A tide of purple has swept up Whitehall, washed over the doorstep of 10 Downing Street, and swirled into every Department. It’s not just that Andy Burnham is the first-ever Labour & Co-operative prime minister, in the 110 years since the Co-operative Party was founded. It is also the influx of Labour & Co-op cabinet ministers including Lucy Powell, Alex Norris, Miatta Fahnbullah, Johnny Reynolds, Douglas Alexander, and a raft of junior ministers and PPSs. This is more than cosmetic. This is the Co-operative moment.
What Kremlinologists have missed from the formation of this government, with their obsession about factions and personalities, is a decisive ideological shift. Not from right to left, or south to north, but from centralisers to decentralisers. The Fabian thinker GDH Cole identified two axes within the Labour tradition. One axis was between reformers and revolutionists, along the familiar poles of left and right.
But the other axis was, and remains, between believers in a benevolent centralised state delivering social justice via strong institutions and an enlightened administrative class, and those socialists who believe in decentralisation, federalism, mutualism, co-operatives, self-organisation, and self-help. This latter tradition reflects Labour’s deep roots in the local trade union branch, the Temperance Movement, the non-conformist churches, Clarion Clubs, and of course the Co-op.
These two traditions have co-existed uneasily within Labour’s broad church. Most famously, the NHS was a triumph of centralisers over federalists, with Bevan winning the argument within Cabinet over Morrison’s advocacy of a role for local authorities in healthcare. Elsewhere, the original Sure Starts were a victory for decentralisers, with local boards setting local priorities, and a quasi-anarcho-syndicalist ethos.
In 1918, at the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster, the Labour Party conference voted for the first Clause IV, with its carefully imprecise language about ‘common ownership’, later treated as carte blanche for Soviet-style nationalisation and monolithic institutions.
The sociologist AH Halsey highlighted the obvious irony:
“the movement that had invented the social forms of modern participatory democracy, and practised them in union branch and Co-op meeting, thereby laying a Tocquevillian foundation for democracy, was ironically fated to develop through its political party the threats of a bureaucratic state.”
However, at the same conference, Labour, forever a mass of contradictions, voted for a resolution calling for local ownership and control over existing services such as education, sanitation, police, water, gas, electricity, and tramways and also housing, parks, town planning, libraries, and the provision of music and popular recreation, and the retailing of coal. This was to:
“avoid the evils of centralisation and the drawbacks of bureaucracy”
Conference also voted that:
“the fullest possible scope should be given in all branches of social reconstruction to the democratically-elected local governing bodies, that whilst the central government department should assist with information and grants in aid, the local authorities should be given a free hand to develop their own services in whatever way they choose.”
This is the democratic socialist tradition in which Andy Burnham stands foursquare. Manchesterism is a modern iteration of the gas-and-water socialism of the early Fabians, or the municipalism of Joe Chamberlain’s Birmingham, or Morrison’s LCC. It was no coincidence that his first speech, once the leadership was in the bag, was at the People’s History Museum on the banks of the Irwell, yards from the site of Peterloo, and under the benevolent gaze of the Chartists, Suffragettes, Radicals, Reformers and other heroes of British democracy.
The clues to Andy’s plan have been there along. It is not only Burnham’s enthusiastic embrace of the Co-operative Party and the Rochdale Principles underpinning the Co-operative movement. It was also a courageous choice to desert the byways of Westminster to run Greater Manchester. Like Dick Whittington in reverse, the former SPAD, MP, and Cabinet Minister turned away from London, to become an elected mayor.
Again, this was hardly a sound career move in traditional terms, but was instead driven by a political ethos. In the book he co-authored with Steve Rotherham, Head North, Burnham states that:
“Over-concentration of political power in one post code is not conducive to the public good”.
That’s the essence of Burnham’s theory of change– that centralised power creates inequalities, inequities, and is inherently inefficient. And his proof of concept is Manchester, where marshalling local forces, from citizens, to councils, to companies, to co-ops, has created economic growth alongside civic pride. In his two major speeches, at the People’s History Museum, and at the Trades Union Congress in London, this is the dominant theme. “Good growth in every postcode” is more than a neat slogan — it is an organising principle to guide every minister in every part of government. This matters because Burnham cannot micro-manage every department, but can set an acid test for every ministerial decision.
Once they get this, it unleashes all kinds of possibilities, from tax-raising powers for city mayors, to electoral reform for the Commons, to mutual control of local assets such as schools, parks, shops, childcare, housing, football clubs, and energy utilities, to co-ops on the railway, to reshaping our high streets as safe, shared spaces. It allows for bold innovation in the delivery of services across health, justice, education, social care, and transport.
Best of all, it provides the best answer to the rise of right-wing ‘populism’, by unleashing the best instincts of the British people, co-opting our innate decency, and tapping into our shared sense of neighbourliness, social solidarity, and co-dependence. This is the Britain of park runs, pub quizzes, charity hikes, blood donation, community choirs, five-a-side football, and street parties, not painting roundabouts or burning down hotels. Burnhamism represents the potential birth of a patriotic communitarianism, fusing national purpose with community spirit. A renewed Britain, born in the Stubshaw Cross Community and Sports Centre.
Like Attlee in 1945, or Thatcher in 1979, Burnham represents a heady blend of personal conviction, public desire for change, and national imperative for survival. Governments need an animating purpose. They need a story about what they are doing and why they are doing it. By mining Labour’s tradition of mutualism, co-operation, and localised democracy, Burnham can construct a governing purpose, and from that flows a series of stories, metaphors, and explainers of what this Labour Government is for. It’s overdue and necessary, but it shouldn’t be hard for Burnham: it reflects what he actually believes.
Paul Richards is a member of the Fabian Society executive.
