He mentions Patrick Minford, an adviser to Thatcher who’s now considered Truss’s economic guiding light, whose plan to close unproductive heavy industry caused devastation in areas like east Manchester. The Tory government, most people here believe, didn’t care about those who were losing their jobs and wasn’t willing to invest in their communities to soften the blow. “They completely fucked this city,” Pete says. “The absolute dogmatic ideological cynicism with which they did it was what turned these great cities into total fucking basket cases.”
Nowadays, Manchester in the process of rapidly un-fucking itself. From my office on St Ann’s Square you can often see more than a dozen cranes at work; one estimate says the city has more tall buildings in the works than any European city outside of London. The city centre is filling up at incredible speed — up from hundreds of residents in the Nineties to tens of thousands today.
Who deserves the credit? One Tory who does betray excitement about Manchester’s growth is George Osborne, whose Northern Powerhouse project was rooted here. “Manchester is buzzing — it’s one of the most exciting cities in Europe, it’s the go-to place for people who want to set up businesses outside London,” he told me last year.
I was interviewing Osborne for a profile I wrote about Sir Richard Leese, the man credited with overseeing Manchester’s economic renaissance this past decade, who stepped down as leader of the city council last year after a 25-year reign. Leese was a Labour pragmatist who gave private sector investors a leading role in the rebuilding of the city, and in doing so deeply antagonised figures on the Left. In a city with no prominent Conservatives, Leese was cast as a Tory by housing activists who felt he was “selling the city” and ignoring the need for affordable homes. One even emptied a glass of red wine over him during a fringe event at last year’s Conservative conference in Manchester.
The dislike was mutual. “They’re middle class tosspots and I hate them,” I overheard him saying at a drinks event last year. Leese understood the old adage that you don’t have allies — you have interests. And while other northern leaders didn’t want to be seen taking money or favours from Tory governments, Manchester’s Labour leadership was willing to criticise the Tories in public while cooperating with them in private.
“Everyone used to say ‘Oh, he’s favouring Manchester,'” recalls Osborne. “Well the truth was, yes, it was the city I knew best. But it was also because they had the most original ideas. They would come to the Treasury with ideas about how to finance the metro system or how to get money into the cultural sector or how to support school reform in the city. And you just didn’t get those ideas from the other big cities of England.”
Andy Burnham, whose job was created by the historic devolution deal Greater Manchester struck with Osborne in 2014, has learned lessons from Leese’s tenure. Burnham’s best-known moment as mayor was his public confrontation with the government two years ago over lockdown funding. But the “King of the North” has generally chosen diplomacy over pitch battles with Tories in Westminster. The council leaders who sit with him around the Greater Manchester table have urged Burnham to be more critical of the government at key moments — for example after the recent announcement of an underwhelming bus funding package — but have been left disappointed.
As the Tory leadership race rumbles on, Burnham and his officials have been negotiating with key figures in Whitehall over their promised “trailblazer deal” — the next instalment of devolution. The mayor wants more funding and powers in areas like education, and someone involved with the talks told me they are getting a positive response from some Whitehall officials.
“The problem is, we don’t know who we are really negotiating with,” one insider told me last week. It won’t be civil servants who sign off a new devolution settlement or “levelling up” policy — it will be Truss or Sunak. So when the candidates arrive today, they will likely be greeted with more charm by the power-brokers in Manchester — behind closed doors, of course — than by the activists out on the street.
This sums up the nature of political debate in Manchester, which takes place, as far as it exists, within a closed shop. Scrutiny will be kept to a minimum and local problems, such as the skyrocketing rates of homeless people living in emergency accommodation, will remain unsolved. Meanwhile, Diane is unlikely to get her wish of being represented by a Conservative councillor or MP in the next few years. But I think she’s right to ask the question: wouldn’t Manchester be better if it had more voices in the room?
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