terraced housing, where Clarkson set out why he disagreed with Burnham’s idea of a conurbation identity. ‘There is a natural area of Greater Manchester in terms of economic area and all the rest of it,’ he admitted. ‘But I don’t think anyone would say on holiday they’re from there.’ In a sense they are both right: the simplest answer about identity can be the one people most immediately grab. We reached the beautiful Warwick Mill building, an expansive red-brick factory overlooking Middleton. Some of the windows were intact, but many were shattered or boarded up. Clarkson was hopeful that the building can be restored to flats, but the process was bogged down in planning disputes. Pointing at the mill, he said ‘It’s frustrating, because in Middleton, there are lots of people who want to do stuff. It’s just giving them the tools to do it. This is an area where people want to improve things.’ As with the other red wall seats, skills and education are top of his levelling up priorities. ‘The reason big firms don’t relocate here is the wrong skilled or trained workers.’ Looking at more deserted buildings, he reflected on how the reason for Middleton’s existence has changed. ‘The employer was based in the town, the workforce came from the town. Now the economy has changed. Most of the jobs are in Manchester, so this either becomes a dormitory town, not properly connected, or a destination.’ Heywood and Middleton’s weekly pay is £87 below the national average; its out-of-work benefits claimant rate is almost two percentage points higher.3
Next we came to leafier streets – 1930s detached houses with smart front lawns, with two cars in each driveway. Julie Grainger, a local housebuilder, has noted that the growth of such a place has overall made Middleton more middle class: ‘Ten to fifteen years ago it was quite a rundown area. But now there has been an injection of cash with new bars and cafes, it’s much better.’4 Yet the socioeconomic mix of Middleton appears stark to the casual visitor. ‘Conservative seats in the past didn’t have that mix, they tended to be homogenous. The middle class is now effectively made up of well-paid public-sector workers with two Audis who are committed socialists,’ Clarkson said. ‘They aren’t coming back, whereas the bloke with the white van and the England flag hanging out of his window is very much open for business with us.’
Middleton is not awaiting grand infrastructure projects, but Clarkson was hopeful for ‘bread and butter stuff’, the ‘small fixes that make things work properly’. He is not looking for a revamped shopping centre, for example. ‘You don’t know if they’re actually going to be useful and they could take years to build. If you want to demonstrate actual change you want to be able to say to people, “Does this work better than it did three years ago?”’
Our tour finished on the Langley housing estate – tightly packed council housing, lined with dark-green metal fences. This is where Clarkson made his largest gains in the 2019 election. ‘We would normally find one in every 20 voters was Conservative. Last time, we were probably pulling even with Labour.’ The main cause was Jeremy Corbyn. Almost every other house has a giant red poppy on the brickwork, commemorating the armed forces. ‘The patriotism angle was strong; they didn’t like or trust Corbyn. You had a lot of people staying at home, which is why the numbers went down.’ Clarkson departed for home himself, to hop onto the latest of the endless Zoom calls that dominate the lives of the red wall Tories.
Still without the Mini, I went back on the 163 bus over the M62 to explore Heywood. As the bus trundled out of Middleton, it soon entered open countryside. The Scout Moor Wind Farm of twenty-six turbines glared over Heywood, which bore few remnants of being a Lancashire mill town. Heywood overlooks the moorlands of Rochdale and the dramatic peaks of the Cheesden Valley. Much of the town is populated by council estates built in the 1950s and 1960s, when the slums of central Manchester were cleared out: one estate alone, Darnhill, housed 5,000 former city dwellers from Manchester. The traditional industry of the town, cotton, was in steady decline by this time. Back in 1833, the town had twenty-seven mills, creating ‘an influx of strangers causing a very dense population’.5 Rochdale had a brief moment of national political infamy during the 2010 election, when an irate life-long Labour voter, Gillian Duffy, confronted Gordon Brown about the influx of Eastern European migrants to the UK. As he darted away from the confrontation in his ministerial car, the then prime minister was inadvertently recorded describing her as ‘that bigoted women’. Brown was forced into a grovelling apology, with his head in his hands, highlighting the party’s challenges with its traditional supporters.
Alighting from the bus in Heywood, I found a barren town with almost no pedestrians. On a solo walking tour, I discovered a range of housing that reminded me of Newcastle upon Tyne’s suburbs. From small terraces to spacious detached homes, Heywood’s housing stock caters for all middle-class needs. The civic centre around the church and town were well-kept, with a black metal outline of a kneeling soldier to pay tribute to the armed forces, another sign of the area’s deep patriotism. The old police station and post office buildings were abandoned, empty and to let. Even with lockdown restrictions allowing for shops to trade, almost everything was closed.
