Manchester is a great world city which has long divided observers. In the mid-nineteenth century, what was for de Tocqueville a ‘foul drain’ and for Taine ‘Babel built of brick’ was for the Edinburgh Review, by contrast, ‘foremost in the march of improvement, a great incarnation of progress’. Most recently, with ‘devo Manc’, the city of 1980s de-industrialisation and indie music has been transmuted into a symbol of post-industrial regeneration and devolved government.
All this is being talked up as a matter of electioneering by the Treasury and Westminster politicians. After all, the coalition government must be seen to have a policy on ‘rebalancing the economy’. Devolved government initiatives in 2014 and 2015 for Manchester and the so-called ‘Northern Powerhouse’ are now being pushed as follow-ups to George Osborne’s 2010 ‘march of the makers’ (a march of course that never happened). After day trips to Manchester, London-based journalists are obligingly hyping it all. The planned devolution of responsibility for health and social care to statutory organisations in Greater Manchester was carefully choreographed; and the papers were then filled with admiring profiles of the Manchester deal-makers who had allied with the Chancellor to create the ‘Northern Powerhouse’.
The Manchester deal-makers have real achievements to their credit, but these do not signal a decentralisation of power or resources; they derive more from the shrewdness with which a small group around Howard Bernstein and Richard Leese (respectively Chief Executive and Leader of Manchester City Council) have played the game of extracting resources from a Treasury that manages what is just about the most centralised system of local authority funding in Western Europe. The planned devolution of social and health care is all of a piece with the Town Hall’s established style of deal-making. Devolution in Scotland followed a decade-long debate involving a wide range of organisations in civil society; ‘devo Manc’ is the result of confidential bargains between the Treasury and a small group of local deal-makers, mostly on the City Council.
