The Economics of Andy Burnham

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0:32Adam Tooze: Hi, and welcome to Ones and Twos, FP's economics podcast. Every week we take a couple data points, use them to try to explain the world. I'm Cameron Abadi, FP's deputy editor with you in FP's headquarters in Washington, D.C. Joining us, as always, is Adam Tooze, FP's economics columnist and Columbia University professor, this week in Berlin, Germany. Hi, Adam.

0:54Cameron Abadi: Hi, Kevin. So, we have one data point for you all this week, and that is 12%.

1:02Adam Tooze: That is the rate at which inflation-adjusted productivity rose in the city of Manchester between 2004 and 2022. Now, during the last five of those years, the mayor of Manchester was Andy Burnham, and Burnham, of course, as of this week, is prime minister of the entirety of Great Britain. Britain has got yet another Prime Minister. Andy Burnham has entered Downing Street to become Britain's sixth Prime Minister in seven years. The UK's Labour Party has announced a new leader. Former Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, who is already setting...

1:37Cameron Abadi: Britain needs to show the world that we can regain our stability once again.

1:45Adam Tooze: And he's taking office, promising to apply the social democratic economic program that he oversaw in Manchester to the country as a whole, hopefully with similarly positive results. He calls that economic program Manchesterism. And that is a term with a long history, but it's a history that in some ways represents the opposite of what Burnham claims for it today. In the 19th century, Manchesterism was the term for the school of economics that accompanied Manchester's rise as the quintessential city of industrialism and of industrialism's social problems like pauperism and destitution, and also of industrialism's emblematic politics like poor houses for those paupers, but also free trade.

2:28Adam Tooze: We thought we would take a look at what exactly Manchesterism was and what it's become today and what the connection between the two might be. And to start off with Adam, what exactly was the original Manchester School of Economics? And apparently it earned the label Manchesterism by way of German writers who meant it as something of a pejorative insult. So how did that come about in the first place?

2:52Cameron Abadi: Well, first of all, I think we have to understand the city itself and its place in modern history, no less. Manchester is, 19th century Manchester, at least, was a world historic site. I mean, if arguably the secular Enlightenment was triggered into its polemics in the 1750s by the earthquake in Lisbon and the French Revolution has its epicenter in Paris in 1789, Manchester is the preeminent city of the Industrial Revolution, bar none. I mean, it's the cotton city of the world. It's the first genuinely explosive product of industrial modernization, which we talk about so much on this show, and which now in the current generation, of course, is most represented by the cities of East Asia and China in particular.

3:41Cameron Abadi: So in 1717, Manchester in the northwest of England has a population of 10 ,000. By 1773, 25 ,000. By 1801, 70 ,000. By 1851, 300 ,000. This is, you know, explosive, economically driven urbanization of the type that we now know as a pattern, but was for the first time produced really in Manchester through the import of cotton raw material, which of course doesn't grow in England. And it's spinning into thread in the spinning mills of Manchester, out of which then developed the first modern industrial product, which is widely abundant cotton cloth. And as such, it really is the shock city of the 19th century.

4:30Cameron Abadi: It's where a lot of the early industrialization, the formation of modern chemistry to provide dyes, the steam engine to power the spinning mills, and modern politics in its own way also takes shape. No longer the politics of the 18th century, but really the distinctive class politics of the 20th century. On both sides, so this is a city without feudal or aristocratic heritage. It's a city in which really for the first time the middle class becomes the dominant local power and also an industrial working class. So Manchester is the birthplace of the British Trade Union movement. It's where the TUC, the Trade Union Congress, first held its meeting.

5:12Cameron Abadi: but this legacy goes back to the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, where Britain emerges for the first time as the global hegemon having defeated Napoleon. The British ruling class is in its pomp and is presiding over this industrial surge. And in 1819, at the centre of Manchester, a standoff develops between protesting workers who were protesting against the conditions of deflation, which have been imposed as Britain returns to the gold standard, and arguably the first massacre of trade unionists of the modern era takes place in what becomes known as the Peterloo Massacre after Waterloo in 1819.