Heywood’s last mill closed in the 1980s, with the town’s economic activity dominated by the 200-acre Heywood Distribution Park. Opposite the site, surrounded by barbed fences and CCTV, was a McDonald’s bakery for the fast food chain, its intoxicating presence permeating the air with the faint smell of yeast mixed with the diesel from the trucks.
After learning little from Heywood itself, I followed Chris Clarkson’s advice to make the hour-long walk to the village of Bamford. Coming out of the town and into the countryside, the classic traditional kind of Conservative prosperity started to emerge. The cars became more opulent, the houses larger. Google Maps guided me through a 1970s housing estate – the sort that proliferated in North East Derbyshire. As I trudged up Bamford Way, there was an unbroken row of five detached houses with a Mercedes parked in each driveway. When this estate was built, I doubted this level of prosperity existed.
At the end of a country lane, I came to the Bamford Barista. His name is Philip Beal. His quaint cottage on the edge of Bagslate Moor park – home to Rochdale’s rugby union and golf clubs – became a takeaway cafe during the pandemic. Beal, fifty-two, repaired espresso machines for Starbucks as his day job. With coffee shops closed, he set up spare machines in his kitchen. His wife baked cakes and his family helped with the brewing and running the till. A steady stream of well-to-do families passing with assortments of dogs and children stopped en route for treats and flat whites. When the queues subsided, I asked Beal about where the idea came from.
‘I used to leave books outside for people to pick up on their way to the moor,’ he said. ‘It was very successful, so I opened this.’ His porch makes for a convincing cafe, the half stable door is his till. Beal followed politics ‘a bit’ and was wholly unsurprised when Heywood and Middleton elected its first Conservative MP in 2019. ‘I was never a Labour man. It’s good, it feels like we needed a bit of change.’ He made an explicit point of saying that his wife ‘doesn’t like Keir Starmer much’. Beal did not have much to say about the Labour leader, but conceded ‘he’s better than the last bloke, Corbyn’. He mentioned that Clarkson had dropped by a handful of times and praised the new MP for ‘getting well-known locally’, something that is seen as ‘pretty important’. There are few problems in the Heywood area. ‘People are fairly easy-going, there are no troubles.’ Beal reckoned most of his customers either run small businesses or work for Rochdale council. And when he goes on holiday, he would tell people he is from Rochdale. Not Manchester? ‘Certainly not.’ I understood Clarkson’s point that Heywood is where the Tory support began and Middleton was where the seat was seized.
Far away from public transport, and missing the car, I headed out of the village via taxi. There is one major unknown factor for the next UK election: boundary changes. Every five years, constituencies are examined, redrawn and rebalanced based on their population changes. Heywood and Middleton is oversized, which means it is likely to be split. If Heywood becomes a separate seat, it will likely end up taking in parts of the Rochdale constituency, which would push it back towards Labour. Half of Middleton, on the other hand, will be subsumed into Manchester and be reunited with its Labour-leaning, city identity. The city was where I returned.
Aside from its split personality, Heywood and Middleton is politically significant for another reason. In 2014, the incumbent Labour MP Jim Dobbin unexpectedly died in office and a by-election was called. Polling day came when UKIP was on the rise and concerns about immigration were dominating the national debate. The party, then led by Nigel Farage, increased its vote by thirty-six percentage points and ended up a mere 617 votes away from winning the seat. Their candidate was John Bickley, a former music industry executive turned games developer (he played a role in creating the first PlayStation), who had stood in a by-election earlier that year in nearby Wythenshawe and Sale East. Bickley was judged to be one of the party’s most effective campaigners with a real chance of making UKIP’s first parliamentary gain.
