One party state
Politics in Manchester has never been so meaningless and so important.
In May 2014 council election results gave the Labour Party in Manchester all the seats in the council chamber, all 96. It seems, as the expression goes, if you put a red rosette on a monkey in the city it’ll be elected. So if a Labour victory is inevitable why bother voting? Surely politics has become meaningless in the city?
It's ugly in some ways this mono-system, but it seems effective.
In November 2014, the Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, announced he was going to devolve powers to Greater Manchester Combined Authority. So in 2017 elections will be held for a regional mayor on the London model taking in the whole metropolitan area of 2.7m people. Decisions will soon be taken at a macro level on transport, planning, housing, skills, training and policing rather than piecemeal within the jigsaw of local authorities.
Politics is reborn, but at a more rational regional level.
This is probably the biggest political news regionally since before WWII. As Sir Richard Leese, the Manchester council leader, said: “Greater Manchester has been in the vanguard of the national devolution debate. It was clear that an over-centralised national system was not delivering the best results for our people or our economy. We are extremely pleased that we can now demonstrate what a city region with greater freedoms can achieve and contribute further to the growth of the UK.”
Neil Dimelow's graphic view north east from City Tower
Greater Manchester has been singled out for this treatment ahead of other cities because the government clearly believes it has demonstrated a willingness to pull together and show vision.
This is partly down to that one party security of tenure in the main administration of the region. With an overwhelming council majority and now a complete redwash of seats, the administration of the city of Manchester can make long term strategic decisions without fear of them being overturned because no other party will replace Labour. It's ugly in terms of democracy this mono-system, but it seems effective.
It's the economy, stupid
There was more good news from the government in 2014 with again the Chancellor referring to Manchester as the centre of a ‘Northern Powerhouse’ and grand talk of HS2 and HS3. These are, of course, the proposed high speed rail links between, respectively, Manchester and London, and across the north through Manchester.
High speeding through the crowd
Private enterprise has joined the mood of probable post-recession buoyancy with major city centre schemes such as Allied London’s St John’s Quarter and the Cooperative’s NOMA and on Deansgate. In the south of the city the proposed Airport City was given a boost when during a trade mission to China a partnership worth £800m was announced with Beijing Construction Engineering Group set to create 16,000 jobs. Meanwhile local developer Peel Group has delivered schemes such as MediaCityUK bringing more than 2,000 BBC jobs to Greater Manchester. Conventions and exhibitions at Manchester Central have performed well in the same period and look set for growth.
One element of investment has surprised everybody; that of a football club. Not only has Manchester City, through the Anglo-Arabic holding company, Abu Dhabi United Group, set about winning trophies and extending the stadium to more than 62,000 seats but also built a ‘campus’ linked to the main Etihad stadium worth more than £200m with its own 7,000 capacity reserve ground, sixteen pitches, an accommodation block and a sixth-form College.
Abu Dhabi United then announced a £1bn partnership with Manchester City Council to build 6,000 homes for rent between the city centre and the Etihad Stadium. Jaws dropped. Never has a football club moved so far from its core activity.
Higher education and health care has pumped millions of pounds into the economy too. By the end of 2015 the so-called ‘knowledge corridor’ along Oxford Road made up of the University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University and other institutions, such as the hospitals, seem set to bring in £400m of investment, providing scientific, health, educational and cultural facilities. These will include the National Graphene Institute worth £61m. The world’s thinnest material bringing fat material gains.
Then as the year fizzled out the £235m longest title anywhere for an institution arrived with the Sir Henry Royce Institute for Advanced Materials Research and Innovation creating a headquarters in the city.
Whitworth Hall - University of Manchester
At the same time Manchester City Council and Spinningfields developer Allied London unveiled plans for The Factory Manchester - a new £78m arts space in the former Granada Studios. In the first half of 2015 the culture chasing classes will gain HOME at the cost of £25m.
All good news - resulting in Manchester’s ranking in the top sixteen of European cities in which to start a business and to live, one of the few non-capital cities in the top twenty. On radio shows there are debates about why Manchester feels like it is the second city when technically that's Birmingham.