5:55Cameron Abadi: And so in the 1830s, as British politics matures and we move increasingly towards an expansion of the franchise, Manchester becomes one of the key sites for the struggle over the future of British politics. And on the one hand, you have Chartism, which is the original radical movement of the 19th century, the first genuinely, you could say, working class politics, which is demanding universal franchise, which are a form of the state to beat back old corruption. and out of that emerges the first political definition of the working class, literally in those terms, OANist socialism. And on the other side, the Manchester bourgeoisie, which is fighting its own fight against what it sees as the entrenched bastions of aristocratic reaction, who of course are focused on the interests of agriculture and in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars had managed to slap a huge tariff on the import of corn, of grain, in other words, for bread.

6:55Cameron Abadi: This was a matter of concern for the industrialists because the level of wages they had to pay workers depended on the cost of food. And if the cost of grain went up, then ultimately the profits accruing to the generation of industrial production would go to the rate limiting factor in the economic system, which was the supply of food. And so this is a strategic struggle between the newly emerging bourgeoisie and the British aristocracy and landowning class. And this begins with the anti-corn law movement, which is formed in 1837, centered in Manchester. And on the other hand, at the same time, from the left, Chartism, which begins to really surge in the UK from 1838 onwards.

7:41Cameron Abadi: And Manchester is the real hub of this. and what is known later, it was dubbed by a conservative politician, Disraeli in 1848, the Manchester School. This is after they had won their great victory over the Corn Law and for the first time driven through a true free trade policy. Between the late 1830s and 1848, this is the moment where we can really describe the crystallization of a kind of, I think we have to call it libertarian, anti-state, anti-protectionist modern economic politics. Because Adam Smith had spoken loosely about the invisible hand. Ricardo had theorised in rather abstract ways the logic of the development.

8:27Cameron Abadi: But it's really in the anti-coronial league, centred in Manchester with the great advocates John Bright and Copden, that really turned the logic of free trade for the first time into an aggressive bourgeois politics. And it's an ambiguous politics because it's free trade. It's anti-aristocratic. It's also against slavery. It generally regards imperialism as a waste of time. And so this is where it kind of has real flavor of modern day libertarianism. But it's also aggressively bourgeois and anti-chartist. So it's also against any kind of regulation of child labor, any kind of welfare provision.

9:08Cameron Abadi: These are the people who most aggressively advocate for punitive forms of welfare, the type that you were quoting in the poorhouse, which is a punitive way of providing relief. It's deliberately not outdoor relief. So you don't get to walk around the streets as a poor person. If you receive this relief, you're essentially in a form of working jail. And that's the logic of that model. So Disraeli called it the Manchester School, but you're right, it's really in the 1860s that LaSalle, the German socialist, actually dubs Manchester Tum, so the ideology of Manchesterism, as the kind of gadgrine, Dickensian, hard-faced, most radical form of free trade, and also, of course, anti-national.

9:52Cameron Abadi: So in the German context, this is anti-Listian, this is in favor of the opening of the German economy to the world trade. And LaSalle and then his buddy Bismarck were clearly pushing in a different direction. So this is how this idea develops. And by the 20th century, in the hands of people like Sombart during World War I, this will become, as it were, a defining difference between the hard-faced Manchester tomb of British liberalism, which sees nothing but profit and free markets and can see no other value in anything else, and the supposed values, of course, of German culture, which has a deeper rooting in the nation.

10:33Cameron Abadi: So it becomes, it moves from being a very live politics in the early 19th century to becoming a rather stereotype formula for liberalism.

10:43Adam Tooze: Yeah, that is interesting that in sort of like relative class terms in Britain, there was something, you know, ostensibly progressive about this politics and this economic ideology.

10:54Cameron Abadi: It's an anti-anistocratic, it's a three-way fight. It really is the moment of the Communist Manifesto, after all, where the old struggles over feudalism are still very much, you know, so-called, so much ongoing. And on the other hand, we have the emergence of new class, new class conflicts.

11:10Adam Tooze: And as you point out, this is being observed from Germany. And you mentioned the social democratic thinker LaSalle. But Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx were also deeply invested in the place of Manchester. Engels famously wrote about Manchester. And Marx went on to analyze Manchesterism quite deeply as well. So what did Marx end up concluding in his writing and thinking about Manchesterism?