Speaking from his home in Cheshire, Bickley, sixty-eight, spoke of his Labour-supporting family background: growing up on a council estate, reading the Daily Mirror, imbibing a strong Christian spirit. Despite his traditional working-class background, he voted Conservative all of his life until David Cameron became Tory leader and set about his modernizing mission. After Cameron didn’t pursue a referendum on the EU’s Lisbon Treaty, Bickley joined UKIP in 2011 and was soon encouraged to stand for parliament. In Heywood and Middleton, he found ‘a lot of traditional Labour supporters were fed up with the way they saw the Labour Party not representing the working class anymore’, particularly on the issue of immigration. Such voters found no home in Cameron’s party either. Bickley said for these people, mostly found on the council estates around Heywood, the thinking was, ‘Maybe we vote for UKIP as a means to express our disgust at the two-party cartel system?’ He defined an imagined biography of the typical disaffected Labour voter: ‘Your dad is Manchester-born. Your dad supports Manchester United and guess which team you end up supporting all your life? Man United. If my dad had supported Man City, I’d be a Man City supporter. That gets ingrained on the political side as well with Labour and the Tories.’
Two issues dominated that campaign, both of which were sensitive topics. The first was immigration and its impact on public services. Bickley said, ‘a lot of people were seeing their jobs threatened, lost their jobs or had to take reduced wages’ following the rapid rise in migrants from the EU’s eastern expansion. These concerns were not xenophobic, he argued: ‘Let’s not blame these people. If I was in Eastern Europe, you know, on five hundred quid a month and I can get on a bus and come over to Britain and get fifteen hundred quid a month, I’d be on the first bus.’
The second issue was child sexual exploitation gangs. Bickley distributed a leaflet during the by-election that claimed ‘Labour’s betrayal is no more apparent than with the young white working-class girls of Rotherham and Rochdale where rather than upset immigrant communities, years of abuse were ignored and complaints swept under the carpet’. This issue, and sensitivities discussing it, affirmed a sense among traditional Labour supporters that the party was out of touch. ‘A lot of people said “I’m not surprised, reading the report [into CSE], we’ve been concerned about that for a long time and Labour had seemed to ignore it.” I think that fuelled even more the idea the Labour Party no longer represents the working class.’
During the campaign, Farage visited four times and Bickley was given solid financial support. Had it not been for the Clacton by-election on the same day – when Douglas Carswell was elected as the first UKIP MP – also using up campaign resources, he felt the extra heave could have seen him over the line. Had he won, Heywood and Middleton ‘would have been a bigger result and had a greater impact on politics.’ Despite the Tories moving in a direction that has swept up UKIP voters, Bickley remained disaffected and unconvinced by both sides. He quit UKIP when it took an increasingly far-right direction after Farage stepped away from the leadership. ‘I look at the British political class and I’m afraid I have nothing but disdain for them. I think back to the old Labour Party, the front bench did seem to be populated by people who’d done proper jobs, people who had some substance to them, and some intellect. It’s the same for the Tory Party. I look around now and see career politicians. I don’t see a level of intellect, commitment to principles.’
I next went around to the other side of Manchester city to find the only prominent Labour figure who put serious thought into the plight of towns like Middleton and Heywood. Indeed, Lisa Nandy’s love of towns spawned a series of internet memes when the MP for Wigan ran for the leadership in 2019.6 Nandy was first elected to parliament in 2010 and rose to become shadow foreign secretary under Keir Starmer. Although she came third in the 2020 leadership contest with 16 per cent of the vote, her presence in the race meant that the future of constituencies such as Wigan, and whether the party could win the red wall back, received due prominence.7
My first encounter with Nandy was back in 2017, when we appeared on BBC’s Question Time beside each other. She was exceedingly friendly – I was a bag of nerves, all too aware that a wrong sentence on a prime time political debate can end a career. Chatting in the front garden of her suburban home, Nandy explained that she started the Centre for Towns think tank as a response to Westminster’s reaction to the Leave vote in the 2016 referendum: ‘We were hearing so much of the commentary and many politicians telling us that towns that voted to leave the EU in relatively large numbers were the people who didn’t want to play any role in the world order. They wanted to stop internationalism. They wanted to stop the world, we want to get off. We’re told equally that people were just too stupid to understand the question. We were told these people are xenophobic, they were racist. Or we were told that people were just in so much despair about how terrible their communities were that they had nothing left to lose. All of which is deeply offensive and completely wrong.’
The think tank aimed to focus the political agenda on the places that had faced decades of economic decline. Nandy agreed that the New Labour’s intense focus on cities led to a brain drain. ‘What we’ve seen in places like Wigan is that young people who want opportunities will go off to university, often in the cities. And when they look for good, well-paid jobs back home, they find quite often that those opportunities just aren’t there. So we’ve lost our working-age population.’ She went on to explain the consequences: ‘The scars are visible on our high streets, we’ve got a crisis of loneliness among our older people who are growing old alone, hundreds of miles away from children and grandchildren. Almost every problem that I’ve been dealing with as a constituency MP over the last decade, you can trace back to that economic model and a political system that just wasn’t responsive.’ With the Tories engaging with this agenda before Labour, it was frustration that prompted Nandy to stand for the party leadership. ‘Voters in places like Wigan, Leigh, Bolton and right across the country had to look at the Labour Party and see a party that understood that [change was needed].’
