There would be a “No. 10 North” in Manchester, he told us. There would be the biggest council house building programme since the post-war era. Whitehall would surrender power to England’s regions. Technical education would sit alongside universities as an equal route to opportunity.<\/p>\n
Each of these announcements was huge in its own way. Yet to see the speech as some sort of manifesto pitch, a collection of policy pledges, would be to miss the real significance. This was much bigger. The likely next Prime Minister was not just setting out a programme for his future government, he was attempting something significantly more ambitious: he was offering a radical alternative vision of how Britain should be governed.<\/p>\n
There was an irony that hung over the speech, as there often is in politics.<\/p>\n
A decade ago Mr Burnham walked away from Westminster after concluding he could achieve more as Mayor of Greater Manchester than he ever could as a cabinet minister. On Monday he made the argument that the rest of Britain should now learn from the city he chose over Westminster. In political terms, that is an extraordinary reversal.<\/p>\n
The central argument of the speech was deceptively simple, but has potentially profound constitutional implications.<\/p>\n
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(Image: Peter Byrne\/PA Wire)<\/p>\n
Britain’s economic malaise, stagnant productivity and declining living standards are not just the consequence of poor policy choices or underinvestment. They are the product of a state that has become too centralised, too fragmented and too disconnected from the places it seeks to govern.<\/p>\n
If Britain is to become more prosperous, Burnham argued, it must first become less centralised.<\/p>\n
This is not an unusual argument to hear from Greater Manchester, but as a pitch to the country this sounded like arguably the first new coherent constitutional programme in a generation.<\/p>\n
For much of the last decade, British politics has been dominated by arguments about Brexit, immigration, taxation and public services. It still is. Burnham’s intervention seeks to move the debate onto different terrain altogether. His contention is that Westminster, and Whitehall in particular, have become the problem.<\/p>\n
Politicians love a villain, whether it\u2019s austerity or globalisation or immigration, or fourteen years of Conservative government. Burnham\u2019s is Whitehall culture.<\/p>\n
Departments compete rather than collaborate. The Treasury hoards power. Councils are left unable to repair roads, let alone transform local economies. Britain, he argues, has become trapped in a model where growth is expected to trickle down from London, despite decades of evidence that it rarely does.<\/p>\n
Put succinctly: the state isn\u2019t too big or too small, but it is in the wrong place.<\/p>\n
Mr Burnham didn\u2019t invent devolution, of course. The rest of England has spent the past quarter-century searching for a way to escape the gravitational pull of Westminster.<\/p>\n
Tony Blair’s experiment with elected regional assemblies collapsed almost before it began. George Osborne resurrected the cause through the Northern Powerhouse and metro mayors. Boris Johnson rebadged it as Levelling Up. Burnham’s speech represents the next stage of that evolution with a proposal to redesign the machinery of the British state itself.<\/p>\n
Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse recognised that Britain’s economy had become dangerously unbalanced and that cities outside London needed greater powers if they were to drive national growth. Burnham was one of the beneficiaries of this policy.<\/p>\n
As Greater Manchester’s first directly elected mayor, he inherited powers over transport, housing, policing and elements of health policy that no previous local politician had enjoyed.<\/p>\n
But Burnham didn’t just inherit devolution he legitimised it. When metro mayors were first proposed, many dismissed them as little more than another layer of bureaucracy. Nine years later, Greater Manchester’s mayor has become one of the most recognisable political figures in Britain outside Westminster.<\/p>\n
Burnham’s own political journey is inseparable from the success of the office itself.<\/p>\n
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MP for Makerfield and former Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham(Image: Getty Images)<\/p>\n
At first glance, Burnham’s speech on Monday appeared to be breaking decisively with the recent past. Yet many of the foundations of his thinking owe an intellectual debt to the Northern Powerhouse agenda established under George Osborne.<\/p>\n
Both reject excessive centralisation. Both see cities and regions as engines of productivity. Both argue that economic growth cannot be commanded from Whitehall.<\/p>\n
Now, Burnham thinks it could work for Britain as a whole.<\/p>\n
A made in Manchester idea, ‘Manchesterism’, that he says will transform the lives of people everywhere.<\/p>\n
There is a key difference between Mr Burnham\u2019s plans and those of his successors in terms of devolution. This time the power, rather than being delegated from Whitehall, will shift to where it can be most effective.<\/p>\n
The symbolism of a “No 10 North” should not be underestimated. England has, for centuries, been governed through one overwhelmingly dominant political centre. That London. Burnham’s proposal suggests something closer to the federal traditions found elsewhere in Europe, particularly Germany, whose constitutional commitment to equivalent living conditions across regions he explicitly referenced.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the big question that everyone should be asking following the speech is whether in this case the doctor has got the patient’s diagnosis correct.<\/p>\n
Is Britain\u2019s problem really one of institutional design, or are there deeper rooted problems that centralism merely reflects? Another question is whether or not these bold aims are politically achievable.<\/p>\n
Whitehall is an old seat of power, wise in its ways of holding onto that power – it will not relinquish it easily.<\/p>\n
What are the spending implications of all this, would be another question. If regions have more power, who becomes accountable when things go wrong?<\/p>\n
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