Andy Burnham, the former Greater Manchester Mayor, is set to become the United Kingdom’s next Prime Minister after Keir Starmer resigned following what electoral analysts are calling a remarkable personal success by Burnham in defeating Reform in his mayoral territory. Burnham’s central political offering — which he has styled “No 10 North” — centres on redistributing power away from Westminster toward English regions and devolved nations, extending the Greater Manchester model of combined authorities and locally accountable public services to the national stage. He has promised to work some days from Manchester, an unprecedented gesture for a sitting Prime Minister. The incoming government inherits Starmer’s defence spending commitments, including a £4.7–5 billion funding gap that will require either tax rises, borrowing, or cuts to other departments.
The received wisdom
The sympathetic reading of Burnham is compelling in several respects. England’s governance is extraordinarily centralised by the standards of comparable democracies. France, Germany, Spain, and the United States all operate with substantially more fiscal and administrative autonomy at the subnational level. Greater Manchester under Burnham genuinely became a laboratory for integrated public services — the combined authority model drew fire from Whitehall traditionalists but produced measurable improvements in transport integration and homelessness strategy. Burnham’s supporters argue that Westminster’s instinct to micromanage everything from school admissions to bus routes has produced the uniform mediocrity that voters have punished at successive elections. “Manchesterism,” in this framing, is not a parochial idea but a serious structural reform that could unlock productivity and democratic accountability simultaneously.
His success against Reform is also noted as evidence that a left-of-centre politics grounded in place and community — rather than technocratic centralism — can outcompete nationalist populism where it is supposed to be strongest.
A different read
All of that has genuine merit, and anyone sympathetic to subsidiarity as a governing principle — a tradition running from Burke through Oakeshott to contemporary federalist thinkers — should give it a fair hearing. But there are serious grounds for scepticism that the cheerleading coverage is eliding.
The first is the confusion between municipal and national governance. Burnham was an unusually effective city-region mayor in part because he operated within a fiscal and regulatory framework set by Westminster. The devolution he exercised was real but bounded: he could not set income tax rates, could not override national planning law, could not negotiate trade agreements. A Prime Minister proposing to “devolve power” faces a structural paradox — the central government must first choose to give that power away, and political incentives at the national level consistently work against meaningful surrender of authority. The history of British devolution since 1999 is instructive here: Scotland and Wales received substantial powers, but Whitehall’s response to every fiscal or competence dispute has been to reassert central control rather than accept the logic of subsidiarity. There is no reason to believe the Treasury, the Home Office, or the defence establishment will behave differently under Burnham.
The second is the defence inheritance. Starmer’s £15 billion defence plan leaves a funding gap that analysts are placing at close to £5 billion. Burnham has said he takes the responsibility to fund the defence plan “extremely seriously,” but his political coalition — built on public service investment and rejecting austerity — is poorly positioned to absorb either the tax rises or the departmental cuts that would be required. The Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch is already framing this as a “mess” inherited by Burnham. She is not wrong about the arithmetic, even if her party’s record on defence procurement over thirteen years in government leaves something to be desired. At a moment when Russia is launching 500-drone attacks on Kyiv and NATO members are under pressure to reach 3% GDP on defence spending, a UK Prime Minister juggling a devolution agenda and a defence black hole is a concerning prospect for alliance managers in Brussels and Washington.
Third, Burnham’s signature gesture — working from Manchester some days — is emblematic of a category error that afflicts much devolution thinking. The problem with British governance is not that the Prime Minister works from Downing Street; it is that fiscal and regulatory power is concentrated in a small number of Treasury officials. Symbolic regionalism without fiscal federalism is aesthetic rather than structural reform. Harold Macmillan governed from Birch Grove on occasion; it did not meaningfully alter the constitutional centre of gravity.
What to watch
- How Burnham resolves the defence funding gap — tax rises, spending cuts, or creative accounting — will reveal within weeks whether his coalition politics can survive contact with the Treasury.
- Watch whether he actually legislates to give English regions meaningful tax-raising powers or confines “No 10 North” to symbolic gestures and press photocalls.
- The Brexit-at-ten question: Burnham inherits an economy still adjusting to EU exit, and his incoming government faces “big calls to make on Europe” according to BBC analysis. Will he move toward a reset deal or preserve current arrangements?
- Labour internal dynamics: the demand from Labour women for half the government to be female, combined with the trade union meetings already under way, will test whether Burnham can hold his coalition together or spends his first months managing internal factionalism.
— J