Manchester’s old Free Trade Hall stands as an Italianate testament to Victorian liberalism. Built to commemorate the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws, it embodies the creed of nineteenth-century Manchester liberalism: free trade, open markets, civic modernisation. Manchester’s liberals believed prosperity emerged not from aristocratic protectionism or centralised management but from the dynamism create by the efficient movement of goods, labour and capital through an open commercial system.

Today, stand outside the Free Trade Hall, walk a few steps and look left towards Deansgate, and you can see another Manchester rising in glass and steel. Despite Andy Burnham’s rhetorical position as a pro-geezer soft-left alternative to Keir Starmer’s Government, his new dynamic Manchester has been built on a modern revival of Manchester liberalism.

Burnham describes his model as “business-friendly socialism.” He presents this as proof that markets and social democracy can be harmoniously fused through municipal government. What has actually emerged is closer to a distinctly neoliberal model of governance: not the crude caricature of the state withdrawing from economic life, but the kind of neoliberalism originally articulated by Walter Lippmann in The Good Society, who argued that markets are desirable but not naturally occurring and therefore require an active state to construct, maintain and defend the conditions in which they can thrive.

Being business-friendly alone of course does not make a politician neoliberal. There are traditions of corporatism, developmental statism and social democracy that have actively supported business growth. Burnham’s model rather becomes neoliberal because the central purpose of state activity is not redistribution, but the optimisation of market conditions. Public transport, policing, planning reform, skills policy and housing are increasingly organised around competitiveness, investment attraction, labour mobility and urban growth. The state is not retreating but engineering a more efficient marketplace.

Greater Manchester’s economy was worth £93.2 billion in GVA in 2023, the second largest city-region economy outside London. Between 2014 and 2024, its population rose by over 10%, productivity growth outpaced every other combined authority in Britain and GDP growth ran at roughly double the national average. The city has reinserted itself into the global economy through finance, real estate, construction, media and advanced services. Nineteenth-century Manchester imported cotton and exported textiles. Now it imports global capital and exports a serviced return.

JP Morgan now employs more than 2,000 people in Manchester and plans to double its northern presence. More than 280,000 people work in Greater Manchester’s financial, professional and business services sector, the largest such cluster outside London. Deansgate Square holds more than 1,500 apartments across four skyscrapers and Manchester is projected to overtake Frankfurt and Paris to become Europe’s fourth-tallest city by skyscraper count. Spinningfields has effectively become a northern Canary Wharf, attracting banks, law firms and corporate headquarters into dense office clusters integrated into global capital markets.

Burnham’s administration has actively stimulated this. Greater Manchester’s ‘Places for Everyone’ framework explicitly promises to remove planning obstacles and accelerate development pipelines. The GM Housing Investment Loans Fund helped unlock around 11,000 homes through low-interest lending to developers. Critics have attacked this model for bypassing affordable housing targets and funnelling public support toward luxury towers, but Burnham has recognised that cities compete internationally for capital and his willingness to permit showpiece residential development exempt from affordable housing requirements is part of a strategy to attract more of it. Even if you do not live in one, skyscrapers improve the supply of living and commercial space for everyone and massively boost the local economy.

The Old Trafford regeneration project is the most dramatic expression of this logic. Burnham has backed a Mayoral Development Corporation for the zone surrounding Manchester United’s proposed stadium redevelopment, with plans projected to create 48,000 jobs, 15,000 homes and £4.2 billion in economic value: a heavily leveraged public-private growth coalition built around entertainment, infrastructure and urban density.

The Bee Network reveals the same underlying model. Burnham presents bus franchising as a triumph of municipal socialism over Thatcherite privatisation. But services remain heavily dependent on private operators functioning within a centrally administered framework. It is better understood as state-administered infrastructure designed to move labour, property and capital through a more efficient metropolitan economy — far closer to Thatcher’s Docklands Light Railway (DLR) than old-style municipal ownership. The DLR helped transform derelict East London into Canary Wharf. Burnham’s transport network is attempting something similar for post-industrial Greater Manchester.

Policing, too, fits a more right-wing pattern than one might expect. A city built around offices, students, nightlife and events requires public order to function competitively. After Greater Manchester Police entered special measures in 2020, Burnham backed the appointment of Stephen Watson as Chief Constable whose philosophy was ruthlessly back-to-basics: visible policing, arrests, neighbourhood enforcement, aggressive action against anti-social behaviour. CCTV, stop and search and live facial recognition usage have both increased. Even Burnham’s homelessness policies focus on reducing visible disorder and stabilising the urban environment rather than restructuring the structural conditions producing homelessness, largely just placing people in temporary accommodation. Like Giuliani in New York, Burnham’s conviction appears to be that urban investment requires public order. Clean streets and falling crime rates are preconditions for the kind of city global capital is willing to enter.

Manchesterism has successfully dressed neoliberalism in the rhetoric of socialist solidarity and Mancunian pride. The more I have researched it, the more struck I am by socialist enthusiasm for Burnham. Perhaps with the right voice and the right coat, you can persuade almost anyone to support supply-side reform. If Burnham wins in Makerfield, removes Starmer from Downing Street and does to the country what he has done in Manchester — perhaps with a Chancellor Streeting alongside him — ‘Singapore-on-Thames’ stands the best chance it has ever had of becoming a reality.

Original photo by No 10 at Holy Trinity Church of England Primary School.