In May 2025, when Keir Starmer was still prime minister, Labour politicians, campaigners and journalists gathered at the Ministry of Sound in London to watch a series of panel talks and presentations illuminated by the lucid glow of club lights. The day-long event was organised by a campaign group called Compass, and the subjects included child poverty, the Murdoch-owned media and the rise of the radical right.
“We felt as though the Labour government was failing, and needed to be pulled into the 21st century,” Neal Lawson, the founder of Compass, told me. The Starmer government’s support for the Conservatives’ two-child benefit cap, its equivocating stance on Gaza and its emulation of far-right rhetoric – crystallised in a speech on immigration, during which the prime minister suggested Britain risked becoming an “island of strangers” – were causing Labour supporters to rapidly desert their party. “The Starmer project was so obviously intellectually bankrupt. He was personally so disinterested in ideas and big thinking that I thought, this is never going to fly,” Lawson said.
At 4pm, the mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, got up on stage to deliver the closing address. “It’s the latest any Labour people have been in the Ministry of Sound on a Saturday,” he joked, cheerfully sweating under the lights. He spoke for 15 minutes, speeding up with excitement. Unlike Starmer, Burnham seemed to have a clear theory about the “dark and divided times” the country found itself in, identifying the long-term cause of Britain’s “modern malaise” as the privatisation of essential services, such as water and electricity, under Margaret Thatcher. Rather than mimicking the rhetoric of the right, he suggested that Labour should take concrete steps to improve voters’ lives, “things that matter to people every single day”.
The prospect that Burnham might replace Starmer seemed distant. He wasn’t an MP, and any route back to Westminster was unclear. But he was the most high-profile Labour politician to eloquently diagnose the causes of Britain’s widespread sense of political disenchantment and economic injustice, something that Starmer had never managed to do. “It wasn’t just the speech of a mayor of Manchester,” Lawson recalled. “It was the speech of someone who looked and sounded like they wanted to be prime minister.”
A few months later, Compass launched a new membership organisation, Mainstream, with the aim of funnelling leftwing ideas into a new Labour government. It wasn’t intended to be a campaign organisation for Burnham, Lawson told me, but it was “a happy coincidence”. Burnham signed its founding statement. As the political momentum for an alternative to Starmer increased, and as Burnham started to look like the only real contender, a small group of economists in London began working together to persuade him that, were he to become leader, he should make the unaffordability of everyday life his focus.
For years, Labour had prized economic growth as the main route to improve living standards. But economists such as Alfie Stirling, the director of policy at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF); Hannah Peaker, deputy CEO of the New Economics Foundation (NEF); and Carys Roberts, a former policy adviser to Starmer who had resigned in October 2025, argued that this approach was mistaken. The government didn’t have long enough until the next election to wait for growth to materialise, they believed, so it should try to improve people’s living standards now by intervening in the market to lower the cost of living. On 14 May 2026, the Labour MP for Makerfield, Josh Simons, announced he would be standing down and cleared the way for Burnham to run in a byelection. On the same day, the JRF and the NEF published coordinated research proposing a new system of rent controls. (The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), the thinktank where Roberts formerly worked, had published similar research a few days earlier.) “We were anticipating political movement,” Stirling told me. “And we wanted to make sure we were landing the right policies.”
Burnham seemed to take their message on board. In his first weeks as prime minister, he threw out a confetti of new announcements. He slashed energy bills and lowered bus fares. He pledged to end homelessness, to build more council housing, and to fix adult social care. “The mood is feeling so much more positive than most of the last year and a half in parliament,” the Labour MP and economist Yuan Yang said this month during a lecture she gave in London.
And, yet, owing to the way that Burnham became prime minister – with no leadership contest or general election manifesto – it’s difficult to tell how radical his government wants to be. Already, he has watered down the council housing announcement (60% of funding for new homes in England outside London will go to social housing, rather than all of it), backtracked on his intention to cap political donations at £500,000, and has stopped talking about “public ownership”, instead using the vaguer language of “public control”. His chancellor, John Healey, is not known as an economic thinker (during his first major speech, Healey spoke mostly about growth, sounding hardly different from his predecessor, Rachel Reeves). “Burnham is the master of vibes. He’s a figure who pops up with a positive story,” Karel Williams, an emeritus professor at the University of Manchester, whose economic thinking has been influential in Labour circles, told me. “It feels as though he’s become a screen on to which different Labour factions project their hopes, telling us more about what other people want to happen than what he might do.”