11:38Cameron Abadi: So yes, it really is through Marx and Engels, amongst other things, that Manchester becomes described as this laboratory of the modern world. It's actually en route to Manchester in 1842 that Engels first meets Marx. And then from Manchester, Engels begins to write back. So Engels comes from a family of textiles, industrialists. His dad decides that young Engels is getting too radical for his own good. So the idea is to send him to Manchester to sort him out and immerse him in the world. On route, he makes Marx. He arrives in Manchester and the paternal project of de-radicalization goes disastrously wrong because Engels sets himself to writing critiques of political economy, which Marx then publishes in the Reiner's Zeitung.

12:24Cameron Abadi: And then in 1844, Engels compiles what is perhaps one of the most dramatic social reports of the modern era, the modern industrial era, on the condition of the working class in Manchester, in England, which is actually a study of Manchester. and he describes this, and it's really Engels that is doing the work as much as Marx here, he describes Manchester as, I mean, quote, social murder, right, as a city set up essentially to destroy its population. It is, in Engels' word, the grim future of capitalism and the industrial age. And this book is published in German in 1844. It's not published, I discovered, in doing the research for this in English until the 1860s.

13:06Cameron Abadi: But in Germany in the 1840s, it's a total sensation. Ahead of the 1848 revolution, Engels is writing about spaceship Manchester. It's like Blade Runner or something. The Germans see the future in Engels's account of Manchester, and it's horrifying. It's a world also of incredible class division. You can hear the echoes or the anticipation of an urban theorist like Mike Davis or something, where where Engels is describing the segregation of Manchester into a series of rings of more or less proletarian, more or less slum, more or less privileged existence. This is driven by the logic of disease as much as anything else, right?

13:53Cameron Abadi: Because it's lethally dangerous to be in the industrial core of British cities in the mid-19th century, above all. Cholera is killing because there's no clean water for people to drink. The working conditions are barbarous. The air pollution is extraordinary. This is why I think it's reasonable to describe it as shock city. And then, yes, from the 1840s onwards, indeed, early drafts of the Communist Manifesto were composed in one of the great libraries in Manchester. It becomes the key reference point. And the politics of the Manchester bourgeoisie and the reports produced by the Manchester works inspectors and the factory inspectors, you know, if you read Das Kapital, the volume one, the whole book is a kind of wrestling by Marx from the relative comfort of London, supported by the profit earned by Engels in Manchester, of, it's a dissection, a wrestling with the ideology of this new emerging class in all the way down to the 1860s and the American Civil War and the complex, ambiguous, often cynical politics of the British bourgeoisie in relation to the question of cotton and where you're going to get it from, the heroic stand of British workers siding with the union and in favour of abolition despite the impact that this was going to have on their jobs.

15:06Cameron Abadi: Like this becomes the site from which Marx thinks this early phase of globalisation industrialism. It's, I mean, there was a line that if, you know, if Engels' family had sent him not to Manchester but to Birmingham, which is England's second city and a site of petty bourgeois small-scale, quite successfully sustained, more balanced industrialization, the whole history of the 20th century would have looked different, because Marxism would not have had the raw material to feed its dramatic vision. But it's the, you know, the dark satanic mills image comes from here.

15:45Adam Tooze: Okay, we're going to take a quick break right here, but we'll be back in a second to continue talking about Manchesterism.

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18:48Adam Tooze: I mean, on one hand, this sounds like a kind of muckraking journalism, almost like a kind of compilation of scandalous abuses. But on the other hand, this is also a kind of work of social theory. I mean, this is what makes this, I think, I guess, significant is this description of Manchester as symptomatic, I guess, of what is coming elsewhere, right? I mean, this is a kind of preview, I guess, of what awaits other major cities.

19:18Cameron Abadi: And as a form, it's the original article, right? Because essentially, what you have is Marx realizing and Engels realizing that to address this reality, you aren't just going to be able to draw on the French revolutionary politics of the late 18th century, right? And you're not just going to be able to draw on Hegel and German idealist philosophy. And Hegel himself had said, right, and I'm also going to need Scottish Enlightenment economics. And Hegel was essentially trying to braid together within the frame of like, in some sense, Aristotelian political theory, the shock of the French Revolution, Kant, and Adam Smith, and Ferguson, and the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment, and Marx and Engels go, and it hasn't turned out the way that Smith and co expected.

