Inside the corridors of power, a constellation of policy experts, former advisers and campaigners are working to dismantle four decades of neoliberal orthodoxy. But can Andy Burnham’s radical vision survive contact with political reality?
When Andy Burnham climbed onto the stage at the Ministry of Sound in May 2025, he was not yet prime minister. He was not even a Member of Parliament. Yet the mayor of Greater Manchester captivated a packed room of Labour activists and intellectuals with a diagnosis of Britain’s crisis that none of his rivals had dared to articulate. He identified the root cause of the nation’s malaise not as a failure of messaging or a problem of personality, but as the systematic privatisation of essential services stretching back to Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. It was, recalled Neal Lawson, the founder of the campaign group Compass, “the speech of someone who looked and sounded like they wanted to be prime minister.”
Sixteen months later, Burnham sits at No 10, the most radical figure to occupy Downing Street since Thatcher herself. His ascent was unorthodox — no leadership contest, no general election manifesto — and that very irregularity has left his programme shrouded in ambiguity. The question now hanging over British politics is whether the network of thinkers, advisers and policy wonks surrounding him can translate their intellectual energy into tangible change, or whether the machinery of government will grind their ambitions to dust.
The Architects of a New Agenda
The intellectual scaffolding of Burnham’s premiership has been quietly assembled by a small, interconnected community of leftwing policy experts operating across London’s think tank ecosystem. When the Labour MP Josh Simons vacated his Makerfield seat on 14 May 2026, clearing the path for Burnham’s parliamentary return, a group of economists seized the moment. Alfie Stirling of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Hannah Peaker of the New Economics Foundation, and Carys Roberts — a former Starmer adviser who had resigned the previous October — had spent months convincing their future leader that the traditional Labour faith in economic growth as a solvent for all grievances was insufficient.
Their argument was elegantly simple and politically urgent: the government did not have the luxury of waiting for trickle-down growth to materialise before voters’ living standards improved. Instead, the state should intervene directly in markets to reduce the cost of essentials. On the very day Simons announced his departure, the JRF and NEF published coordinated research proposing a new framework of rent controls, with the Institute for Public Policy Research having released complementary findings days earlier.
“We were anticipating political movement,” Stirling told me. “And we wanted to make sure we were landing the right policies.”
The influence of this network extends well beyond think tank reports. Miatta Fahnbulleh, the energy security secretary, has populated her department with alumni of the same tight-knit policy circle. Her chief of staff, Carys Roberts, previously directed the IPPR. George Dibb, another former IPPR figure, advises on industrial strategy. Arthur Downing, who worked under Ed Miliband in the energy department and now champions public ownership of Britain’s energy networks through his Haldane Society, has found himself in conversations that shape ministerial thinking. The revolving door between Westminster and these policy institutions is not a bug — it is the engine of the entire enterprise.
Three Camps, One Prime Minister
Not everyone orbiting Burnham agrees on what “ending neoliberalism” actually means. Three distinct factions are competing to define the agenda, and their tensions reveal both the breadth of his mandate and the fragility of his coalition.
The first, and most radical, camp clusters around Fahnbulleh, Miliband and the think tank Common Wealth. Its intellectual centre of gravity is Mathew Lawrence, whose paper *The Productive State: A Framework for Manchesterism*, co-authored with Alex Williams, argues that Britain’s affordability crisis is a direct consequence of privatising life’s essentials. Lawrence’s framework envisions an economy built on publicly run corporations delivering core services, a tier of private manufacturing and retail, and a third tier of regulated startups in fields like artificial intelligence and clean energy. “The Blair line was always ‘what matters is what works’,” Lawrence told me. “But is private equity really working to deliver social care? Have leveraged buyouts of the water industry really worked for rivers?”
The second camp is more centrist, anchored by Louise Haigh, Burnham’s first secretary of state, and Josh Simons. Organisations such as the Centre for British Progress and the Good Growth Foundation populate this space. Their diagnosis locates Thatcherism’s damage not primarily in privatisation itself but in the erosion of state capacity that followed. Britain, in their telling, has “forgotten how to build,” buried under an apparatus of planning regulations that protects incumbents and stifles innovation. Their remedy is deregulation and streamlined construction rather than nationalisation.
The third camp — and the one holding the most institutional power — comprises the communitarians. James Purnell, Burnham’s chief of staff, and his close collaborator Graeme Cooke, who now leads No 10’s policy unit, have long argued that Labour’s fundamental failure was philosophical rather than technical. A 2010 essay they wrote after Gordon Brown’s electoral collapse contended that New Labour had never developed a coherent vision of a good society. This month, Burnham deepened this intellectual current by hiring Marc Stears, a political theorist whose 2021 book Out of the Ordinary critiques the “cult of expertise and detachment” that has hollowed out democratic engagement. Stears’s prescription is nothing less than a “thoroughgoing devolution of power.”