Nonetheless, Burnham styles himself as the most radical prime minister since Thatcher and has not backed away from his stated ambition to end 40 years of neoliberalism. His willingness to name her ideology suggests that, unlike Starmer, Burnham understands the importance of ideas in politics: having them, spreading them, making them seem like common sense. Many of the ideas that have guided Britain’s governments in the past half century have been produced by a small group of thinktanks within two miles of Westminster. “When there’s the prospect of a new Labour government, that machine goes into overdrive,” Mark McVitie, the co-founder of the Labour Growth Group, a caucus of MPs formed in 2024 with a self-described mission to “smash the status quo”, told me.
In the past few months, a deluge of ideas – some large, some small – have been suggested by people seeking to influence the government. Burnham could nationalise Thames Water, scrap the triple lock that protects state pensions, or put workers on company boards. He could rewrite the mandate of the Bank of England, ban Palantir from the NHS, or tax social media giants to rejuvenate local high streets. He could build the equivalent of London’s Elizabeth line in all of Britain’s major cities, introduce proportional representation or require all new bicycles to have built-in lights. Whether any of these ideas have a chance of becoming reality will become clear over the next few months, first with the publication of the budget, and then with the government’s 10-year plan for Britain. “Nothing is off the table,” one source close to Downing Street told me in August.
This summer, in the weeks after Burnham became prime minister, I began interviewing the small core of people who are trying to shape this agenda. Some have radical ideas about economic ownership, while others spend their lives thinking of ways to devolve political power away from London to Britain’s neglected cities and regions. But for all their different prescriptions, they agreed on one thing: the government can’t afford to wait if it is to have a chance against the threat of a globally resurgent right, funded by oligarchs who are hostile to democracy. “There’s a ticking clock with this,” McVitie said. “I talk about democratic breakdown. And my big fear is that tweaking the current model is not going to work. If you don’t break from the path you’re on, eventually, some form of that is going to arrive.”
One phrase that Burnham has repeated since becoming prime minister is that Britain’s great mistake has been privatising economic power and centralising political power. More than one person I spoke with attributed the phrasing to Mathew Lawrence, the founder of the thinktank Common Wealth. In June, he and the economist Alex Williams published a paper called The Productive State: A Framework for Manchesterism. It was intended as an alternative to a failed status quo.
“The Blair line was always ‘what matters is what works,’” Lawrence told me. “But is private equity really working to deliver social care? Have leveraged buyouts of the water industry really worked for rivers? Has the privatisation of energy really worked to deliver value for money or energy security?” Faced with the worst decade for living standards on record, the paper argued for a different kind of economy. It would be based upon a foundation of essential services delivered by publicly run corporations, a second tier of privately owned manufacturing and retail businesses, and a third tier of startups in industries such as AI and clean energy that would be regulated and supported by the government.
Lawrence, whose Dr Martens and scruffy beard cut a more casual impression than that of most policy advisers, is always having at least two conversations at once: one in person and another on the phone. I’ve known him for nearly a decade (we briefly shared a flat in 2020), and when we met recently, he took three calls in the space of 20 minutes: one from an MP, another from an MP’s special adviser and a third from a journalist. Although his research has been cited as an influence on Burnham, Lawrence has not been given a role in the new government (neither has Lawson, who helped write the script for Burnham’s byelection campaign video and advised him before he became prime minister). But Common Wealth certainly is influential. As secretary of state for energy security and net zero, Ed Miliband consulted its research when founding the publicly owned company Great British Energy, and Lawrence has since discussed the Productive State paper with the team of Miliband’s successor, Miatta Fahnbulleh.
