At the weekend, Zia Yusuf posted: “After 7 May 2026, Reform will accept no more Tories.” In other words: all you failed MPs and councillors have a full three and a half months to decide at your leisure whether or not to leave the sinking ship.
Taking on politicians from the party that governed Britain for more than a decade and broke it is hardly the stuff of a political insurgency. Suddenly, Britain’s newest political force doesn’t look quite so potent or relevant. Instead, it seems old.
And what of their prize new signing Robert Jenrick appearing on our TV screens and declaring that Britain is broken? I would love to know how many screams he prompted in living rooms across the land: “Yes – and you broke it mate!”
It feels as if the overinflated bubble around the new British right could be about to burst. By embracing the dregs of the Tory party, Reform UK is abandoning its claims that it is a friend of the working class and revealing itself to be a full-on Thatcherite force with added Trumpian fervour.
For the British left, this presents an initiative to be seized. If the question at the centre of British politics is “who broke Britain?”, let’s be clear and unequivocal. The four horsemen of Britain’s apocalypse are deindustrialisation, privatisation, austerity and Brexit.
In my time in politics, there has been a tendency for too many in Labour to accept too much of the framing of the right, but we must firmly reject its narrative and call it out in no uncertain terms. Figures on the British right talk of taking back control, but people can see that they are the ones who gave it away.
After the deindustrialisation of the 1980s, Thatcher’s deregulation and privatisation created a race to the bottom. They left people and businesses paying way over the odds for the essentials and are the root cause of today’s cost-of-living crisis. This was compounded by the selloff of council homes, leaving Britain in the grip of a worsening housing crisis. As a result, the country’s ability to control its costs has been severely weakened. For instance, it has no option but to use the benefits system to fund unregulated rents in the private rented sector.
These structural weaknesses in our economy were to some degree masked by the higher growth we had in the EU. But the combined effects of austerity and Brexit in the 2010s laid them bare. Our cities and towns were hollowed out and the country has been trapped ever since in a low-growth doom loop. People’s alienation from politics has grown as our archaic, adversarial political system has struggled to find long-term solutions. So we are stuck in a rut and in hock to the bond markets because of the resulting volatility and uncertainty.
To be clear: these comments are a criticism of the British right and not the Labour government. It took us to this place. The government has made important pro-growth moves, such as last week’s announcement on Northern Powerhouse Rail. But now is the moment in this parliament to make a clearer case about exactly who broke Britain and lay out bolder fixes.
We hope what has been happening in Manchester might offer inspiration. Over the past decade, we have become more and more functional as the country has become dysfunctional. We have used devolution to build a new, more collaborative political culture that is the polar opposite of the Westminster and Whitehall world.
On the back of it, we have begun to roll back some of the worst aspects of the 1980s. We have retaken public control of our buses and will soon reach a new tipping point where we are building more council and social homes than we are losing through right to buy.
We are taking a long-term approach to rebuilding an economy devastated by the deindustrialisation of the Thatcher era. We have been growing at double the rate of the UK average and this week set out plans to reindustrialise our city region in the next period through the development of five global clusters.
We are laying out new paths for our young people into these new industries as part of a plan for an education system that offers an equal alternative to the university route. And, by supporting more of our residents to access opportunity in what is the fastest-growing city-region economy in the UK, we are showing that it is possible to make more effective use of public funds, reducing crisis spending in the long term.
“Manchesterism” is a modern and functional response to the high-inequality, low-growth trap that came from the 1980s drive to privatise economic power and overcentralise political power in the Treasury. It is about creating a new politics to plot our way out of that and develop a new economy.
Replicating this thinking at a national level could mean putting electoral reform centre stage as the means to create a more collaborative politics and consensus on the public investment needed to free the country from the pernicious pincer movement of the simultaneous cost-of-living and housing crises. This in time will restore greater control over public spending and remove the uncertainty about the country’s direction, thereby putting us in a better position in relation to the markets.
This is Manchesterism and, yes, as one of our famous sons, Tony Wilson, once said – it does mean doing things very differently.
Andy Burnham is the mayor of Greater Manchester. He served as the Labour MP for Leigh from 2001 until 2017