Manchesterism Under the Microscope
Burnham’s signature concept — “Manchesterism” — functions as both a governing philosophy and a political lightning rod. Defined in a speech earlier this year as a method of softening capitalism’s harder edges by marrying economic growth with social progress, it is also, fundamentally, an argument for devolution. The Greater Manchester mayoralty, along with five other metro mayor positions, was created under the Conservatives, yet Burnham has transformed it into a laboratory for a different kind of politics.
His most tangible achievement, the Bee bus network, illustrates both the promise and the constraints of this approach. Following the 2017 Bus Services Act, which empowered metro mayors to reclaim control of routes, Burnham became the first to exercise these powers. The result: a sunflower-yellow fleet whose routes, timetables and fares are decided by Transport for Greater Manchester, with private operators bidding for contracts. Stagecoach and Rotala challenged the arrangement in court; the high court dismissed their case. Richard Leese, the former council leader who negotiated the original deal with George Osborne, recalled the precision required: “He had to be very precise at all times in exactly what he said. One wrong step and Stagecoach and the others would have had us back in court.”
Yet scaling Manchester’s model to the national stage presents formidable difficulties. Burnham has already retreated from several early pledges. His council housing announcement was diluted — only 60% of new homes outside London will be social housing, not all of them. His intention to cap political donations at £500,000 was abandoned. And the language of “public ownership” has been quietly replaced by the vaguer “public control.” His chancellor, John Healey, has offered little intellectual ballast, delivering his first major speech on growth in tones barely distinguishable from his predecessor Rachel Reeves.
Karel Williams, an emeritus professor at the University of Manchester whose economic thinking has shaped Labour discourse, captured the paradox succinctly: “Burnham is the master of vibes. He’s a figure who pops up with a positive story. It feels as though he’s become a screen on to which different Labour factions project their hopes, telling us more about what other people want to happen than what he might do.”
The Devolution Dilemma
No discussion of Burnham’s programme is complete without confronting the tension at its core. The prime minister’s central conviction — that Britain’s great mistake was privatising economic power while centralising political power — runs directly into the structural realities of the British state. For two centuries, transformative reform has been executed through Whitehall’s centralised machinery. Attlee and Wilson relied on powerful bureaucracies; Thatcher needed a strong state to police opposition; Blair famously insisted that systemic change must be driven from the centre.
Burnham’s answer is No 10 North, a secondary headquarters in Manchester announced in late June, currently housed in a refurbished 1980s office block opposite the city’s Victorian town hall. Civil servants responsible for local growth are being relocated into a new Office of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, led by Haigh. The concept originated with Jack Shaw’s think tank Groundwork and its paper arguing that “in order to get the most out of devolution, Burnham needs a more powerful centre” — a paradox that encapsulates the entire enterprise.
The government’s Rewiring the State statement, published this summer, has electured the devolution community. Shaw, who belongs to a WhatsApp group of 120 experts, described it as “the most radical document in devolution policy that we’ve seen.” It promises local leaders greater control over income taxes, skills, transport and public services, with many policies scheduled for implementation within two years.
But history offers cautionary tales. The economic benefits of devolution in Greater Manchester have been uneven. Central Manchester rents now exceed housing benefits by at least 200%, while outer boroughs such as Oldham and Rochdale remain economically disconnected from the city centre. Ambition North Wales, a regional initiative promising 4,200 new jobs by 2036, had generated just 63 full-time roles after five years. The political risk is equally real: Ben Houchen, the Conservative mayor of Tees Valley, has already signalled he would use any new income tax powers to fund rebates rather than Labour-preferred programmes.
The Road Ahead
Next week, Burnham will address Labour’s annual party conference for the first time as prime minister. Shortly thereafter, the budget will land. These moments will serve as the first genuine tests of whether the rhetoric of radical transformation can withstand the gravity of political and economic reality. Undoing four decades of privatisation and centralisation within a single parliamentary term is, to put it mildly, improbable.
Yet the urgency driving this cohort of reformers is genuine. McVitie of the Labour Growth Group speaks openly of “democratic breakdown” and the danger that incremental adjustment will prove futile against a globally resurgent right. The thinkers I spoke with share a conviction that the government cannot afford to wait — that the window for structural change is narrowing by the month.
Whether Burnham’s premiership becomes remembered as a genuine rupture or a brief, luminous interlude depends on decisions still being made in offices from Whitehall to Manchester. The architecture of a new politics is being drafted in real time, by people who believe Britain’s democratic deficit is not inevitable but designed — and therefore can be redesigned. Whether they are right remains the defining question of this parliament.
Why it Matters
The debate surrounding Burnham’s programme is not merely about policy specifics such as rent controls or bus franchising. It represents the most consequential attempt in a generation to fundamentally reconfigure the relationship between the British state, its economy and its citizens. If the devolution experiment succeeds, it could reshape the geography of British power for decades, ending the gravitational dominance of London and giving communities genuine stakes in their own governance. If it fails, it will confirm the deep structural resistance to change embedded in the UK’s constitutional DNA — and leave the right’s critique of state incompetence not just unchallenged but vindicated. The next twelve months, culminating in the budget and the party conference, will determine whether this moment proves to be a turning point or a cautionary tale about the limits of ambition in a system resistant to reinvention.
