George Osborne built modern Manchester

Andy Burnham: a passenger on his own trams

‘Northern Powerhouse, what were that all about, eh?’ bellows Peter Kay before a stupendously large audience. Recently-constructed skyscrapers dot the Mancunian skyline, plunging the city’s red brick mills-turned-oversized-bars into the shadows of yesteryear. An unpaid drug debt leads to a violent scuffle in Piccadilly Gardens, as shoppers pass by at pace to get the next train back to Didsbury. An uprooted Londoner trudges past countless vendors of sweetcorn near the Arndale Centre, on his way for a fun night in the Gay Village. The Hacienda is now a block of flats. Ancoats has been chipped away to make way for New Islington.

Manchester has certainly changed over the last two decades, and mostly for the better. In spite of its serious lack of parks or pleasant walks, it’s safe to say it has become one of the best places to live and work outside of the capital. Well-paying jobs are easier to come by, and large areas of the city’s suburbs are being transformed into pleasant commuter towns. Much of ‘Manny’ (as the locals are want to call it) has been completely rebuilt in recent decades, to the point of being unrecognisable to its older natives, with a smattering of its industrial heritage preserved as venues to watch the football with a plastic pint in hand.

Manchester’s inhabitants, watching the march of progress before them, cling on to the city’s former glory as the gritty home of post-punk and acid house by selling overpriced reprints of The Stone Roses’ eponymous album. Go to several shops in the Northern Quarter, and you’ll find a concocted ‘Manchesterism’ that has little bearing on the city’s radical departure from the past. Nine years after the Ariana Grande Arena Bombing, endless trinkets plastered with bees sit next to Joy Division t-shirts and posters of Liam Gallagher’s face. What had once been the logo of Boddington’s Bitter has become a trite response to tragedy. Since even the bloodiest of events slink from the popular consciousness with ease, remembrance has found a new home as little more than a civic moniker like ‘I Heart NYC’. With each passing year, Lowry’s flat-capped workers feel more out of place.

Andy Burnham, a master of reinvention, has managed to take hold of this nostalgic sense of the city, whilst also taking credit for its transformation and improvement. Long gone are his New Labour suits, replaced with an Umbro jacket and a plain shirt. His Liverpudlian accent has softened to a vaguely Northern lilt, and he talks incessantly about football and abolishing VAR. The bee has been fitted on every bus and tram, complete with a bright yellow makeover. Refusing to be pigeonholed into an identifiable party faction as he plots his return to national politics, Burnham has downplayed his Brownite origins and instead blithely appropriates the term ‘Manchesterism’ to define his project in front of the baying Parliamentary Labour Party.

For all the drug dealers, spiceheads, and creeps videoing women on nights out in the city centre, Burnham has cleverly used Manchester’s leap towards modernity as his own vision of a wider ideal for the country. But Burnham’s cynicism has left George Osborne, the man responsible for the city’s noticeable development, lost to the cruel nature of political spin. Unlike Cameron, Osborne — the MP for Tatton, a constituency in Cheshire — was a passionate and true believer in ‘levelling up’ areas outside of England’s South East. His aim was to develop ‘core cities’, primarily in the North, to act as micro-Londons: centres of productivity which would radiate growth outwards across the country.

An ardent advocate of HS2 against a slew of bickering rural Tories and an unsupportive Prime Minister, Osborne was the first British politician of any real stature to attempt the transformation of underdeveloped and unproductive population centres into fully functioning hubs of economic activity. In the wake of painfully slow productivity growth after 2008, this was the Chancellor’s primary method of boosting growth in Britain, and his motivation in showering the North’s fledgling cities with cash lay in his desire to stand them on their own two feet and end the cycle of dependence on Southern subsidy, rather than in the jealous whinging of Northern MPs that were the primary proponents of ‘levelling up’ both before and after his tenure.

To understand Osborne’s staunch commitment to this idea, you need only look towards his desperation to summon the words ‘Northern Powerhouse’ from the mouth of Xi Jinping during his state visit to Britain in 2015. After succeeding in this personal coup, Osborne accompanied Xi to Manchester City’s grounds, a club that had come to dominate the Premier League after an inflow of Arab cash, to the financial benefit of the city. It would be incredibly unfair to credit anyone other than Osborne for being the singular pioneering character behind Manchester’s growth, long before ‘Manchesterism’ entered the pages of The New Statesman, or Andy Burnham showed up in town.

The decision to use Manchester as the seminal focal point of the Northern Powerhouse came after MediaCity had relocated plentiful London jobs from the capital, and after redevelopment projects had been carried out to repurpose late Victorian industrial spaces for residential purposes. It must be remembered that bare brick mixed with glass, stitched together with neat bits of steel, was immensely fashionable in the early 2000s, and Manchester benefitted from this aesthetic disposition towards the post-post-industrial. Osborne wasn’t plucking Manchester out of thin air; he was building on development that trundled on since rejuvenation projects had first begun in Ancoats in 2004.

