Why Manchesterism is a politics of land
Andy Burnham's 'place first' philosophy opens up questions of land ownership & access
This is a post by Guy Shrubsole, co-director of the Right to Roam campaign. For more in-depth essays and thoughts from our campaign team, sign up to this substack.
“Place first, not party first” has been Andy Burnham’s motto, before and after the seismic Makerfield by-election. Burnham is unusual amongst politicians in defining himself so keenly in relation to place, casting it not simply as part of his personal backstory but also the basis of his political beliefs. ‘Manchesterism’, Burnham’s name for his philosophy of governing, is fundamentally grounded in the place that he’s been mayor of for the last decade. And underpinning every place, every community, is land.
The politics of land has been off the agenda in Britain for decades, but Manchesterism could well bring it back. Firstly, Burnham’s keen interest in regaining public control of housing and key utilities leads very quickly to questions of who owns land, and how the public sector might reverse decades of asset sales begun under Margaret Thatcher’s governments. Secondly, Burnham has long been an advocate for land value tax – a form of taxation which would levy property owners according to the value of the land they own. And thirdly, the people of Greater Manchester have long pioneered campaigns for greater access to land – from the mass trespasses at Winter Hill and Kinder Scout, to the creation of Britain’s first national park in the Peak District.
Let’s start with the ownership of land. “Public control is everything,” argued Burnham in an interview last year with the New Statesman. “When you’ve lost control of housing, energy, water, rail, buses, you’ve lost control of the basics of life”. Undergirding all of these basics of life is land: land on which social housing can be built, railways run, and wind farms and reservoirs constructed. If Manchesterism is a form of municipal socialism writ large, perhaps we should be looking at how municipal authorities operated in Britain at the height of their powers, from the late 19th century to the 1940s. Then, local government acquired land at a rate of knots, in order to provide their populaces with council housing to live in, clean water to drink and green spaces in which to exercise.
When Manchester’s population expanded in the Victorian period, it was the municipally-owned Manchester Corporation which acquired land for reservoirs in the Lake District to supply the city with water. This all changed when Thatcher’s environment secretary Nicholas Ridley introduced legislation to privatise the water industry in the late 1980s, declaring himself “absolutely delighted that this Bill achieves the privatisation of nearly 500,000 acres of land”. Today the privatised water companies still own vast swathes of the countryside, comprising critical watersheds in the peaks and moors of Northern England. Yet they’ve failed to care for the land and infrastructure they were gifted. United Utilities, the successor company to the Manchester Corporation, stands accused of turning Lake Windermere green with algal blooms from the sewage pollution it has discharged into it.
“Manchesterism is the end of neoliberalism,” Burnham has declared in one of his campaign videos. If this is to be so, a reckoning is needed not only with neoliberalism’s privatisation of public services, but also of land itself. As the academic Brett Christophers has written, Thatcher’s disposal of public land was “the biggest privatisation you’ve never heard of”, leading to the sale of some 5 million acres worth a staggering £400bn. Today, according to my own investigations, the public sector owns just 8.5% of England – less than half of what public bodies owned before Thatcher took power. This “new enclosure” encompassed everything from the sale of council housing and water utilities through to the disposal of half the nation’s stock of County Farms. More recent attempts at privatising publicly-owned land have been beaten back by staunch public opposition. Look at the backlash to David Cameron’s thwarted attempt to sell off the Public Forest Estate; or how local residents halted Brighton Council from flogging off its downland estate, originally bought to let the public enjoy walking in the fresh air amidst glorious wildflowers.
Andy Burnham has already stated his support for renationalising Thames Water; I hope he will also give serious thought to how having more land in public ownership can serve the public good. Mathew Lawrence, director of the thinktank Common Wealth, talks about Manchesterism being the creation of a “productive state”, engaged in “directly owning and operating capital in essential sectors”. Land is an essential capital asset that consistently appreciates in value: “buy land, they’re not making it anymore”, as Mark Twain once quipped. Yet in Britain, even our national parks don’t actually belong to the nation. Small wonder that nature is ailing in such places, with private grouse moor owners turning parts of the Peak District into a tinderbox, sparking wildfires that choke the lungs of the residents of Manchester and beyond. We have hamstrung our public bodies by depriving them of the means to control the land under their jurisdictions.