In Britain, the world of leftwing policy ideas is really a small network of close friends and former colleagues. Fahnbulleh, who previously worked at the IPPR and was then chief executive at the NEF, has hired a number of people from the network into her department. Carys Roberts, formerly director of the IPPR, is her chief of staff. George Dibb, another IPPR alumnus, was seconded to Fahnbulleh’s department to advise on industrial strategy. Another influential thinker in this world is Arthur Downing, a friend of Lawrence who worked as an adviser in the energy department under Miliband. Today, Downing is a strategy director at Octopus Energy and author of a recent book arguing for public ownership of Britain’s energy networks. He recently founded a monthly discussion group called the Haldane Society – named after a hero of his, Thomas Haldane, a Scottish engineer who created one of the world’s first heat pumps – bringing together Westminster insiders and people working in the energy industry to discuss public ownership. “Privatisation is a form of self-loathing,” Downing said at a recent event. “It’s believing that your own government can’t own and operate assets that another state can.”
The thinkers surrounding the Burnham government share certain characteristics. They are mostly men who live in inner London, wear dark blazers over open-collared shirts, and write essays on Substack or for the New Statesman using phrases such as “dynamism” and “productivism”. Some of them have worked for MPs, some have spent most of their careers at thinktanks, and others have come up through what one described as the social media “posting to policy pipeline”. Many of them are under 40, and all of them bear the disappointment of having witnessed Labour finally win an election and then struggle to govern.
It’s possible to discern three distinct camps seeking to influence Burnham. The first, which is closer to Fahnbulleh and Miliband, draws on the more radical ideas of thinkers such as Lawrence and includes organisations such as Common Wealth and the NEF. Its central argument is that the privatisation of life’s essentials, including energy and social care, has created an affordability crisis that is driving up inflation, and that many of these assets should therefore be publicly owned.
The second camp is closer to Burnham’s powerful ally the first secretary of state, Louise Haigh, her adviser Nick Williams, and Josh Simons, the former Makerfield MP. It includes thinktanks such as the newly founded Centre for British Progress and the Good Growth Foundation. For this more centrist camp, the problem with Thatcherism has less to do with privatisation than the erosion of state capacity that resulted from it. “We rely on an army of consultants, lawyers and third-party providers”, because Britain has “forgotten how to build”, wrote David Lawrence, the co-founder of the Centre for British Progress, in a recent essay. The answer to Britain’s economic problems, according to this school of thought, lies in winnowing down the vast apparatus of regulations, particularly planning policies, that protect large and established companies, prevent startups from emerging, and are holding back a potential abundance of new homes and power plants.
Finally, there is a third, older camp of thinkers who might be called the communitarians; they have more power than either of the other two camps, since they hold key positions in No 10. Among them is James Purnell, Burnham’s chief of staff and one of his most trusted friends, and Purnell’s close friend Graeme Cooke, a former director of the IPPR, who is now director of Burnham’s No 10 policy unit. Newcomers to the Burnham government have been reading a 2010 essay that Purnell and Cooke wrote during a period of soul-searching after Gordon Brown lost the general election. They argued that New Labour had failed to develop a philosophy for what a good society looked like, one that rejected the paternalism of the state and put people in charge of their lives.
This month, Burnham hired an adviser named Marc Stears, an influential political theorist in this communitarian tradition. Stears is more concerned with political philosophy than the granular details of economic policy, and believes Labour’s major challenge has less to do with the minutiae of planning regulations or public ownership than with the need to renew people’s faith in politics. “For decades now, the professionalisation of political parties [has] generated a cult of expertise and detachment, a sense that ordinary people do not understand their own lives, that the fundamental aspects of their affairs are better run for them from on high,” he wrote in Out of the Ordinary, a wide-eyed study of English writers such as DH Lawrence and George Orwell that was published in 2021. He argued that what Britain needed most of all was a “thoroughgoing devolution of power”.
One challenge for the small army of thinkers trying to influence Burnham is that, unlike his predecessor, the prime minister is not a blank slate: he has strongly held principles, derived not from policy papers or Westminster advisers, but from his own experience of governing. At the heart of this is an approach that he has famously dubbed “Manchesterism”. In a speech he gave this March, Burnham defined this as a means of softening the harder edges of capitalism by combining economic growth with social progress. For the prime minister, Manchesterism is also, crucially, a vindication of the policy of devolving power away from London. (The Greater Manchester mayoralty, along with five other new “metro mayor” posts, was introduced in the 2010s under the Tories.)
