Manchesterism: An avalanche of coal

Andy Burnham's purposeless revolution

On a sunny, windless morning in October 1966, a strange noise was heard in the mountains above Merthyr Tydfil. Witnesses described it variously as the sound of thunder, the roar of a low-flying jet aeroplane, or the rumbling of an old train passing closely by. A few of those living below the Merthyr Vale Colliery saw the odd sight with their own eyes: a ‘dark glistening wave’, 30 ft in height, was flowing down the valley towards the village of Aberfan. This roaring tide of black rock demolished several houses before it came upon the Pantglas Junior School, where approximately 240 children and teachers had just begun their morning lessons. Like a tidal torrent crashing against a sandcastle, the flowing suspension of coal, rock, mud and tailings consumed the Victorian schoolhouse, crushing or suffocating to death 109 children and five teachers therein. Later, rescuers digging through the rubble unearthed the dead, frozen in their final poses by the rubble, like the plaster-casts of Pompei: a dinner lady sheltering children with her body; the deputy-head master desperately repurposing the classroom blackboard as a shield.

Tip 7, a 111-foot-high pile of waste mining materials sited about 700 yards north of Aberfan Village up the valley slope, had liquified, flowing down the hill like an avalanche. Tip 7 had been sited over several springs and watercourses. It was known by the National Coal Board (NCB), the Attleeite body that ran the Merthyr Vale Collier and every other coal mine in Britain after the 1946 nationalisation of the coal industry, that spoil tips were liable to undergo liquefaction when sited over watercourses. Indeed, there had been three such ‘flow-slides’ on spoil tips in Aberfan in the twenty-five years which preceded the disaster. In 1939, a tip slide five miles up the road from Aberfan at the Albion Colliery at Abercynon had blocked a road, a canal and a railway line, causing £10,000 of damage without loss of life. This prompted the pre-nationalisation pit-owners, the Powell Duffryn Company (who also owned the Merthyr Vale Colliery at the time) to commission an investigation, and a memorandum was issued recommending that spoil tips should not exceed a height of 20 feet. Nonetheless, the NCB had begun Tip 7 in 1958 after Tip 6 had been stopped following a complaint from a farmer that it was spilling over onto his land. It quickly piled higher and higher. The looming mountain of coal spoils squatting above the village did not go unnoticed by Aberfan’s residents. The Town Clerk for Merythr wrote to the NCB in 1959 expressing fears of slips. The letter was ignored. In 1960, the NCB received a deputation from Merythr Council and assured them that fears of a tip-slide were ‘groundless’. A slide from Tip 7 occurred in 1963, but the NCB did not act. The increasing concern of Merythr Council was met with haughty indifference from the NCB, who dismissed their fears with assurances from ‘experts’.

News of the disaster reached the glitzy Grosvenor Place headquarters of the NCB quickly. An NCB board meeting that morning led by the NCB’s chairman, Labour grandee and former cabinet minister Lord Robens, was briefed on the scale of the destruction and loss of life. Robens had personal use of an executive aircraft to enable him to travel quickly to the remoter outposts of his nationalised empire of coal. He chose not to use it to travel to Aberfan, instead attending his investiture ceremony as Chancellor of the newly founded University of Surrey in Guildford that evening. His subordinates lied to the Secretary of State for Wales, telling him that Robens was personally directing relief efforts on the ground in Aberfan.

In the days following the disaster, Robens sought to protect the NCB by making a series of misleading remarks to the press. In particular, he claimed on television that no one could have known that there was a spring under Tip 7. In fact, several springs were marked on Ordinance Survey maps, and the springs were one of the primary causes for concern expressed by Merythr Council to the NCB throughout its increasingly worried correspondence in the years preceding the disaster. In the aftermath of the disaster, a relief fund for the families of the victims was established by popular subscription. The NCB succeeded in shamelessly raiding this fund in order to defray the costs of removing some of the remaining spoil tips in Aberfan. When left-wingers talk of the cruelty of capitalism ‘red in tooth and claw’, remind them that Aberfan is what socialism looks like.

Lord Justice Edmund Davies was commissioned by the Secretary of State for Wales to investigate the disaster. His report (from which the facts in this article are largely derived) laid the blame for the disaster squarely with the ‘arrogant’ NCB, with Robens receiving severe personal criticism. Nonetheless, Robens was not sacked and did not resign. He remained chair of the NCB until 1971, following Labour losing power in the 1970 general election. Shockingly, in 1969, that darling of ‘Lexiteers’, post-liberals, and SDP twitter alike, Barbara Castle, commissioned Robens to chair a committee on occupational health and safety. Old King Coal (as he was known) issued his report in 1971, which led to the passing of Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 when Labour returned to power that year. The man whose spoil tip crushed 116 children to death is the man responsible for the creation the Health and Safety Executive.