20:09Cameron Abadi: No, it's turned into this thing, which is much more dramatic. The only thing worse than being part of this is not being part of this, in which case you have the pauperism crisis in Germany, which is the driver of the 1848 revolution. You have the Irish famine, which is also happening in this period, which is the result of underdevelopment, the lack of industrial development. And as the corn laws are abolished, the British demand for grain from Ireland falls, so it actually exacerbates the Irish crisis. But no, this is Marxism is, Marxist theory is exactly as you say, it's like this original synthesis of different elements so as to capture the extreme radicalism of this moment.

20:48Cameron Abadi: And capital written in that way is, you know, this intoxicated combination of gothic writing, muckraking, factory inspectors reports, laborious efforts to, you know, manipulate the labor theory of value, all in a in a single synthesis, little wonder that it was difficult to finish as a book, right? This was a different mode of writing, a different mode of analysis for a different situation. And indeed, yes, following the kind kind of Hegelian logic, in the particular, you could see the whole, you could see Geist, you could see the unfolding of a much larger logic that in due course was to come to, you know, very large parts of the rest of the world.

21:29Cameron Abadi: And really, in any case, will be to shape the economy of the whole world. Interesting. Yeah.

21:32Adam Tooze: And I guess, I mean, also fueled by some kind of dialectical mode of thinking that I guess is sort of counterposing this to the other forces in the society at the time. although, yeah, Hegel was famously also the founder of dialectical thinking, but, yeah, seemed to have more equal pose in thinking about these issues than Marx in his kind of, yeah, activist energy in writing about this. Hegel never saw Manchester either. Sure, fair point.

22:02Cameron Abadi: He never saw it. He died in a cholera epidemic.

22:07Adam Tooze: Yeah, before Berlin boomed, I think. Before Berlin as well, yeah. But yeah, exactly. I think Berlin's Manchester phase came a bit later in the 19th century. But I guess if we were to move past this original status as a kind of shock city of the 19th century, the way you were describing Manchester, what was Manchester's trajectory then in the 20th century? You know, we think of Britain in the 20th century, and it tends to be London that comes to mind, probably. So what happens to Britain's other cities? Are Britain's other cities in the 20th century a real significant counterpoint to London in that time?

22:50Cameron Abadi: This is a very important development in, you know, early British capitalism as being the earliest instance, is that over the course of the 20th century, for large parts of the century, what had originally been a relatively multipolar system of development shrinks and concentrates into the London core. And that's the result of factors within the UK, the nationalisation of the UK economy. I mean, just the thing that many of our listeners may know is that the Guardian newspaper, which people will read as a kind of left-wing alternative to the New York Times, it used to be the Manchester Guardian.

23:25Cameron Abadi: It was the Manchester Guardian until the 1960s. It was a powerful bastion of a certain sort of campaigning liberalism centered in the obvious place for that to be. Birmingham, likewise, was a major counterweight to London. And over the course of the 20th century, that breaks down. Manchester's population peaks in 1931 at 766 ,000 residents and then begins a precipitous decline as a result, essentially, of the movement of the industrial employment away from Global North textiles producers to the rest of the world. And so by the 1970s and the 1980s, Manchester is a little bit like Liverpool, but to a degree even more extreme, a classic case of British deindustrialization.

24:11Cameron Abadi: They're really dramatically marked by that. The cultural product of that that folks will be maybe familiar with who are amongst our listeners, certainly those of my generation, is pop culture. So if Liverpool gave us the Beatles, Manchester gave us the Smiths. It gave us the Stone Roses, the Happy Mondays, the Manchester club scene of the 80s and 90s. Very, very druggie. You know, the culture of the rave insofar as it percolates out from Britain rather than the house scene in the US is powerfully situated in Manchester. And then the other big global phenomenon of Manchester is football or soccer.

24:47Cameron Abadi: So as football, we were talking about this when we talked about the economics of football in previous episodes, as football moves into its hyper modern, massively commercialized, financially leveraged mode in the 1990s with the Premier League in the UK or England leading the way, the two dominant teams of the 90s, 2000s, the early 2010s, and then from the 2010s to the 2020s are both Manchester based. So Man United and Man City are the two dominant football teams. And that maps, along with a certain sort of, you know, pop culture revival, Oasis being the most dramatic kind of lad pop, cool Britannia moment, onto the revival of Manchester, whose population is back from its lows in the 500s, in the early 1970s.