The British media rarely covers cities outside London in great depth, and Burnham’s “ism” has generated its own micro-genre of commentary from journalists and policy experts using the city as a guide to what he might do as prime minister. Yet the idea of combining social and economic progress is hardly a radical philosophy. In that speech, Burnham likened Manchesterism to Benjamin Disraeli’s one nation Toryism. So what does it actually tell us about what the prime minister wants?
Burnham’s most high-profile achievement as mayor of Greater Manchester was the creation of the Bee bus network, the result of a deal that Richard Leese, the former leader of Manchester city council, agreed with George Osborne in 2014. Under Thatcher, England’s buses were effectively privatised in 1986, allowing companies to choose which routes to cover and how much to charge. This meant that from 1986 to 2019, the number of bus journeys in Greater Manchester dropped by nearly half. After Theresa May’s government passed the Bus Services Act in 2017, allowing England’s metro mayors to bring buses back into public control, Burnham was the first to use these new powers.
While the buses wouldn’t be fully run and owned by the state, the newly formed Transport for Greater Manchester now decides all the routes, timetables and fares, and operators bid for these contracts. Stagecoach and Rotala, two of Britain’s largest bus operators, took the mayor’s office to court, arguing that the decision was unlawful (the high court dismissed their challenge). “Getting this done was really, really hard work – for Andy in particular,” Leese told me. “He had to be very precise at all times in exactly what he said. One wrong step and Stagecoach and the others would have had us back in court. They were watching the commas.”
The sunflower yellow Bee network was launched in 2023 and burnished Burnham’s credentials as a savvy political salesman. His emphasis as mayor on regenerating communities outside the city centre and making Manchester more affordable, by pledging to build council housing and pressing employers to pay the living wage, has drawn retrospective comparisons to New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who introduced rent freezes, city-run grocery stores and free childcare to reduce the cost of living. But a number of people I spoke with worried that there would be limits to how much the Manchesterist approach could be applied at a national level.
This year, Haigh wrote a piece for Renewal – an influential centre-left journal published by Compass – setting out her arguments for economic change. It recommended a series of fiscal policy tweaks, but made no mention of public ownership, nor how to tangibly improve living standards in the here and now. Since then, Burnham has put Haigh in charge of a cabinet taskforce that will examine how to bring housing, energy, water and transport under “public control” rather than full-on state ownership. Lawrence, McVitie and other members in that first, more left-leaning camp around the prime minister are sceptical that the system of public control that worked for Manchester’s buses could ever work for England’s water system. England already has five separate regulators to police these companies, yet not one of them has managed to control the industry’s excesses. “We risk giving local leaders more responsibility for a system they don’t have the power to fundamentally change,” McVitie recently told the Guardian.
At her lecture in London this month, Yang, a former Financial Times journalist who has a government role in the Treasury, sketched out a vision for what Burnhamism might look like. “Many words have already been written about which isms might replace neoliberalism: Manchesterism, productivism, localism,” Yang said. “What interests me is not just the switch from one ideology to another, but the end of a neoliberal consensus, the idea that there’s one economic theory to rule them all.”
Yang falls somewhere between the first and second camp: she is a member of the Tribune group of moderate Labour MPs led by Haigh, but is also regarded as someone who has distinctively progressive ideas about the economy. In her lecture, she explained that Manchesterism is about places being able to make choices for themselves. But if power is further devolved to individual regions, she admitted, “there are some regions with Reform mayors [who] will pursue quite different economic structures”, perhaps by pursuing “light-touch regulation and financial services”. If this is the case, a Manchesterist approach to running the UK government wouldn’t represent the end of neoliberalism so much as the beginning of an experiment in letting hundreds of municipal flowers bloom. From Labour’s perspective, some of those flowers would probably turn out to look more like weeds. Yang struck a hopeful, but uncertain note: “I think we have to be really quite brave about admitting that there’s a significant amount of uncertainty about how different regions will pursue their different methods.”