This little episode from the peak of British socialism is now remembered only by women who have watched the Netflix show The Crown, in which the Royal Family’s bungled reaction to the disaster provides a source of drama for the third series. Beyond this, Aberfan has largely faded from memory, with one prominent local politician of Welsh descent recently admitting that they had never heard of it until asked. It is the sort of working class tragedy that could easily have been sacralised into the folk memory of the British left, much as the Hillsborough disaster decades later was, were it not so inescapably obvious that socialism itself was to blame.

For these reasons, Aberfan has played little role in shaping the psychological world of the left. But what does it have to tell us about Andy Burnham, and his personal political doctrine of ‘Manchesterism’?

Alf and Andy

Lord Robens was born plain old Alf Robens in 1910, in Chorlton-on-Medlock, a small Lancashire town that was slowly being absorbed into the Manchester conurbation. 50 years later, and 30 miles away, Andy Burnham was born in Aintree, another Lancashire village consumed by the suburban creep of a big city, this time Liverpool. Alf and Andy are popularly supposed to be of working-class origin; however, like many northern grandees of the Labour party, they were in fact raised within the provincial petite bourgeoisie: Alf’s father was a cotton salesman; Andy’s a telecoms engineer.

Here the order of Alf and Andy’s live becomes jumbled. Alf, who had joined the Cooperative Society as a clerk and quickly risen to become a director, was elected to Manchester City Council, now part of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority over which Andy presently presides as Mayor. Whilst Alf began his political career in the city politics of Manchester, it was national politics to which he aspired. In Labour’s landslide election victory of 1945, Alf was elected MP for a Northumbrian constituency he had no prior connection to, and rose rapidly through the ranks of the parliamentary Labour Party. Serving in government positions almost as soon as he was elected, his Parliamentary career culminated in a brief period of service in Attlee’s cabinet as Minister for Labour and National Service before Labour lost office at the 1951 general election. In opposition, he served as Shadow Foreign Secretary but was demoted by Attlee’s successor, Hugh Gaitskell, to Shadow Minister for Labour. Seeing no prospects for advancement under Gaitskell, in 1960 he accepted the well-remunerated position as Chairman of the NCB, resigning from the Commons and accepting a peerage.

Andy, on the other hand, came to Manchester politics only after his time in national politics. Graduating from Cambridge with a degree in English in 1991, he spent a couple of desultory years plugging away at trade-journalism (his sole job outside of politics), before landing a position as researcher to Labour MP Tessa Jowell in 1994. He remained as Jowell’s staffer until the Labour landslide in 1997, after which he took up a series of parliamentary roles before being appointed special adviser to Culture Minister Chris Smith. In 2001, he was rewarded with the safe Labour seat of Leigh to contest. Leigh, another ex-Lancashire town near Wigan now organised within Greater Manchester, was (like Alf’s Northumberland seat) a place with which Andy had no prior connection.

Andy’s ascent within the Parliamentary Labour party was no less rapid than Alf’s had been fifty-five years earlier, fulfilling a number of PPS positions almost immediately after entering Parliament, and achieving ministerial rank in the re-shuffle which followed the 2005 election. It is here that Andy’s career echoes Alf’s most resoundingly.

Attlee’s government, of which Alf had been part, created more than one three-lettered nationalised industrial behemoth. A little less than a year after the NCB was created, the NHS was born. Like the NCB, the NHS assumed control over a pre-existing infrastructure (of hospitals rather than mines) and sought to subject it to top-down control as part of the post-war socialist command economy. Whilst most of the nationalised institutions of the Attlee state did not survive the Thatcher-Major governments, the NHS endures. In an attempt to modernise that institution, the Blair government introduced a flagship policy of NHS Foundation Trusts — essentially, networks of hospitals which enjoyed greater autonomy from local and central government control. Andy, as a Minister of State for ‘Delivery and Reform’ at the Department of Health, was tasked with pushing the last remaining NHS hospital trusts towards ‘Foundation’ status.

During this time, the senior management of Mid-Staffordshire Hospital sought to build up cash surpluses in their budget in order to meet the financial requirements for Foundation status qualification. They did so through cutting staffing and services. Soon Mid Staffs was seeing mortality levels dramatically in excess of those to be expected in a hospital of its size. The relatives of patients raised concerns. Those concerns were haughtily ignored.

