Cooking the Books 1 – Manchesterism
Until Andy Burnham, as Mayor of Greater Manchester, re-coined the word, ‘Manchesterism’ meant the economic doctrine of the Manchester and district cotton mill owners who favoured a policy of complete tariff-free trade and opposed state interference in industry, as expressed by Richard Cobden, one of the leaders of the Anti-Corn Law League of the 1840s. In England they were known as the Manchester School. On the continent their doctrine was called manchesterisme in French and Manchesterismus in German. It wasn’t that popular there as the local factory owners realised what was behind it — that their British rivals wanted wider access to continental markets for their cheaper goods.
Engels lived and worked in Manchester for over twenty years and was well aware of the views of the Manchester School, if only from socialising with them. Writing in English he used ‘Manchester School’, but in German he used the word ‘Manchesterismus’ as in a note he wrote about a May Day meeting in London in 1890 where he refers to new trade union members wanting ‘no more to do with the Manchesterism of the old Trade Unions’ (‘4 May’, Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 27).
When he re-coined the term, Burnham may not have been aware of its previous use and meaning, but others were and asked him if there was any connection. PoliticsHome (15 April) recorded:
‘Asked whether he identifies more with Richard Cobden or Friedrich Engels, he chooses Cobden, the Mancunian Radical and free-trader.’
There is not in fact that much in common between Burnham’s and Cobden’s Manchesterism. Cobden was a free marketeer while Burnham has defined it as ‘business-friendly socialism’. It is, however, revealing that when asked to choose between a capitalist free-marketeer and an opponent of capitalism in all its forms, Burnham identified more with the former.
What Cobden and Burnham have in common is that they both support capitalism. ‘Business-friendly socialism’ is an oxymoron but if you understand ‘socialism’ to mean Labourism then it becomes, like a ‘round circle’, a pleonasm. Starmer and Reeves expressed it more directly when they said that Labour was ‘the party of business’.
Insofar as Burnham’s Manchesterism is more than a populist slogan which sets workers in the North against workers in London and the South East, it seems to mean giving regional authorities more freedom to raise money locally and to attract capitalist investment to their region. In other words, a mere change in the political superstructure in the hope that it will stimulate ‘growth’. But what drives growth is the pursuit, and accumulation as new capital, of profits. If the prospect of a profit is not good, then investment won’t take place, whatever the political arrangements.
But what sort of investment? These days British capitalism lives not so much by producing surplus value directly in industry as by capturing, through selling financial and legal services, surplus value produced elsewhere in the world. Under Burnham, Manchester has been able to divert some of this from London to Manchester, but not everywhere will be able to do this.
The other type of capitalist investment that regional authorities can seek is ‘property development’. In fact the two businesspeople that the Times’s Economics Editor, Meerhen Khan, interviewed (25 June) who had found Burnham ‘business friendly’ were both in the property business. One said that ‘all the evidence suggests that he’s incredibly pro-business’ and that ‘his comments on the excesses of neo-liberalism were also a critique of its social impact on communities in post-industrial cities like Manchester rather than an outright rejection of market capitalism’.
So says a Labour-friendly capitalist.