Burnham’s new order
The king in the north
It’s interesting that two cities in one corner of Europe have produced such a huge number of popular musicians, and why that is. Perhaps it is that Manchester and Liverpool both have large Irish and Welsh influences, and migrants from both countries brought with them a strong musical tradition.
Maybe, as one of the Stone Roses (I forget which) once said in an interview, it’s the weather. Because of the rain that characterises life in historic Lancashire, there is nothing to do except either play music or something else I won’t repeat. Maybe it’s just population density, and large cities produce a higher per capita number of musicians, but I would be surprised if London beats Manchester on this metric. Birmingham certainly doesn’t, as much as I loved head-banging in my teens.
Whatever the source of Manchester’s musical talent, it has certainly played a part in the city’s recent economic renaissance. As Dominic Green wrote in The Wall St Journal ‘Manchester was once a working-class industrial powerhouse. After the mid-1970s, it reinvented itself as an indie music mecca: Buzzcocks, Joy Division and New Order, the Smiths, Happy Mondays, Stone Roses, and of course the hooligan nostalgia of Oasis, whose “Wonderwall” accompanied the England team’s traditional flameout at this summer’s World Cup. Manchester’s postindustrial musical boom made the city cool again, as a cultural counterweight to London, and laid the groundwork for the property boom that Mr. Burnham calls Manchesterism in action.’
Manchester’s cultural power has grown in recent decades, not just thanks to music but to football too, and its two monstrous global brands. Now it has achieved a form of cultural supremacy with the coronation of mayor Andy Burnham as Prime Minister, a man whose political brand is essentially Kevin and Perry walking like Liam Gallagher.
Burnham launched his 2024 mayoral campaign at the Salford Lads Club – famously associated with The Smiths – and began his leadership of the Labour party by dancing to New Order, a band whose origins lie in the Sex Pistols’ famous 1976 performance at the Manchester Free Trade hall, attended by over half a million people according to later recollections.
He now becomes Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade - and we are to find out whether this one will solve the Riddle. For Burnham it was that Britain took ‘a series of wrong turns in the 1980s… political power was centralised, economic power privatised, large parts of the country de-industrialised, and they still haven’t recovered.’ Promising to look to Germany and its federal model of redistribution, Burnham quite explicitly appeals to the North in a way unlike any predecessor, following three party leaders who all lived within a few miles of each other in the boroughs of Camden and Islington.
In a Guardian interview in 2010, Burnham said that the ‘bloke’ from ‘Corrie’ would play him in a biopic; chips, peas and gravy were his favourite food and ‘gobshite’ his favourite word. His favourite smell? ‘The streets around Goodison Park on a match day.’ On a more recent occasion he listed his favourite films as Goodfellas, The Big Short, Brassed Off and Pride: a film about the evils of the financial services industry, a film about gay rights and a film about a northern brass band.
Burnham has taken the professional northerner routine to the next level by landing a job in London and refusing to move, pledging to remain in Manchester even as he rules the United Kingdom - the first prime minister to avoid Downing Street since the acutely paranoid Harold Wilson, who believed the secret services were bugging his office (which they probably were). It seems like the ultimate rejection of Thatcherite Essexman Norman Tebbit’s exhortation to ‘get on your bike’; he’s not just refusing to relocate to get a job, he’s refusing to relocate after getting the top job in Britain.
