Given the fuss you might have thought Andy Burnham had proposed moving No 10 to the moon. When he becomes Prime Minister, Burnham has suggested he wouldn’t spend all his time in Downing Street. Instead, he envisages governing for part of the week from Manchester, from a Northern extension of No 10.
The response to this in some quarters has been little short of hysterical.
How will the government function? What about civil servants? Cabinet meetings? Diplomats? Security? Tradition? The suggestion has been dismissed as a gimmick, an cynical exercise in political symbolism that would achieve little but cause lots of problems and create inefficiency and unnecessary costs. There are a few things we learn immediately from these responses.
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Firstly, it is a clear illustration of just how the machinery of the British state remains physically bolted to SW1. More importantly, it demonstrates exactly why Mr Burnham is right to pursue it.
Successive governments have spent decades insisting they want to rebalance the economy, decentralise power and strengthen England’s great city regions. The language of devolution appears frequently in manifestos. Every Prime Minister promises to govern on behalf of the whole country.
Of course, it hasn’t worked out like that in practice, and the angry reaction to the suggestion that a future PM might actually spend some meaningful time governing somewhere other than London, is perhaps illustrative of why. The backlash tells us something really important. It’s a demonstration of the deep-rooted orthodoxies that Mr Burnham will have to overcome if he’s serious about relocating political power. The knee-jerk assumption that government can only properly happen within a few streets of Parliament reveals just how deeply centralisation is embedded in Britain’s political culture.
After all, Whitehall is an old power and is very good at keeping that power. If merely changing where the Prime Minister occasionally works provokes this level of anxiety, imagine the resistance to moving departments, agencies, investment or influence on any meaningful scale.
In that sense, the criticism rather proves Mr Burnham’s point. For all the talk of devolution, Britain remains one of the most centralised democracies in the developed world. Power is located in a few streets. Geography has become inseparable from that power.
That’s a fairly extraordinary thing to still be happening in the twenty-first century.
People on Westminster Bridge in London(Image: Ben Whitley/PA Wire)
No 10 Downing Street will, of course, remain the seat of government. No one is suggesting otherwise. Parliament will still sit in Westminster. Foreign leaders will still visit London.
The proposal is simply that the country’s most senior politician might spend part of the week governing from another part of the nation he is elected to serve.
In the age of secure communications, encrypted networks and digital government, the idea that every significant conversation must happen within walking distance of the Treasury feels increasingly antiquated.
Businesses manage international operations across continents. Military commanders oversee operations from thousands of miles away. Governments routinely conduct diplomacy across time zones. Yet apparently Britain cannot survive if the Prime Minister catches the Avanti train to Manchester once a week.
Journalist Kay Burley posted thoughtfully on X about recent polling from YouGov that showed Britain was evenly divided on Burnham’s proposal to not live permanently in London. But her concern was more about security. What happens if there is a COBRA meeting at three in the morning?
It is a fair question. But it rests on an assumption: that government can only function properly in a crisis from Westminster.
No 10 is more than a famous front door and a cat, it’s an operational headquarters, designed to bring together key people during moments of national crisis. In an age of heightened security threats, from cyberattacks to terrorism, surely the Prime Minister needs to be at the centre of that operation rather than 200 miles away? At first glance this sounds compelling. On closer inspection, however, it once again demonstrates the assumption that government can only function within the boundaries of Westminster.
Besides which, modern government doesn’t really operate that way anymore. A Prime Minister can be overseas when a terror attack happens. They can chair meetings remotely and use secure communications to speak with military commanders and police. Few would seriously suggest Britain ceases to be governable because the Prime Minister is attending a NATO summit, a G7 meeting or a diplomatic visit abroad.
The polling is revealing though. According to YouGov, support for Burnham continuing to use his Manchester home as his principal residence stands at 37 per cent compared with 33 per cent opposed. A huge proportion of people simply ‘don’t know’, which you could argue means they don’t care. In short, the panic says more about the assumptions of the media/political class than it does about the proposal itself and what ordinary people think about it. We’ve seen this film before.
MediaCityUK
When the BBC started to move their operations North fifteen years ago there was a remarkably similar chorus of anxiety. Critics warned that serious broadcasting would suffer, that top talent would refuse to relocate, that high-profile guests would not travel north and that one of Britain’s great national institutions would somehow be diminished by operating outside London. Much of the debate became consumed by practical questions about executives moving house, commuting arrangements and whether the BBC could really function with so much activity taking place 200 miles from Broadcasting House.
Once again the underlying message was that a serious national institution could simply not survive outside of London.
Looking back, that all seems rather quaint and silly now.
MediaCity became one of Britain’s most successful creative experiments. Thousands of jobs followed, independent production flourished, flagship programmes relocated without viewers noticing any discernible decline in quality. Far from undermining the BBC, the move arguably made it a better reflection of the country it serves.
The message from that process was a simple one that critics of Burnham’s plan to shift the focus of government north should note: excellence and competence are not geographically fixed.
Westminster is a self-contained eco-system. Politicians, advisers, journalists and lobbyists all occupy the same streets, the same pubs and the same restaurants. It’s where the country does business. It’s a bubble. If these professionals have to spend more time outside of that bubble, in order to follow the PM, would it really do them any harm?
Some commentators have slammed Burnham’s plans as mere symbolism. As though symbols don’t matter as a guide to intention. In fact those symbols are often the first step towards changing institutions.
For generations, ambitious people have been encouraged to believe that if they want to shape Britain they must move to London. Businesses have followed investment south. Institutions have clustered around Whitehall because Whitehall is where influence resides. Centralisation becomes self-perpetuating. Changing that perception could lead to a genuine change in society.
If you look around the world Britain remains the exception rather than the rule. Governments elsewhere routinely decentralise departments, agencies and political activity. Whereas in Britain, London is not merely seen as the capital, it’s often treated as though it were the country itself. And what of the claims that somehow Burnham’s decision to relocate power would make the government less efficient or cause chaos?
Well, disrupting how Whitehall currently operates is, at least in part, the point. It’s not necessarily the case it will become more inefficient.
Andy Burnham(Image: Getty Images)
Burnham’s entire political argument is that Britain has become over-centralised, that too much economic, political and administrative power has accumulated in one corner of one city. If critics respond by insisting that the government simply cannot function unless everything remains concentrated in London, they are not really rebutting Burnham’s argument; they’re making it for him.
Indeed, the backlash itself may be the clearest indication yet of how difficult meaningful decentralisation will prove.
That is not to say that the argument Burnham is making is without problems. It is focused on a North that is just Manchester. Moving to two centres of power is a start, but other large city-regions would be right to ask: what about us? There are cost implications of course, and the detail is really vague at this point. The announcement that the respected Greater Manchester CEO Caroline Simpson will be running operations at No 10 north is a serious statement of intent, but there will need to be much more meat on the bones of the idea before it starts to happen.
These moves, if they come to pass, will not do so without some bumps in the road. But Burnham’s point is a valid one, certainly from those who have watched successive governments promise the earth and deliver little. You cannot endlessly preach decentralisation while treating any practical expression of it as constitutional heresy. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to rebalancing Britain is not economics, infrastructure or even legislation. It is a deeply ingrained belief that power only counts if it is exercised from London.
Until that instinct changes, every promise to decentralise will remain constrained by a political and media class that cannot quite imagine governing from anywhere else.