In the autumn of 2005, Tony Blair gave one of his most unhinged and fascinating speeches as prime minister. “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation,” he said. “You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.” He went on: “The character of this changing world is indifferent to tradition. Unforgiving of frailty … It has no custom and practice. It is replete with opportunities, but they only go to those swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change.”
In the hall, his characteristically messianic delivery ensured this argument landed, but anyone listening from one of the UK’s deindustrialised areas must have received it as yet another punch in the face. For decades, change and adaptation were what they had been living through and reeling from – but where were the rewards? Where, indeed, was any real sign of even the beginnings of the 21st-century prosperity Blair seemed to be offering?
Back then, even if it was the defining condition of whole swathes of the country, no one in a position of power really talked about deindustrialisation. Margaret Thatcher’s governments had already blitzed the relevant parts of the UK economy; as Labour politicians must, some of them paid lip service to an industrial revival, but nothing like that happened.
Crudely put, New Labour’s basic economic idea was to turbocharge the financial sector and use the resulting tax take to fund increased government spending and new jobs in the public sector, while most private-sector workers – who were encouraged to be “flexible” – were concentrated in services. Labour’s old industrial heartlands saw lots of money spent on new schools, hospitals and roads, but their lowly economic status remained mostly unchanged. The numbers eventually spoke volumes: while Blair and Gordon Brown were in power, manufacturing fell from a share of 18% of the economy in 1997 to 10% when the latter left office in 2010.
Sixteen years later, the kinds of notions Blair extolled in 2005 have long since fallen from favour. Donald Trump and the populists of mainland Europe are believers in the supremacy of national economies and the glories of protectionism; even Rachel Reeves has declared that “globalisation, as we once knew it, is dead”. In that sense, the bundle of ideas Andy Burnham calls “Manchesterism” is hardly a political bolt from the blue. But as well as the radical, unprecedented devolution of power, at its core is a striking word that will soon be endlessly heard in Westminster, Manchester and beyond: reindustrialisation.
Globalisation begone, says Burnham. “We need to safeguard sovereign manufacturing and production capability across the country in critical sectors like steel, defence, energy, food and farming, rather than just being prepared to let it go, as we have sadly done in the past,” he insisted in his big speech this week. And whereas the New Labour milieu in which he cut his teeth put its faith in the featherlight wonders of financial services, Burnham clearly has visions of bustling 21st-century factories, universities that will put new industry at the cutting edge, and a country in which every region can “set clear and credible industrial ambitions”.
At which point, it is worth briefly examining what deindustrialisation and the disappointments that followed it have looked like close up. Some of the best accounts can be found in the Welsh author Richard King’s brilliant oral history of his home country, Brittle With Relics. One of his interviewees recalls what he and his friends dubbed the “red shed programme”, following the miners’ strike of 1984-85: “A colliery would close, the local MP would kick up a stink, the Welsh Development Agency would put the bulldozers in, flatten it into a plateau, put up a load of tin sheds and then put To Let boards on them, and the miners who had been made redundant would plough their redundancy money into making dartboards or fibreglass chess sets and go banko [bankrupt] in a year.”
In plenty of former industrial towns, industry was replaced by retail parks (often literally: the site of the pit that began the miners’ strike is now one). The result was the grimly circular economy – since fatally weakened by the internet – in which people worked in shops to spend money and keep jobs afloat in other shops. The cynicism all this sowed still swirls around such places, which points to the resentment and disenchantment Burnham will reap if his project goes wrong, in places where Labour is already on the verge of being crushed by Reform UK.
To which his people have an optimistic answer: this time, government will be strategic, agile and devolved enough to deliver something much better. For all the southern sneers about the supposedly huge jump from overseeing Greater Manchester to running the country, the years Burnham spent as that city-region’s mayor fizzed with creative industrial policy, and gave him a schooling in how to make it work (witness his mayoral Good Growth Fund, which has helped firms specialising in life sciences, advanced manufacturing and green technology). Note also the critical change he has planned for the structure of his government. At the new No 10 North in Manchester, the prime minister himself will be in charge of “reform of essential utilities, reindustrialisation and the regeneration of places”. This looks like a brazen challenge to the Treasury, and it will be fascinating to watch it unfold.
But big questions for Burnham and his comrades are inevitably piling up. He may have given himself 10 years to succeed – which is still a long shot, electorally speaking – but how on earth can he pull off his intended revolutions while sticking to the government’s fiscal rules? Some places may reindustrialise halfway successfully, but what will AI and automation mean for actual employment opportunities?
Industry, moreover, is not just about economics. It is also profoundly emotional terrain, bound up with delicate and sometimes explosive feelings of loss and wounded pride, and what that Blair speech called custom, tradition and practice. I say this somewhat hesitantly, but the issue shades into questions about masculinity: how a productive economy with good jobs can bestow confidence and responsibility on young men who might otherwise go off the rails, and why the disappearance of that economic model was one of the catalysts for masculinity turning toxic. This is one of the reasons why what Burnham has planned needs to be thoroughgoing and transformative. A disused factory repurposed as an Aldi or Lidl will not cut it; neither will any modern equivalent of those red sheds.
The scale of the task is mountainous: never forget that north-east England and Yorkshire and the Humber are currently poorer than Alabama and Mississippi. There again, the audacity at work is surely why politics suddenly seems so full of its most essential ingredients: there is doubt and disbelief, for sure, but also a sudden sense of promise and fascination. Burnham’s pledge of “good growth in every postcode” is quite something, but the idea of a country that has become a byword for the postindustrial condition pulling off the revival he intends feels almost surreal. Everyone – even Blair – should wish him luck. He will certainly need it.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