There was no doubt in Nandy’s mind that Labour has been growing apart from the residents of Wigan for quite some time; with its interests being too theatrical. ‘People often feel that we’re quite obsessed in the Labour Party with being radical and we certainly have been in recent years. But what we often aren’t is relevant. That very much came to the fore at the last election with all the manifesto pledges. There are a lot of pledges that people couldn’t understand the relevance to their own lives.’ She cited the example of Leigh, Andy Burnham’s former constituency on the outskirts of Manchester, where campaigners were ordered on a particular day to talk about trains. ‘Leigh doesn’t have a train station, and it’s a source of real frustration locally. Buses would have been far more relevant, to bring it back to my favourite theme. We needed to be much more relevant to people’s lives and the only way that really happens is being far more rooted in communities, and decisions have to be driven locally.’ With Jeremy Corbyn’s retirement from front-line politics, Nandy admitted to feeling ‘quite optimistic’ about Labour’s future, believing that ‘it is actually walking the walk in terms of wanting to hand people real power in their lives and leading by example where we have the power to do that.’
‘Levelling up’ is a not a term Nandy uses, but she is pleased that the debate has brought the economic issues of towns to the front of the political agenda. ‘It’s a recognition that for a very long time, communities like mine have seen relative economic decline. We used to have large numbers of young people and working-age people forty years ago when we had the coal mines, we had mills. There were factories dotted around the outskirts of Greater Manchester in many of those towns similar to ours. And for the last forty years, we’ve seen that steady process of decline so that now the inequalities between parts of the country like mine and parts of the country like Manchester, which is only a few miles away, are very vast indeed.’
She does not, however, think that places such as Wigan are eager to return to the industries of the past; it is implausible to imagine its teenagers wanting to go down the coal mine, even if they still existed. ‘We’re very proud of the role that we played empowering this country and building the country’s wealth and influence. But we don’t want to see a return to that sort of work.’ Many residents in her patch commute into larger settlements – Manchester, Salford or Bolton. She was hopeful that the rise in home working during the pandemic could give more purpose to places. ‘Two thirds of my constituents have to commute out of the borough for work because the work isn’t available in Wigan. And yet we’ve seen that quickly change with lots of people working from home or working locally . . . the new normal may well look a lot more like this, where our high streets will start to be boosted by the fact that people are working locally again and so they’re spending locally again.’
Her prescription for towns includes significant investment in regional transport, especially buses and local train services. ‘I know I talk about policy so much that it’s become a running joke,’ she smiled. ‘But actually, I’ll keep talking about buses until I see some of this start to change.’ Nandy believed that decisions on infrastructure spending must be taken locally. ‘If you’d asked people in the north of England how they wanted transport spending allocated, they wouldn’t have started with High Speed 2. Now I’m not knocking High Speed 2, this country needs proper transport infrastructure. But before you can get any kind of political buy-in from the public for a project like that, you’ve got to sort out our regional trains.’ Although more money is key, she believed power is just as important. ‘The only way in the end it’s going to start to change is if those decisions are made far closer to home.’
When I put to her the vision of the Northern Powerhouse – linking together the great northern cities to counter the economic might of London – I wondered whether this was compatible with her ideas for towns. Manchester has thrived in recent decades, but can towns and cities economically do well at the same time? She argued that the current model of life being increasingly based around cities is broken. ‘Take a walk down my local high street and you’ll see why that doesn’t work, because people will commute into Manchester, they’ll spend in Manchester, and then they’ll come back. They sleep here, they see their families, maybe have their evening meal, but they’re not spending on the local high streets and not spending in the local pubs. And then the whole social fabric starts to fall apart and people feel that very keenly. That’s why we’ve had these big political upheavals in recent years and we’ve got to start paying attention.’
Nandy’s priority is reimagining high streets for small towns, recalling the rise and fall of tower-block housing in city centres. ‘I grew up in Manchester in the 1980s, when they were busy detonating tower blocks in the next community to mine, Moss Side and Hulme, because they built them in the 1960s, largely for single parents with young kids and older people, who’d told them at the time that they didn’t want to live twenty storeys up without access to a garden and without seeing their neighbours. And yet they didn’t listen, so they had to tear them down all those years later. I think the debate about high streets has been really similar.’ She wants high streets to be ‘places to go where people can see each other and have that social fabric.’