The world of policy debate and thinktank research can sometimes feel very insular. These organisations have such similar names – Compass, Mainstream, Tribune, Renewal, Progress, Common Wealth, the Productivity Institute, the Future Governance Forum, the New Economics Foundation – that only an insider could be expected to keep them straight. Since he became prime minister, Burnham’s big idea has been to challenge the notion that politics is something that only happens among a small clique in a couple of square miles in central London. In late June, he announced the creation of No 10 North. It is currently located in a sleekly refurbished 1980s office block opposite Manchester’s Victorian town hall. The vibe is more casual than Downing Street: inside, there are break-out rooms and open-plan offices. Some ministers hot desk. When I passed the building on a sunny Friday evening in August, two police officers were guarding its entrance. A passerby asked what was inside, and one of them replied: “No 10 North,” with a shrug and a smirk, as if to say: me neither.
No 10 North could be remembered in a few years as just a gimmick, but it could also turn into one of Burnham’s most consequential policies. It is partly a means of wresting power back from the Treasury in London, which is often accused of blocking investment in the north. Civil servants responsible for local growth are being relocated into a new government department called the Office of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, which will be led by Haigh. The idea for such a department originated in a paper produced by the Future Governance Forum, which argued for a new centre of executive power within No 10. “You need a centre that is strong enough that it can give different government departments a direction on devolution they can’t ignore,” Jack Shaw, who runs a small thinktank called Groundwork, told me. “Paradoxically, in order to get the most out of devolution, Burnham needs a more powerful centre.”
Many of the thinkers most excited by Burnham’s devolution plans are people like Shaw, a 33-year-old from Dagenham who has spent many years working on these ideas at smaller thinktanks, including IPPR North. Shaw belongs to a WhatsApp group of 120 devolution experts, which pinged with excited messages when the government recently published an ambitious statement called Rewiring the State. The statement laid out the cabinet’s plans to give local leaders greater control over income taxes, skills, transport and public services. Its policies reflected ideas that have circulated for decades, but its timeframe – many of these policies will come into effect over the next two years – suggested a new sense of urgency. “It was like Christmas for devo wonks,” Shaw told me. “It’s the most radical document in devolution policy that we’ve seen. And I don’t use ‘radical’ lightly.”
Burnham sees devolution not just as a technical policy challenge, but as a moral imperative. The received wisdom among politicians and civil servants has long been that people care far more about the NHS and other national services than they do about their councils. But the erosion of the public realm has exposed the flaws in this thinking. It is, after all, local government that is responsible for litter, high streets and many of the services that people interact with in their everyday lives. The all-too-visible decline in these areas has fostered a widespread disillusionment. “We now have a hollowed-out local state combined with soulless, top-down public services,” Burnham said in a 2025 speech. “That is becoming, in my view, a toxic combination. Citizens no longer trust these systems to improve their lives.”
One initiative that Burnham launched as Manchester mayor shows what an antidote to this might look like. In 2023, the city created three new community health hubs that offer people healthcare and employment advice in their neighbourhoods. Instead of funnelling people through the NHS or DWP, these “Live Well” hubs connect them with local charities and community organisations. They’re an attempt to instil what Burnham, quoting Pope Francis, has called a “culture of encounter”, where the local state works alongside organisations that people already trust, and listens to their needs. “Live Well captures the sense that being a part of our community, being tied to people around you, having relationships of mutual obligation and reciprocity, is the stuff of life,” said Rich Bell, the director of We’re Right Here, a team that has been meeting with No 10 advisers about devolution. “I think Burnham, in his gut, feels the need to directly empower people and communities,” Bell told me. “But I have concerns that these ways of working are quite alien to the state, and to the Labour party in general.”
If the central idea of Manchesterism or indeed Burnhamism is devolving power away from Westminster, the prime minister will have to confront a deep-rooted anxiety in the UK. Writing about the fragility of the British state in the 1970s, the historian Tom Nairn noted Westminster’s resistance to constitutional change: rising Scottish and Welsh nationalism were always seen in London as “destructive forces” that needed to be managed. Labour, too, is inclined towards hoarding power. “The party was born in an age of industrialised, mechanical, top-down, Fordist empire,” Neal Lawson told me. “That’s its culture. And old-school Labourism is monopolistic, controlling, ‘we know best’.”