25:38It's nowhere near its peak, but it's seen a considerable resurgence.

25:42Cameron Abadi: And in British politics itself, and this is something that people talk about a lot about the structure of the UK, is that Britain has a very unresolved relationship to decentralization. But what began in already in the 80s and 90s was a conversation about how to devolve power, how to make cities and regions, indeed nations in the case of Scotland or Northern Ireland or Wales, into viable components of the UK constitution. And what emerged by the 2010s was an emphasis on big city metropolitan areas of which Manchester is one of the largest with total population in the wider metropolitan area pushing 3 million alongside London as a kind of powerhouse of British economic development.

26:27Cameron Abadi: And it's not by accident now that we've had, you know, Boyce Johnson, who was mayor of London, and Burnham, who was mayor of Manchester, as merging as prime ministers. This is a new early 21st century phenomenon. It would have been more common in the late 19th, early 20th century to see locally based politicians moving in this powerful way. But it's a new phenomenon. It's not by accident that Manchester should be the vehicle for this. Because if you're looking for an alternative power base around the UK that isn't in Scotland, Manchester would be your obvious pick.

27:00Adam Tooze: Yeah, that brings us to the mayorality of Andy Burnham, Britain's new prime minister. Prior to taking that office, he was very consciously styling himself as specifically a mayor of that city of Manchester. I mean, on one hand, there seems to be an aesthetic component to that, sort of drawing on this cultural history of Manchester. He seems to be sort of himself maybe a fan of the music and the music scene in Manchester, just judging from the clothes he seems to wear sometimes. But his concept of Manchester goes beyond that. He has sort of consciously shaped an alternative economic agenda based on his time as mayor.

27:42Adam Tooze: And I'm curious what Burnham's Manchesterism has to do with this entire history we've just discussed. And I guess more specifically, it seems to me like Burnham's Manchesterism could be an inversion of the kind of free trading bourgeois Manchesterism that we were discussing at the outset. But perhaps there's a link there based on its localization specifically. So what is the relationship, would you say?

28:10Cameron Abadi: Yeah, it's very interesting. I mean, he's, on the one hand, he's kind of, you could describe him as a kind of bland, typical product of his generation, my generation, so profoundly shaped by the shock of Thatcherism in the 70s and 80s. He goes to, he went to Cambridge more or less at the same time that I did. He read English, he then moved into a professional career in politics in the Blair period in London. He was around the Blair Brown group. It's all very kind of familiar and I think then a cynic would also say that he is a careerist he's he's a man who's after the main chance and he's a has a chameleon quality that allows him to move through several different registers and including embracing a local man local boy of Manchester kind of sense of identity and rootedness along with a variety of other personas that he's he's occupied over the course of his career and the coalition around him and the way it's being built.

29:06Cameron Abadi: And the question of how far it actually marks a break with Starmer is an open question. I think it's not clear. And even the by-election that he won was after all handed to him by figures that were previously deeply associated with the right wing of the Labour Party and notably its pro-Zionist wing. So he's a really complicated figure that plays politics for real. On the other hand, he's also not uninteresting from an ideological point of view. And reading a bit about his biography, one of the things that really stood out for me and that makes him intelligible also against the European backdrop, but may also be of interest in the US right now, is that he comes from a Catholic family, which is interesting.

29:46Cameron Abadi: So his family is actually from Liverpool, which makes sense, right? Because Liverpool is one of the great centers of Catholicism in the UK. so he went to catholic elementary school middle school high school i think and describes his own vision of you know the most foundational elements of his politics as deriving from catholic social doctrine which makes sense that's this is this actually i think precisely helps the question apparently i don't i haven't been able to confirm this but he donates he believes in tithing he donated a very considerable fraction of his income his salary as mayor of of manchester to homeless charity work.