Although Nandy did not win the 2019 leadership race, she is upbeat that the plight of towns such as Wigan is now at the forefront of the political agenda for the first time since she arrived in Westminster. Soon after Keir Starmer was elected Labour leader, he went on a virtual tour of the country, starting in Greater Manchester. ‘He asked local people to set the agenda and spent several hours listening to what they had to say and talking to them on their own terms about their priorities.’ She is deeply sceptical of whether the Johnson government can ‘provide those opportunities’ but acknowledged, ‘I do think there’s an element of the Conservative Party that really does understand this.’ Above all, she is just relieved. ‘It feels to me that this is now a very mainstream part of the political agenda and the prospects for people in towns, therefore, are much brighter than they would have otherwise been.’
The counter to Nandy’s view on the importance of towns is embodied by George Osborne, who proposed the Northern Powerhouse concept in 2014: pursuing more devolution with more mayors, extra funding for these conurbations to encourage investment and improved transport links. ‘Not one city, but a collection of northern cities – sufficiently close to each other that combined they can take on the world,’ the former chancellor said.8 He did not hide his belief either that cities were the economic unit of the future. ‘In a modern, knowledge-based economy, city size matters like never before.’ After being the second-most powerful man in the country during David Cameron’s Conservative governments, Osborne’s politics career came to an shattering end after the 2016 referendum. He exited parliament and, after a spell editing the Evening Standard, has started a third act in banking. Throughout lockdown, he has resided in the bucolic Somerset village of Bruton, where I spoke to him from my Manchester hotel about the towns versus cities debate.
His enthusiasm partly came from being a northern MP – Tatton in Cheshire – for sixteen years. ‘I was someone who had been born and brought up in London. I’d always thought that this simplistic view in London, which is that nothing of any interest happens outside the M25, was wrong. Equally wrong, this view around the north-west of England that all the action was being sucked out of the north, down to London. Both were false and I was in a position as Chancellor and as a northern Tory MP to address it.’ Osborne noted that successive efforts had been made since Harold Wilson’s governments of the 1960s to ‘build up the rest of the country’ by shuffling government departments around (exactly what Boris Johnson’s government is doing by moving 20,000 civil servants out of Whitehall by the end of the decade). The idea of sending ‘a few hundred civil servants to some town in the north of England in ten years’ time’ would not achieve much, Osborne argued, because a future government would relocate them back.
‘There’s nothing new about wanting to level up. The Northern Powerhouse is a solid economic theory that cities – particularly around the Pennines; Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Liverpool – could be brought more closely together economically because they’re geographically actually quite close to each other. If you linked them with good transport links, if you empowered them by creating new city mayors, if you invested in the science and the universities and the teaching hospitals there, then the whole would be greater than the parts and you’d attract private investment.’ This theory was the brainchild of Jim O’Neill, a leading economist from Manchester, Goldman Sachs banker and later a Treasury minister under Osborne.
Did Osborne have concerns that towns would be left behind with the economic success of cities? He pointed out that the cities of the north were ‘economically devastated and city centres hollowed out’ during the 1980s and 1990s and their ‘incredible journey’ is evidenced that other places aspire to be like Manchester. He is unwavering in his belief. ‘All around the world, the evidence is that cities act as a kind of cluster for economic activity with their universities and their science, teaching and hospitality. What you then need to do is make sure that the suburbs and the towns around these cities have proper links into them and that activity can spill out.’ He cited the example of Reading, a long-standing commuter town near London where global tech firms have now opened bases. ‘The Boltons, the Rochdales of this world, the Wakefields of this world, they’re not going to succeed if Manchester isn’t doing well, if Leeds isn’t doing well. But you’ve got to create two-way traffic between those towns and those cities . . . you start with the cities and then the towns will benefit.’
When I pushed Osborne on the issue of identity – how these smaller towns will feel about an economy and political leadership rooted in a nearby city – he pointed out that ‘a central part of the Northern Powerhouse has been to empower the local communities such as Wakefield and the towns of South Yorkshire, like the towns of the Pennines.’ Osborne revealed that there was much internal opposition from Cabinet ministers and Whitehall, particularly the Treasury, who ‘did not want to hand power away’. He argued that Andy Burnham’s mayoralty is proof that it works for the whole area. ‘Greater Manchester is not just Manchester city centre. It includes Rochdale. It includes Wigan. It includes Bolton and Bury. And now you have in the great mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, a recognizable public national voice for those communities. The idea that Manchester’s gain is Rochdale’s loss is a total zero sum game.’
