Can Andy Burnham bring Manchesterism to the East?

It has been yet another week in British politics where Westminster is once again gripped by leadership speculation and drama. The anticipation around Andy Burnham’s impending premiership and his economic vision is understandable. How will he operate within the constraints of Keir Starmer’s programme for government and the Chancellor’s fiscal rules? Can we expect more tax and spend as critics forewarn? Or will he chart a different course that can finally break the cycle of flatlining growth?

For nearly a decade, Greater Manchester has been held up as the city-region that has most clearly bucked the national trend: more confident, more institutionally coherent, and more willing to think in terms of place. Burnham’s “Manchesterism” has seen growth at higher rates than the national average. So, what might that mean in practice?

First, we should expect a strong push on devolution. Burnham has long argued that England’s overcentralised state is not merely inefficient but economically self-defeating. The most interesting recent reports suggest he is thinking seriously about going further than the current settlement, including a new devolution department and a stronger redistribution of power away from Whitehall. If that happens, it will not just be constitutional housekeeping. It will be an attempt to change where decisions are made, where accountability sits, and where growth is built.

And those rumoured to be advising this economic vision are significant. Andy Haldane and Lord Jim O’Neill are not decorative endorsements. They signal a particular economic seriousness. O’Neill has long argued that Britain will not solve its productivity problem without solving its regional imbalance, and that requires much bolder investment in infrastructure, connectivity and city-region growth. Haldane brings something slightly different: a long-standing interest in institutional reform, local economic ecosystems and how capital can be steered more effectively into productive parts of the economy. Together, they suggest that a Burnham project would be determined to rewire the economic model around place, investment and diffusion.

Haldane’s speech at the British Chambers of Commerce annual conference this week was revealing in that respect. It was not a conventional plea for marginal reform. It was a broader argument about the UK’s “seed-corn” economy: the need to channel more long-term capital into productive domestic investment, to back smaller firms, and to think harder about how the tax and savings system shape growth. Strip away the technical language and the message was straightforward: Britain has capital, talent and entrepreneurial energy, but does not organise them well enough to support long-term, broad-based prosperity. That sits squarely within the Burnham orbit.

So, what does all this mean for the East of England?

Potentially, quite a lot. The East has too often been treated in national policy as an awkward in-between: neither the overheated capital nor the archetypal “left behind” region. But that misses the point. The East contains some of the country’s most strategically important economic assets: globally significant science and innovation, major logistics and freight corridors, clean energy potential on the coast, advanced manufacturing, agritech, defence, and growing urban centres that are often constrained less by lack of opportunity than by lack of coordination. In other words, it is exactly the kind of region that should benefit from a more place-led, devolved, investment-friendly model of growth.

But that will not happen automatically. If Burnhamism is to mean anything beyond Manchester, then the East will need to make its own case for a stronger institutional settlement: more joined-up transport, more strategic skills planning, more capacity to capture the gains of growth locally, and a clearer voice in national economic debates. A devolution push that stops at our largest cities will create a new imbalance. The real test of any Burnham premiership would be whether it can take the lessons of Greater Manchester and apply them to a wider English growth strategy.

That is the opportunity now opening up. The question is not whether the East can become Manchester. It should not try to. The question is whether a Burnham government might finally create the conditions in which regions like the East are trusted to shape their own economic future. If so, the most important thing the East can do is not wait to be invited, not get involved in ideological or geographical differences, but work together in pursuit of a common good by getting ready with a serious proposition of its own.