30:24Cameron Abadi: So he seems like a man who sits within what you might call the Christian social tradition, which is also something, oddly, that he has affinities with Blair over. And then within that, I saw interesting comparisons between Burnham and the contemporary social democratic, socialist politics of the Iberian Peninsula. In other words, Pedro Sanchez and his Portuguese equivalents, not just because they're successful and charismatic and good-looking and patently modern social democrats, but also in a sense that it is a kind of higher pragmatism rooted in basic principles like anti-nationalism, for instance.

31:03Cameron Abadi: Burnham is on record, which goes with his Catholicism, which goes with his social democracy. But then when it comes to these questions of the free market, he basically argues that the deal in Britain was broken by Thatcher in the 80s and 90s, and the Thatcher and her Tory successors. And the malfunctioning, the cost of living crisis in Britain today is ultimately traceable back to that profound, violent rupture with the social contract of the post-war period. And so he is deeply rooted in a politics that actually, at some level, refuses the Thatcherite inheritance, makes him quite different from Blair, who embraced it, and wants to push back on that.

31:48But on the other hand, is also a go-getting, delivery-orientated, competitive, regional economic development specialist, which relies on close working together with and

32:03Cameron Abadi: public-private partnerships in conjunction with private business and with the universities and with local nodes, police-based economic strategy. so it's a very weird combination historically speaking you'd say it's a little bit more reminiscent of Birmingham's politics than of Manchester's because Birmingham with Chamberlain have this social imperialist vibe going on. This is certainly not the free trade radicalism of the 1830s and 1840s but that's also just a historical irrelevance that's far too long ago to really bear on this but I think he's widely seen as a kind of truly a compromise figure, which includes Corbyn as a key element, so the left-wing moment in the Labour Party of recent vintage.

32:52Cameron Abadi: And Burnham, as it were, opens the party to those elements too. Beyond that, it's quite difficult to be precise about where his trade-offs are going to go. Rapidly announced policies include tax cuts for struggling pubs and small businesses. So this is a kind of, you know, successful mayor kind of strategy. Let's make Manchester a happy and fun place to live. This is by no means bad politics, but it doesn't, it doesn't. And in the first instance, it's, I think, a little unclear how this fits within a broader strategic vision.

33:27Adam Tooze: That's fascinating. And I think somehow this sort of shift in the meaning of Manchesterism, somewhat by happenstance, is really sort of fittingly describes a shift in the status of Manchester as a city. You know, it seems like what we were discussing earlier on was Manchester as this very fateful place, almost like the stakes were so high and it was so heightened as if the future will be decided in Manchester and by Manchesterism. And now it's a kind of more meliorist, marginal, you know, view. And I don't mean that pejoratively either. I just mean it's sort of like a description from a more vulnerable perspective, right?

34:09Adam Tooze: I mean, not as opposed to a...

34:11Cameron Abadi: I mean, think about Barcelona or Madrid as well. You know, Madrid, what did Madrid stand for in the 1930s? Like, as you say, like nothing less than the future of the world hinges on it. And now it's a lovely city to live in with great weather and excellent football. And then it's a matter of governance and who rules it. And the stakes are not those of 90 years ago.

34:33Adam Tooze: But there's one added element of Manchester, as opposed, I suppose, to Barcelona, is that the feeling of being left behind now, right? A sort of vulnerability in addition to the...

34:44Cameron Abadi: But it's a story of comeback as well. I mean, it's more resurrection. It's a city that was left behind, that had its crisis. And, you know, after all, we did mention it, but it was also the site of one of the most, you know, absolutely catastrophic IRA bombing campaigns on the mainland, which is widely seen as having kick-started the revival process. So this is a city that has been through it. It wasn't as badly bombed as places further south in England, But this is a city that's been in the wars and is a story of resurrection as well at that level.

35:18Adam Tooze: Perhaps Burnham's Catholicism also contributes here, almost a kind of pastoral element, in addition to kind of the ideological vigor that we've been discussing over the course of Manchester's history. But I suppose we'll have occasion to see how Manchesterism develops on a national scale now that Burnham is in office. But for now, we should probably end this conversation. Of course, we'll be back next week with new data points.

36:09Adam Tooze: That's podcasts at foreignpolicy.com. Or you can tweet us. That's at onesandtwospod. I'm Cameron Abadi. Thank you very much for listening. And we'll be back in your feed next week.

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