The Factory
It's society, stupid
The positives have to be viewed with the negatives: the awful, bleak, shocking, seemingly intractable negatives. The evident progress and wealth can mask the desperate conditions, particularly in the north and east of the City of Manchester and in large areas of the other Greater Manchester boroughs.
There are hundreds of thousands of people, established residents and recent immigrants, who feel excluded from any upswing in the economy, trapped in areas with some of the worst indices of health, well-being and employment in the country and across Northern Europe.
Len Grant's feature 'Her first year' about a low income family was featured here on Manchester Confidential
By many measures the City of Manchester is the 4th most deprived local council in England – a situation not helped by the city falling victim to some of the harshest funding cuts as the government attempts to balance the UK books. If predictions of the loss of another 600 jobs in the City of Manchester are borne out, then levels of privation will only rise.
Education, training, skills surely are the key here. This is, as has been stated by local leaders, one of the objectives of devolved powers so instead of 'an over-centralised national model – imposing ‘one size fits all’ – there's greater local control over certain budgets and powers'. It seems clear that when the money is released it's within training and skills much of it should go.
Something has gone deeply wrong, not just in Greater Manchester of course, but across the country, with a widening sense of us and the very excluded them.
A few years ago I conducted a free tour from Harpurhey as part of programme of events tied to a city centre exhibition. The coach was filled with local residents from 20-70 years-of-age. The tour covered the central areas of the conurbation.
Nobody - not a single guest - on the coach had been to The Quays, the University area, Chorlton, Didsbury (although I doubt whether many of the latter suburbs' residents have ever been to Harpurhey), Fletcher Moss Gardens, Rusholme, Sportscity or indeed much of the city centre such as Chinatown, the King Street area or the Castlefield basin.
Their Manchester lives seemed to revolve around seven streets close to their homes, Manchester Arndale and Piccadilly Gardens. They made occasional jaunts to the airports for Med resorts. As one of the group said as we finished the tour, "I had no idea my city was so big. I feel stupid now. I didn't realise it could be so grand."
I felt humbled but I also felt angry. Why aren't people's eyes open to the city and what it offers? What keeps them closed to the opportunities available?
Why did a person from another deprived area say this to me in November when I talked about the HOME arts centre? "But it's always the same, these places aren't for us. They'll have programmes to get us in and schools will go and they'll try their best, but it'll be condescending and we won't go back 'cause there'll be nothing for us."
I asked the same person whether they'd be voting in any Elected Mayor ballot in 2017. The reply was a sarcastic laugh, an expression of almost an active nihilism, a scoffing sort of deliberate self-exclusion probably fed by idiot vox-pops saying all politics is lies and politicians are in it for themselves. These dangerous distortions are creating a vacuum extremist parties are trying to fill.
From Collyhurst, Manchester city centre can seem much further than a mile
The fault lies both ways of course.
Schools, local authorities can only do so much, if people lock themselves into narrow lives despite all attempts at opening their eyes then what can anyone do? But education and skills if they lead to jobs, work, pride, spare money, changes all that. It pries eyes open. That this is a commonplace doesn't make it any less true: jobs, economic growth, is the path to improvement.
Immigration is important too especially for the inner suburbs. Immigrants driven with the desire to succeed add energy to an area. Nobody who has looked at the development of cities can fail to understand the importance of new blood, new ideas. Inward looking cities decline history tells us.
What is reassurring is that throughout the areas with the highest level of unemployment there are people who stay and battle on, lift spirits, help out, who are not nihilistic. The good souls behind the Moston Miners Community Arts and Music Centre with its small cinema are representive of these. There are thousands of these people across the region.
But there's a long way to go before we have a more equal society. It’s typical of this contrary region, that while unemployment rates in the city are stuck around 11% (regionally 8%), Greater Manchester is said to be home to more multi-millionaires than anywhere outside London. Occasionally it seems the divide between rich, comfortable and poor is as wide as it was in the 19th century, although the experience of poverty might be very different.
