As a politician with a knack for good branding, Andy Burnham has garbed himself in the iconography of the city he leads, dubbing his political and economic philosophy “Manchesterism.”

Precisely what that means, though, depends on who you ask.

Some take Manchesterism to be a by-word for the city region’s services-driven, post-industrial economic model — one that’s seen it buck a trend of sclerotic U.K. growth, attract huge private investment into the city center with its gleaming new tower blocks, and become “the star performer of the U.K. economy since 2008,” according to research firm Oxford Economics.

And yet for Burnham, who hopes to ride his local popularity back to Westminster and perhaps into No. 10 Downing Street, it means something more. In his telling, growth only matters if it is translated — by City Hall or, if he becomes prime minister, by parliament — into tangible benefits for every citizen. Manchesterism is “the end of neoliberalism, the end of trickle-down economics,” he said in the campaign video launching his by-election bid to become MP for Makerfield and a successor to the unpopular Labour leader Keir Starmer.

But there’s a third meaning, vital to Burnham’s political brand. In a country seething with resentment against Westminster and politics-as-usual, ‘Manchesterism’ is code for ‘not-Westminsterism.’

It’s a mantra, close allies say, that allows him to run as an insurgent, challenging the Westminster and Whitehall status quo with a pledge to take power out of London, spread it around the country, and — they hope — steal a march on another set of political insurgents: Nigel Farage’s Trump-inspired Reform UK, currently ahead in the polls and on track to win a national election expected in 2029.

At “the heart” of so-called Manchesterism, said Louse Haigh, the Labour MP, former Cabinet minister and co-manager of Burnham’s campaign, “is devolution.”

Boom town

In Manchester at least, many voters have some cause to feel warmly disposed toward Burnham. Whether it was down to him or not, the city is booming.

Oxford Economics’ report, published earlier this month, found its growth “has not only been impressive within the U.K., but also internationally” with central Manchester employment growth “in the top five in Europe since 2008.”

Jim O’Neill — a former minister, former chief economist at Goldman Sachs, and chair of Manchester-based investment firm Northern Gritstone — compares the city’s long-term economic trajectory, from post-industrial decline to services-led success fueled by a thriving university research base, to that of Boston in the second half of the 20th century.

But the story “pre-dates Andy,” he said, and rested on political and policy stability over many years. Howard Bernstein, who served as chief executive of Manchester City Council from 1998 to 2017, is regarded by many in Manchester as the “chief author” of the city’s revival, as online newspaper the Manchester Mill put it upon his death in 2024.

Nonetheless, Burnham “managed to take it further with great passion” after becoming the first mayor of the city region’s combined authority in 2017, O’Neill said.

The most visible legacy of his tenure has been the popular public takeover of Greater Manchester’s bus and tram network (the highly-visible, heavily-branded, £2 per ticket Bee Network.)

Buoyed by its success, Burnham’s Manchesterism now advocates “public control” for other “basics of life” including energy and water — although his team are hazy about what this would mean applied nationally.

That rhetoric is also seemingly at odds with the business-friendly environment that has prevailed in Greater Manchester and helped attract billions in foreign investment from the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong and the U.S.

“This idea that Andy’s soft left, which obviously politically he’s playing on, doesn’t really resonate with what’s happening in Manchester,” noted O’Neill. “They’ve attracted a lot of private sector money.”

But Burnham has characterized Manchesterism as a best of both worlds, open to globalized private investment flows but not squeamish about active public sector intervention when deploying the proceeds of growth locally.

“A lot of the growth comes from the city center in Manchester,” acknowledged Haigh, Burnham’s campaign co-manager. “But then the proceeds of that are able to be distributed across Greater Manchester, that’s why they’ve been able to invest in additional bus services here, it’s why they’ve been able to invest in in police officers to help drive the crime rates down.”

Allies also point to the largest decline in inner city deprivation anywhere in the country since 2010 — although Oxford Economics’ report noted that the city-led growth model had “failed to translate into meaningful improvements in living standards” for parts of Greater Manchester outside the thriving city center. The wider region’s disposable income growth, averaging just 0.6 percent per year since 2008, was actually behind the national average of 0.7 percent, their report found.

The contrast between the realities of Manchester’s growth and Burnham’s rhetoric are starting to be noticed. The New Statesman magazine, influential among the Labour members who will have to back Burnham should there be a leadership contest, ran a critique on Monday headlined: “Manchesterism is not socialism.” The pro-market Financial Times, meanwhile, has said the U.K. needs “real ‘Manchesterism’— not the version Burnham supporters appear to think he represents.”

Control trip

When it comes to his national agenda, Burnham uses the term “public control” of energy and other utilities rather than ‘public ownership’ “advisedly and specifically,” insisted Haigh. In other words, he doesn’t mean nationalization. “It’s about tougher regulations, tougher sanctions,” Haigh argued.

But some in the private sector worry that what works for Manchester’s bus network won’t work for a country’s utilities; least of all energy, the biggest and most economically important sector in Burnham’s sights.