Osborne also said some Tory Cabinet members were solidly opposed to creating mayors with powers that could create political headaches. ‘I remember there were very senior Conservatives, colleagues of mine in the Cabinet, who said “What’s the point of doing that, George? You’re just going to create Labour fiefdoms.” To which my answer was, “Will you tell me what Manchester or Liverpool is at the moment if it is not a Labour fiefdom? It’s not like the Conservatives have got a big foothold there.” If you’re just looking at it in policy, political terms, this is a way for us to get a chance for Conservatives to be represented there.’ Osborne cited Andy Street of the West Midlands and Ben Houchen in Teesside as examples of ‘capable Conservative mayors’.
Osborne may be praised by local government leaders for pushing devolution and delivering directly elected mayors to Manchester and Tees Valley, but he has also been severely criticized for the cuts he made to local-government spending. In the decade after 2010, the core funding to councils from central government was cut by £16 billion.9 Council leaders have spoken of the devastation this has caused to local services, exacerbating existing challenges such as housing and social care. Did Osborne accept any blame for the political dislocation that came to the fore in the 2016 referendum due to these cuts? ‘No, I don’t at all,’ he curtly said. ‘Did the financial crisis have a big impact on communities around Britain? Yes, it did. Were communities that were already hard done by even harder done by? Yes, they were. That’s what happens when the economy blows up. I was there afterwards to try and clear up the mess.’
Osborne did not think the revival in Tory fortunes in the red wall was people ‘rebelling against austerity’ because the party’s reputation for fiscal discipline was strong. ‘They came to understand that the Conservative Party had more to offer them than their traditional support for a Labour Party that really wallows in nostalgia for the mining movement, or the steel mills that disappeared over a generation ago. It’s because, over a period of time, the Conservatives had something to offer – which I’d like to believe included the Northern Powerhouse – that political support in these communities started to swing towards us.’
The deindustrialization of many Western economies over several decades was particularly rapid in Britain. Osborne pointed out that similar collapses in industry have created the same political dislocation elsewhere: ‘As you can see from the United States and the Rust Belt there, the effects are still being felt just as harshly. If you like, they’ve taken longer. It’s been a massive challenge for Western democracies. These arguments about left-behind towns, left-behind communities, they’re not unique to Britain and we should stop this kind of British exceptionalism disease. These are exactly the same issues that they faced in the US, France, Germany and Italy and other countries.’ He characterized the approach of the past as ‘let’s get in a Japanese microchip manufacturer and let’s move the Inland Revenue there, and ultimately it did not prove sustainable or allow business to invest on a much longer and more permanent basis.’
He argued that austerity happened in developed countries across the world, a response to ‘the fact that the global economy collapsed’. Osborne brought out the argument that was heard wall-to-wall during the 2015 election campaign: ‘Because of the Cameron coalition government, more jobs were created in the north than we’d seen under any previous government. And Britain recovered faster than any other comparable country. So our economic plan delivered for the north.’ After the recovery, his hope was to have the northern cities ‘think collectively about their economic future’ instead of being competitive with each other (something the north has continually struggled with). ‘Rather than thinking that if Liverpool won, Manchester lost. Of course there are strong regional and city identities there. But as a whole, you can make the Northern Powerhouse bigger than the individual communities.’
The Northern Powerhouse project drifted under Theresa May’s leadership of the party, with a greater focus on the ‘Midlands Engine’, driven in part by her chief of staff Nick Timothy. Osborne is naturally thrilled that Boris Johnson has embraced levelling up. ‘He is our first prime minister coming from being an elected mayor, so I think he understands the benefits of devolution.’ But he did question whether Johnson’s plans for a levelling-up fund – a big pot of government money for small infrastructure projects below £20 million – could lead to structural change. ‘Proof will be in the pudding. Over the next eighteen months we’ll see in budgets and spending reviews whether all we get is a kind of levelling-up fund, in which case I think the world will move on. Then we will wait for another government to come up with a serious long-term plan. Or the levelling-up fund is a bridge to a much longer-term approach, which is what this country wants.’