Andy was then promoted to the cabinet as Health Secretary. Between him and his predecessor in the position, 81 requests for an inquiry into mortality levels at Mid Staffs were rejected. Under mounting political pressure, Burnham eventually commissioned an independent investigation, but the appointed QC, Robert Francis, complained about the restricted scope he was given. It took the incoming Coalition Government to upgrade the investigation into a full public inquiry. Reminiscent of the Edmund Davies Report into Aberfan, the Francis Report was scathing of a secretive, imperious and unaccountable body, which was able to repeatedly ignore concerns expressed by the public, or bat them away with officious platitudes.

Following Labour’s defeat at the 2010 election, Burnham ran for the leadership of the Party. He achieved a pathetic 8.7% of votes (just one percentage point more than Diane Abbot) and was eliminated in the first round. He sat in the victorious Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet until Labour were defeated again at the 2015 election. He ran again as leader. This time he was trounced by left-wing firebrand Jeremy Corbyn, coming second with just 19% to Corbyn’s 60% of the vote. That might well have been the end of Burnham’s Prime Ministerial ambitions, if not his career as a whole. A Shadow Cabinet position under Corbyn kept him relevant, but such a platform rarely provides opportunities to overcome a reputation as a two-time loser. (Un)fortunately, the Tory Party, in its wisdom, established the Metro Mayors for several English Combined Authorities, giving Burnham a new lease on life as he took office in Greater Manchester. It was from this position, and especially during the COVID pandemic, that Andy found his calling: the King in the North; and his credo.

Manchesterism

In a superb recent article by anonymous Uranian writer and friend of Pimlico Journal ‘The Marquis’, the vacuity of ‘Manchesterism’ — an ostensible theory of political economy developed by Burnham as mayor of that town — is brilliantly exposed. ‘The Marquis’ is correct that Burnham’s achievements amount to him spending vast amounts of money within Manchester which were raised as taxes outside of Manchester. Burnham’s popularity in Manchester is akin to Father Christmas’ popularity among children. Unlike children, however, who eventually learn that their presents were really bought from shops by their parents rather than made by elves, Mancunians show no sign of growing up.

One of the great ironies of Burnham’s ‘achievements’ in Manchester is the extent to which they are simply the result of Tory policy. Regional devolution, and even the mayoralty he himself occupies, was a creation of George Osborne, as part of his long-forgotten ‘Northern Powerhouse’ strategy for regional development. The vast sums of money Burnham has deployed in Manchester were allocated by Tories, convinced of the belief that Manchester had to be artificially supported to ‘rebalance’ the British economy. It was under the Tories that the English National Opera was bullied into relocating to Manchester. Most notable, however, are the Tory fingerprints found on his flagship ‘Bee Network’ of bus and tram services. Manchester was granted the power to commission its own bus franchises (as Transport for London does) by Chris Grayling’s Bus Services Act 2017. Burnham’s singular contribution to Manchester’s transport network seems to be the decision to paint all the buses yellow.

Official logo of the ‘Bee Network’

Manchester itself provides a perfect encapsulation of the wider ‘devolution’ project of the British state: Potemkin units of local, regional or national government are created, with little or no power to raise revenue, but are allocated funds to spend by central government. The effect of this is to elevate local politicians as fonts of central government cash. They are popular with the public because, even if it isn’t their money, it is their name on the cheques. Any problems in their local, regional or national fief can be parsimoniously blamed on Westminster “austerity”. This game has been played very well be the SNP, by Welsh Labour, and by Sadiq Khan in London. But few have played it better than Burnham, who turned extraordinary Tory largesse against them, whilst using COVID as a means of extorting even more money from the centre, under the threat of refusing to implement lockdowns when demanded.

But is there anything to ‘Manchesterism’ besides spending other people’s money? There is — although not much. It is claimed by the prestige press that Burnham is the living incarnation of Labour’s ‘soft left’, as opposed to the more right-wing ‘Blue Labour’ as represented by the polytechnic lecturer Lord Glasman. The reality is that it is hard to distinguish between the two of them in policy terms. Burnham claims a desire to see re-industrialisation of Britain, and an increase in ‘democratic’ control over the British economy. He has specifically mentioned water, electricity, and the railways as targets for such extended controls. Yet his frequent citation of his silly yellow buses as a model to follow shows the hollowness of Burnham’s ‘left-wing’ agenda. All bus services in Manchester are privately operated, with their services regulated through franchises commissioned by Albert Square. Burnham does not advocate nationalisation, which would be disastrous, but would at least vindicate his claim to have broken with the Labour consensus of the past thirty years — instead, he believes private companies should deliver the state’s goals in a regulated environment — a position he shares with Glasman, Wes Streeting, Tony Blair, and basically every other Labour politician since 1995, with the exception of Jeremy Corbyn and five or ten of his closest comrades.