Another means of exerting some public control over land is through taxation. Burnham is a long-term supporter of land value tax, first advocating for it in his first Labour leadership campaign in 2010. He then called taxing land values “an idea so old-Labour it can be traced back to Thomas Paine”. Burnham might have added that land value tax has since been supported by everyone from Henry George to Winston Churchill, was a staple policy proposal of Labour Party manifestos in the first half of the 20th century, and unites economists of left and right who see it as being one of the most rational taxes you can implement. More recently, Burnham has expressed his support for land value tax during the Makerfield by-election campaign, telling the Guardian he backed “replacing ‘iniquitous’ council tax with a land value tax”, and telling the Telegraph: “I think land is under-taxed. I look, as mayor, at swathes of Greater Manchester that is land that is held, but there is no charge in terms of redundant land that is not used. I have long been persuaded of the argument for a land value tax.”
The most thought-through proposal for how to levy taxes based on land values – and in the process replace council tax and stamp duty – is the Proportional Property Tax (PPT). Its proponents, the Fairer Share campaign, count many Labour MPs amongst their supporters. They argue, rightly, that council tax is regressive – with tax bands based on valuations last undertaken in 1991, meaning that “those who have benefited the most from house price growth have also been the biggest beneficiaries of the council tax system”. The campaigners propose abolishing council tax and instead levying PPT, charged at a flat rate of 0.48% of the value of a property. Owners of expensive properties would end up paying more, but 75% of the public would pay less tax as a result. Fairer Share also propose applying the tax to undeveloped plots of land granted planning permission, to discourage land banking, and to levy higher rates on long-term empty homes.
But a politics of land and place isn’t just about legal deeds of ownership or the cold calculus of taxation: it is also about belonging. “Who possesses this landscape? The man who bought it or I who am possessed by it?” wrote the Scottish poet Norman MacCaig. The people of Greater Manchester have long understood this truth. They started the first campaigns in Britain for access to land, in order to experience the glorious countryside on the edges of their city.
In 1896, 130 years ago this September, ten thousand people marched up Winter Hill to the north of Bolton in Britain’s first mass trespass action. They were protesting the unlawful blocking up of a footpath by a grouse moor owner. Winter Hill sparked a movement for land access that continues to this day. In 1932, the baton passed to Manchester resident Benny Rothman, who led 400 hikers on the famous Kinder Scout mass trespass in the Peak District. The trespassers had to fight off gamekeepers on the Duke of Devonshire’s grouse moor, and some were imprisoned for their protest. But the action helped lead to the creation of the first National Parks in Britain by the post-war Labour government, starting with the Peak District. When New Labour took power in 1997, it was a Greater Manchester MP, Michael Meacher, who championed the Countryside and Rights of Way (CRoW) Act, giving the public a partial right to roam in England’s countryside.
Access to land is an old, oft-forgotten part of the Labour movement’s history, and it remains unfinished business. It was Meacher’s successor as MP for Oldham, Jim McMahon, who as shadow environment secretary called for Labour to pass a Right to Roam Act in government. McMahon’s team went on to propose that England should follow Scotland’s approach of creating a full right of responsible access to the countryside. But following heavy lobbying by landowners, Keir Starmer’s team took against the idea and U-turned. Many Labour MPs were disappointed and vowed to fight on. One of the most prominent champions of right to roam in Parliament currently is Phil Brickell, MP for Bolton West, whose constituency includes Winter Hill.
Andy Burnham should revive an English right to roam as a way to fulfil Labour’s manifesto commitment to “improve responsible access to nature.” The Labour movement has long seen access to land as one of the “basics of life”, and one that should be free and available to all. Giving the public a right of responsible access to their countryside would improve people’s health and happiness, save the NHS money, cost virtually nothing to implement, and be a vote-winner: polling shows that nearly 7 in 10 people back the idea, with equal support in both urban and rural areas. Most importantly, Burnham should embrace access to land because it speaks to the essence of Manchesterism: a politics that puts love of place at its heart.
Greater public ownership, fairer taxation, making the basics of life more affordable, cultivating love of place: many of the preoccupations of Manchesterism are shared by advocates of land reform. It’s clear that the government needs bold new policies that address the cost of living crisis, raise revenues and win back progressive voters in key constituencies. Proposals to reverse the privatisation of public land, replace unfair council tax with land value tax, and give the public a right to freely access nature speak to all of these. Manchester’s heritage of pioneering the public ownership of land and public access to the countryside offers inspiration for England to follow.