The idea of a levelling-up fund is something Osborne has seen throughout his political career, starting in the early 1990s. ‘I totally understand. I’ve been there.’ While such small-scale investments are a ‘temporary measure ‘to help ease the issues, he was concerned there is not enough focus on longer-term policies to ‘change a century-old force in our country.’ During the Industrial Revolution, the economic settlement of the country reversed. ‘It used to be the north was the industrial and economic powerhouse of the country. And over the last century that has changed. To reverse that, it cannot be done with a levelling-up fund. You need serious long-term policy thinking underpinned by solid economic theory.’
He also criticized the New Labour governments for only delivering small-scale projects in places they were elected to. ‘If that approach worked, then Labour would still be in charge of all these seats,’ he laughed. ‘If you go to Sedgefield, you would probably see a whole lot of projects with Tony Blair’s name on the plaque as the local MP who opened them.’ He was right on that: every Labour MP I spoke to could list small projects they had delivered which did little to save them in 2019. Osborne added, ‘People are not dumb, they can see that approach is not going to deliver long-term changes in the economic prospects for them and their families.’ He felt red wall voters would respect a government that proved it can work with businesses and local leaders to forge a more resilient local economy.
And what does success for levelling up and the Northern Powerhouse look like? Osborne concluded with a story: ‘The great test will be that if you are born in a community where perhaps the coal mine closed thirty or forty years ago, or the steel mill shut, or the fishing industry, you really feel there’s a future for you and your family in this town. The town feels like it’s going somewhere. The city nearby feels like it’s going somewhere, new jobs, new activity, new industries are opening. And instead of kind of clinging to the nostalgia of the past, there’s pride in the past. There’s also enormous optimism about the future.’ Manchester’s success is evidence enough for Osborne that such a vision is achievable and can work.
My visit to Greater Manchester concluded exactly how it started: outside surrounded by people drinking beer. I met Jennifer Williams, political and investigations editor of the Manchester Evening News, to try and form a conclusion about Heywood and Middleton, the future of mayors and local identities. Before my road trip, I was a fevered advocate for more devolution, and such enthusiasm has not waned, but I can appreciate from Heywood and Middleton that towns need to have purchase on the agenda and retain an identity they feel comfortable with.
On a rare dry day, with thin rays of sunshine across in the Cathedral Gardens, Williams and I opened up a couple of beers and discussed Heywood and Middleton within the context of the mayoralty. She was scornful about the idea of Greater Manchester identity, but admitted that since Andy Burnham won the mayoralty, more people would describe it as the place they came from on holiday’s overseas.
Her biggest concern is that the momentum will be lost locally and nationally. Howard Bernstein and Richard Leese, the council’s chief executive and leader who oversaw the city’s renewal, are both on the verge of retirement. ‘There is no longer an obvious Heseltine-style [or, perhaps, Osborne-style] figure in government with whom to do business. The question then arises: who is the next generation and how do they see this agenda moving forward? Who is the intellectual driving force, both here and in Westminster?’ She pointed out ‘the political momentum that has propelled the city itself in recent times, and by extension Greater Manchester dates back to the same period, when the core group of people driving it were the new generation, working with Michael Heseltine when he was at his most influential.’ I wondered whether she felt the city suffered from some nostalgia, when its music scene dominated the world. She agreed: ‘Manchester is very good at self-mythologizing its 1980s and 1990s cachet – to the point of being irritating at times, even as someone who lives in and loves the city. But in fairness, that has served it pretty well during its years of reinvention.’
Boris Johnson pledged ‘full devolution’ across England in the party’s 2019 manifesto, so ‘every part of our country has the power to shape its own destiny.’ Ironically, it was Burnham’s success in negotiating with Whitehall during the coronavirus pandemic that has turned Johnson off handing over more powers. Williams said, ‘[the mayoralty] doesn’t have as much power as it might appear to do on the outside. And I think actually a lot of its power has probably been shown in the first term of the mayoralty to lie in its soft power.’
Williams knows more than most journalists in the country about how local government operates. I asked her what the core purposes of the mayoralties are. ‘There’s the advocacy: campaigning and profile and championing of the region. And then there’s the policy side, actually changing things on the ground. Obviously every mayor is going to define that in a different way.’ Burnham was one of the first directly elected mayors and has had to make a lot of it up as he goes along. Her main criticism is the lack of transparency about who is doing what and why.