“I think most likely this is cosplaying at nationalization and public ownership, when the political reality is there is very little financial space to do this at scale,” said one senior energy industry figure, speaking on condition of anonymity to give a frank assessment.

Depending on the precise policy proposal, public investment to bring parts of the energy system under direct public control would be “vast in terms of the sums required — tens and tens and tens of billions,” the same person said.

But in using the language of “control,” Burnham is also invoking one of the most powerful anti-elite phrases in British political history: “Take Back Control,” the slogan of the Vote Leave campaign which triumphed in the 2016 Brexit referendum.

A Remainer who has talked about wanting to see the U.K. back in the EU in his lifetime, Burnham has nonetheless recognized the Brexit vote as a cry for change from voters clobbered by years of stagnating living standards — and promised not to “re-run” Brexit arguments if he becomes prime minister. Indeed, he’s even prepared to steal some of the Vote Leave campaign’s tunes.

“To us, ‘Take Back Control’ didn’t stop with powers brought back to Westminster from Brussels,” wrote Burnham in ‘Head North,’ a 2024 book penned alongside his friend and political ally, Liverpool City Region Mayor Steve Rotheram.

“It also meant neglected places in the North being able to do much more for themselves, such as re-regulate buses and build council houses.”

It’s a process that Burnham would take further if he made it to No. 10, said Haigh.

“The U.K. is one of the most centralized countries,” she said. “Andy believes in that principle that … decisions about people’s lives should be made as close to as close to them as possible.”

She and Burnham’s team avoided making many specific policy commitments, but the ‘Head North’ book contains some eye-catching proposals.

Burnham and Rotheram suggested replacing the U.K.’s unelected revising chamber, the House of Lords, with an elected “Senate of the Nations and Regions” partly made up of “people from places and professions that have traditionally been neglected by Parliament.” It could be done as soon as the next national election, due in 2029, they said. The book also talks about devolving powers held in Whitehall to enable local regions to take control of their own policies for getting the unemployed back into work.

A Burnham premiership, O’Neill predicts, would mean the transfer of “more than a bit of power” from Whitehall to local regions.

“Having some awareness of where Andy’s mind is, and his people … Whitehall and Westminster is going to get a bit of a shock,” he said.

But is devolution and constitutional reform really going to be enough to cool the seething discontent on Britain’s streets, where parents now wearily expect their kids to be worse off than them, and the country never seems more than a few days away from another explosion of rage from the far-right fringe?

“Delivery has to follow,” said Seb Wride, head of polling at Public First, which has run focus groups on Burnham and the Makerfield by-election alongside POLITICO. “People have to draw a line from ‘Burnham said this, in response to what I’m experiencing’ to ‘this is the thing that I can now see has got better in my local area’.”

“If he can’t do that, then he’ll be immediately tarred with the same brush as the rest of them — someone that didn’t get anything done.”

In that scenario, Wride says, despairing voters will likely conclude: “‘We’re going to give Reform a whirl.’”

King of the North

Still, for Burnham, the localism agenda represents the “the Left’s only viable answer to the radical Right” — or so he and Rotheram put it in ‘Head North.’

“Whether we like it or not, Donald Trump and Nigel Farage have been effective in connecting with people who feel politicians have neglected the place where they live; who feel that politicians focus on issues affecting other families but not theirs,” the pair wrote in the book.

They also note clear parallels between the U.S. and the U.K. experience of disillusionment with the national politics driven from the center in Washington and Westminster.

Both countries faced “higher levels of inequality than the rest of the developed world,” both saw a “new radical Right … exploiting the alienation that comes from it” — and both have an out-of-touch left-progressive establishment that is “not speaking directly to the concerns of working-class voters.”

“Kamala Harris’s endorsements from celebrities seemed only to succeed in emphasizing a connection to the elite rather than a preoccupation with everyday issues,” they wrote, days after Donald Trump’s re-election.

Burnham is closer to another U.S. Democrat, who also made his name as a mayor: Pete Buttigieg. The pair have known each other for some years and Buttigieg’s 2019 diagnosis that “the Reagan neo-liberal era is now over” chimes with Burnham’s own. Buttigieg “thinks highly of him,” and the pair have stayed in touch, according to one person familiar with the relationship.

According to Haigh, it is that experience of being a mayor — far from the machinations of Westminster — that has reconnected Burnham with the so-called “everyday issues,” that Democrats in the U.S. failed to address in 2024.

“Politicians hear the same things day after day on the door, we know what the top issues are, facing people’s lives,” she said. “It’s anti-social behavior in people’s communities, it’s the state of the roads, it’s poor public transport.”

Now, Burnham wants to somehow make localism national.

“It is almost a form of populist messaging to talk about Manchesterism,” said Wride, the pollster. “It focuses eyes on the locality of what he’s doing, and I think people are typically more proud of their local areas, they’re typically more warm to the people around them.”

At the national level, though, Wride noted it may not work as well.

“He can’t be as locally present, he can’t do things that are as tangible,” he said. “That’ll be the biggest challenge that he’ll face when it comes to public sentiment about him.”