This is all insubstantial stuff, but no matter. ‘Manchesterism’ need not offer compelling solutions for real problems when it can instead offer a marginally alternative vibe to a party nauseous at the prospect of three more years of Starmer. Here, Burnham offers the same empty, nostalgic aesthetics adored by the Glasman tendency. Both men have a fixation with the gloomy, soot-caked Britain of the 1960s. Glasman, with his shabby demob suits and roll-up cigarettes. Burnham, with his (doubtless very expensive) imitation National Health spectacles, posing gloomily in black-and-white outside the Salford Lad’s Club in ‘unpretentious’ working-man’s dress.

Where Kier Starmer has no favourite poem, Burnham cites Philip Larkin’s ‘Mr Bleaney’. Initially appearing an odd choice, it is in fact perfectly apposite for Burnham. It is a poem about a desiccated, empty man, who after his death leaves nothing behind for posterity but the dated paraphernalia of the post-war era: football pools stubs; a preference for sauce over gravy; a souvenir ashtray. It may seem strange that two key figures on both sides of Labour’s internal divides should look back with longing on the era in which Britain was transformed from the world’s second military and economic power to a sick and diminished backwater; to the era of Aberfan. But then, of course, in that era, whilst Britain was at her weakest, the left was at its strongest. There was white wine and smoked salmon at No. 10 for the union grandees (or, as the press credulously reported, ‘beer and sandwiches’), there were plenty of ministries in Whitehall from which to order legions of civil servants about, and there were many more appointments as captains of (nationalised) industry for those with the right politics who played their cards right. Our blob runs conferences and seminars and talks of ‘online harms’; their blob ran steelworks, shipyards, and car factories. That, of course, is what ‘democratic’ control of the economy means: industry consolidated into unaccountable public behemoths, run by the beneficiaries of a system of political patronage.

The Labour Party has run to the end of a long experiment in a style of doing politics which has been found lacking. If there is one thing on which the entire Labour Party agrees, it is that being part of a Labour government — at least in the beginning — should feel a certain way. It should involve getting things done to make life better for your constituents, and it should produce some kind of adulation (or at least good feeling) among those constituents. But with no ideas left, and seemingly no power to make change happen, being part of this Labour government has felt very wrong indeed. Impotent, and feeling it, the attraction from these very different factions towards a moment in which, for better or for worse, politicians really had the power to determine outcomes rather than sitting stupidly as global events and technological change transform society around them, can be easily understood.

The problem, though, for Burnham — and, for that matter, for Glasman — is that these politicians did not simply want to be in control. Whatever you might wish to say about Attlee’s government and its failures, the people who built Britain’s socialist economy had definite ideas about how it should be run. The process of nationalisation itself was not the end — running the nationalised industries was, and every Labour minister had thoughts aplenty about how their sector of the economy should function in the interests of workers and the nation. Twenty years later, those heady days had faded, and those burning convictions had ebbed. By the time of Aberfan, Lord Robens, along with the rest of Britain’s socialist aristocracy, had come to view ‘democratic control’ as the independent end, forgetting the actual reason for pursuing nationalisation in the first place.

‘Manchesterism’ begins at the end. Even now, when it has yet to be born, it has nothing to say on how the various new levers of control it hints at should be deployed to improve outcomes; instead, it simply desires the moment in which they are established. The notion of ‘public control’ is fetishised, the purpose of it lost. And so, if Burnham does win his seat in Makerfield next month, and if he does launch and win a leadership challenge against Starmer, then perhaps that is what we should expect to see from his Premiership: a rapidly blooming constellation of oversight boards, working groups, and devolved administrations which understand that their role is to establish ‘business-friendly socialism’, but have little more idea than its progenitor what any of that actually means in operation. Aim for 1945, and even if you miss, you’ll end up in 1978.

Should one of these (business-friendly) socialist grandees, stumbling around in the dark as they seek to understand just what it is that makes Manchester so great, make a mistake and unleash an avalanche of coal on a primary school, to whom will they be accountable? To Andy? Not likely. No, there’s only one man who can serve as the people’s headsman here — and for the sake of the country, let’s hope he decapitates the snake in one month’s time, so he doesn’t have to deal with the hydra in three years.

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

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