If there is further devolution, Williams thought there needs to be honesty about funding for local councils. ‘The way it has been treated in the past decade has been scandalous, albeit a scandal central government correctly calculated would come at no political cost. It now means that if you are hoping for a transference of power and resource out of London, the structures you would theoretically transfer that to are weak. Much institutional memory has been lost through waves of redundancy, much experience has gone; it will take time to rebuild an entire strata of the state. That bleeds into scrutiny, standards and accountability too.’ The corruption scandal enveloping the mayor of Liverpool is an example of what can go wrong when there is too much power without accountability.
I was curious to know what she felt about the seats like Leigh, Bury, and Heywood and Middleton that had voted Tory for the first time. She did not think they would be a pushover for Labour to win back. ‘There were already more Tory voters than people thought; I mean, Graham Brady’s got a seat here after all,’ she said, referencing the impeccably tailored Conservative grandee. ‘It’s always been written about as though it’s this immovable Labour stronghold. Andy Burnham has to some extent not helped [that image] – he was pretty much the only massive Labour success during the Corbyn years. But actually when you get beneath the surface, there are already more Conservative-leaning voters here than you might initially think.’
The sun was fully gone by the last of our drinks, the cold plaza empty. Williams went off to a barbecue and I returned to my hotel, wondering how I felt about the towns versus cities debate. Having grown up in a town close to a city, I never felt any animosity to Newcastle (I was actually born at the special care baby unit in its General Hospital, the result of arriving six weeks early), but was aware of the low-level resentment from Gateshead’s people. That felt unhealthy. Perhaps towns have such a level of unease because they sense their future is innately tied to cities.
Howard Bernstein, chief executive of Manchester City Council for almost two decades, told me there was ‘an inherent economic strength of Manchester’ that makes it unique among England’s cities. But he rightly argued that the quality of its local leadership was just as important. ‘You’ve had two of the most successful local government leaders over the last thirty years in Graham [Price] and Richard [Leese] . . . our approach to convening institutions, residents and businesses to get behind the vision for the city has been very strong and very effective.’
He was chiefly concerned that Whitehall and the Johnson government has developed a ‘basic mistrust’ of local government that has undone the last decade of advancement for devolution. ‘People are not looking at local government as engines of change. They are being looked at as inconvenient, and in some cases, inadequate partners.’ The case about why a fully centralized model may need to be rethought. ‘We need to start to rehearse the reasons why a centralized model can’t work just by itself. With devolution, it’s something perhaps around co-design, partnerships, new place-based deals where government are not seen to be taking all their accountabilities for programmes.’
Fundamentally, Bernstein said that residents of Manchester city and the towns around the conurbation want the same thing. ‘Most people want to improve their life chances, most people want to be able to access a job, most people want to be able to look after their families. The problems in certain towns are still problems in certain parts of Manchester: there are too many people experiencing serious inequality, experiencing levels of deprivation, and in some cases, abject poverty. And they are not being supported in the way the state, whether it’s local or national, is able to support them.’
His vision for the future of these towns is similar to the wider questions for cities: diversifying the business base and adapting to different ways of working, particularly after the pandemic. ‘You go around different parts of Greater Manchester, which I’m most familiar with, and you see a whole bunch of creatives . . . what we need to do is better structure our workplace provision, we’ve got to obviously boost skills and productivity. We have to look at new forms of housing, in our town centres as well as our city centres.’ Agreeing with Lisa Nandy, he felt that the town centres need to become ‘more attractive places to visit’. ‘There will be new perspectives around retail provision, it will be more experiential, rather than huge shopping malls where you can’t distinguish one shopping unit from the other. There are opportunities for independent retailing.’ As well as devolution, he argued that flexible planning laws will be vital.
George Osborne’s argument about the economic pull of cities is hard to dispute. There are many improvements to be made for towns, which the Johnson government’s small pots of money will help to address. Their high streets may feel better in the coming years, but the directly elected mayoral model of grouping together a critical mass into a conurbation remains the best way of creating economic resilience. Even without a city of global standing, there is room for improvements: Ben Houchen has shown in Tees Valley how groups of towns can be brought together under a united economic vision. Economic gravitational pull matters. Some places can be major employers, some can be great and comfortable places to live. Economic prosperity tied to political autonomy. Not every town will be the same; a lesson Whitehall should remember when figuring out how to deliver for hundreds of places that voted Tory for the first time in 2019. And finally, heading a little further north one last time, it was the last stop on the road trip: the old mill town of Burnley in Lancashire.