For Patrick Diamond, a professor at Queen Mary University of London, who worked in Downing Street under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the Labour party’s controlling tendencies mean it is inclined to worry about the political consequences of devolution. “There’s a fear that if decision makers outside the centre do things that are unpopular or incompetent, that will boomerang back to the centre.” One episode has already illustrated the political headaches that might come for Burnham and his new devolutionary settlement when Ben Houchen, the Conservative mayor of the Tees Valley, said he would use any new share of income tax he was given by Burnham’s reforms to fund tax rebates, rather than spend it on programmes a Labour government might prefer.
In the past two centuries, every politician armed with grand ideas that managed to change Britain did so through the central state. Reforming Labour governments, such as Clement Attlee’s and Harold Wilson’s, relied on Whitehall’s powerful bureaucracies. Thatcher recognised that her free-market reforms depended on the existence of a strong state that could police opposition, including restive trade unions and Labour-led councils. Tony Blair once said: “If you want to drive through systemic change, you’ve got to drive it through from the centre.” Burnham has said he wants economic change, but it’s unclear how this will be achieved by giving power away to people who may not share this desire. “Just because you devolve something, doesn’t mean you’ll get what you want,” Andrew O’Brien, who leads the Reindustrialisation Research Group, a caucus of Labour MPs that is pushing the government to revitalise manufacturing, told me.
Burnham hopes that devolving power will improve Britain’s economy and drive “growth in every postcode”. “There are really strong rationales for this,” Diane Coyle, a professor of public policy at Cambridge who co-authored a report whose policies were credited with spurring Manchester’s 21st-century revival, told me. “But I think every ‘postcode’ is overambitious. It’s not going to happen at that granularity, because some places will mess it up.” In Greater Manchester, the economic benefits of devolution have been uneven. The average rent in central Manchester is now at least 200% higher than housing benefits. Outer boroughs such as Oldham and Rochdale are as far removed from central Manchester as Dagenham is from Belgravia.
Not long before Burnham became mayor, Howard Bernstein, the former chief executive of Manchester city council, told him that the real test of devolution “will be judged by what it can do for Oldham and Rochdale”. In late August, the leader of economic development at Rochdale council took me on a drive around Atom Valley, where the council is attempting to attract a cluster of high-value manufacturing businesses that produce things such as batteries for electric vehicles and fibre-based alternatives to plastic. The government has funded a research and development centre for manufacturing techniques, an attractive glass and steel building in the creases of the Lancashire hills.
Atom Valley could be an example of what the grand talk of ending neoliberalism and new economic models looks like in practice: government-backed manufacturing, focused on the industries of the future. The council officer told me excitedly about the 20,000 jobs that the businesses one day housed at Atom Valley would create. I wanted to believe him. But as it has become more advanced and automated, the number of people employed in manufacturing has shrunk, while postindustrial towns have been transformed into hubs of logistics warehouses and low-waged care work. “The political classes, for statecraft reasons, want to restore growth, because it would make it so much easier to manage everything,” Karel Williams told me. “But they can’t restore growth because the good jobs that were partly responsible for growth aren’t coming back.” Williams told me about Ambition North Wales, a regional initiative that is supposed to create 4,200 new jobs by 2036, including roles in advanced manufacturing. After five years, it has produced just 63 full-time roles.
Next week, Burnham will give his first speech at Labour’s annual party conference since becoming prime minister. Not long after that, the budget will be announced. People will be watching anxiously to see whether the rhetoric of Burnham meets reality. Undoing decades of economic privatisation and political centralisation can hardly be accomplished in what remains of Labour’s parliamentary term. But the job of building a more visible and democratic state, one that is rooted in place, is something that Burnham understands needs to start now. It may sound wildly idealistic. It may not work. But if anything is to really change, perhaps Britain will need to relearn how to govern itself.