But what Osborne did truly begin was the massive injection of cash into the home of New Order and Bernard Manning — cash that was spent with great glee by the Labour-controlled council on highly visible (if practically useless) projects. Before Osborne was Chancellor, the Metrolink tram connected Bury in the North through Piccadilly to Altrincham in the South. With the Treasury’s gift, it was greatly expanded in ‘Phase 3’ (or the ‘Big Bang’) to swarm outwards, swallowing up the airport, East Didsbury, Rochdale, and Ashton. All of this was completed within Osborne’s time as Cameron’s right hand man, and he should receive much of the credit for every obnoxiously yellow tram that hurtles past St Peter’s Square.

Twinned with this was Osborne’s eagerness to improve Mancunian infrastructure and encourage building development with a mixture of direct government funding and international assistance from China, in keeping with Cameron’s desire for greater entanglement with the emerging superpower. At a cost of £800 million, Manchester Airport was expanded along the lines of Frankfurt’s own impressive outfit, an initiative supported greatly by Chinese investment. In 2014, he proposed plans to link Leeds and Manchester with high-speed rail, an episode forgotten by many YIMBY developmentalists who now harp on about the same idea years later. In the same year, he allocated £300 million for the Greater Manchester Housing Investment Fund, which led directly to the city’s boom of residential and office skyscrapers that have sprung up dramatically in the last decade. Even in the arts, Osborne’s Treasury was willing to cough up £78 million for The Factory, a venue named, of course, after Tony Wilson’s record label.

Osborne’s antics in Manchester also tied with the Cameron government’s most successful display of garnering private investment. Just as they were able to help change Manchester’s skyline, they also expended a lot of energy getting companies either to relocate or to invest in new premises as the city continued to grow. Immediately after leaving office, Osborne continued to work with economist Jim O’Neil (the brainchild of the Northern Powerhouse) in order to campaign for further national funding, and convinced both British and American firms to open offices in the city.

In the light of these truths, Burnham’s attempt to claim responsibility for Manchester’s success becomes even more unbearable. Becoming Mayor in 2017, he has enjoyed the fruits of work started many years earlier simply by squatting in office as projects come to completion, building an undeserved reputation as the new Joseph Chamberlain in the process. Of course, much of this is politicking, and we should expect little else. But it becomes utterly contemptible when one compares Burnham’s willingness to take credit for Osborne’s successes with his own comments on the former’s Chancellor’s agenda for the North at the time. Any appreciation for the government’s large-scale investment in the region was downplayed in favour of whining about austerity and cuts to the metropolitan council’s budget. That Burnham has spent his tenure as Mayor cutting ribbons in front of developments he had no part in making happen and attacking those who did as uncaring negligents is risible hypocrisy.

The green shoots of modernity now pockmarking Manchester were not nurtured by retaking public control of the buses to construct the hopelessly twee ‘Bee Network’, nor by the City Council’s plans to ‘reindustrialise’ Salford. They certainly were not midwifed by ‘Manchesterism’ — a strange Frankenstein pitch which combines tepid enthusiasm for the fruits of liberal Britain with deep cultural resentments against that same phenomenon. No: the Manchester of today was the passion project of a Tory Chancellor who funnelled a great deal of money into the area with the twin support of private equity and the public purse. If I was George Osborne, I would be screaming this from the (seventy-two storey) rooftops until the ungrateful beneficiaries raised a statue in my image up outside Victoria Station.

‘Manchesterism’, much like his affected accent and quirky style of dress, is simply yet another attempt by Burnham to position himself as something excitingly different from every other Labour politician. It plays well to the resentful fantasies that still plague Northern politics in part, and which must always find ways to valorise the lack of prosperity which has come to define it even as it ostensibly seeks its solution. Yet the idea that Burnham will enter Number 10 and set about turning every mid-sized town north of Watford into little versions of cyberpunk Chongqing is pure fantasy. Manchester’s prosperity did not stem from the opportunity, at long last, to impose its revenge on the South and reconstruct Westminster in its own image: it was delivered by Gideon of Paddington, an eighteenth-generation petty nobleman and former member of the Bullingdon Club. Burnham’s claims to the contrary are a thin mirage, set to break under the slightest scrutiny.

My only hope is that, should he vacate the Mayoralty, the future Baronet Osborne puts his name forward as a candidate — if only to waltz down Deansgate pointing at every building in sight, repeating the mantra: ‘I did that.’

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This article was written by Solothurn, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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