A few kilometres south west of the city of Manchester is the Tatton constituency which records the highest average UK income outside the south-east.
Let's hope the spin-off from advanced material and graphene projects, the hospital schemes, even maybe the prestige given to the city by cultural projects such as The Factory, MediaCityUK and HOME help drag investment to the poorest areas. Let's hope the infrastructure changes do the same. Crossed fingers and all that.
Decay still characterises many inner suburbs
Regained Confidence
Bad and good. Good and bad. Isn't that just cities?
Yet there is much still to praise in Manchester as it enters 2015, there is much to be positive and optimistic about. The city has changed hugely, especially in its central areas, especially in its confidence - although we have to look at a longer period than the last twelve months to appreciate this. It's even changed for the better, physically, in many of the suburbs although the effect has been much less even.
Clever initiatives such as Manchester International Festival (MIF) have helped morale and image. This is an undoubted success story, a biennial showpiece of new ideas in the arts that has made headlines and got heads turning across the country and the world.
A walk across the city centre today reveals a city more open and accessible and enlivened with new buildings and squares. Despite some people - often ranting on Confidential - who can't see what is palpably before their eyes, the city centre is a cracking place to stroll, look up, look around, eat and drink, visit theatres, galleries, libraries and museums.
Walking the modern city
We might smirk at the first line here, but as Max Davidson wrote in 2010 in the Daily Telegraph: 'Because Manchester has never blown its own trumpet, it has never featured prominently on the tourist map of Europe. If Manchester were in France or Germany, we would visit it in droves. In fact, in many ways, it is the perfect city-break destination: accessible, reasonably compact, but blessed with a bewildering variety of attractions. Architecturally, Manchester is a mess, but a glorious mess. Get on the next train.'
In terms of on-street activity the city centre is becoming more and more the regional leisure destination, more festivals, more markets, more everything; activity coalescing in the city centre just as it should. Hotel occupancy is up.
Manchester Day 2014
Nor should the rise and rise of the blessed trinity of Chorlton, West Didsbury and Didsbury be overlooked. It'd be very welcome if one of the North Manchester suburbs - it should be Prestwich but maybe it's too strung out geographically - could start to show similar movement.
Another fairly recent report stated, ‘Manchester has been at the cutting edge of innovation over the last years. It is a model for a city with a great past, combining traditional and revolutionary architecture, giving its citizens a fine and stimulating environment for work and leisure.’
As discussed above these words need to apply to many more of its citizens before Manchester and Greater Manchester can take things for granted, but the underlying confidence is welcome with public and private sectors demonstrating the ability to work together. The remarkable announcements of the last few months have bolstered this. As always this city is better when it attempts to live up to the expansionist liberal tradition that made it one of the global players.
Back to politics. Within the city the council needs to be careful it doesn't become too high-handed, too know-it-all. The scathing and stupid way it has dealt with the Library Walk protest, its blindness to the errors of the Piccadilly Gardens redevelopment, the obstinacy of some aspects of transport policy, shows there can be closed thinking and a resistance to accept criticism: typical behaviour of the One Party State.
Meanwhile in the suburbs with high levels of immigration Labour will have to watch out for resentment over that sense of exclusion expressing itself in support for the dangerous UKIP.
Brian Katz is the darling of urbanists at present and has lectured in Manchester. He is the author of The Metropolitan Revolution and boss of an American think tank focussed on cities. His mantra is that 'metropolitan areas know themselves better than anyone and the key to making stuff happen is private-civic partnerships delivering key infrastructure. 'Proximity is key'. In other words, city regions are better than central government in enacting real change locally.
Let's hope in the near-future we'll find out whether proximity delivers and whether a degree of devolved local governance closes the distance between Harpurhey and Didsbury?
As journalist Jim McClellan wrote some years back: 'Manchester’s size makes the social processes more visible. You can see how things are developing. Where they might end is another matter. Perhaps it’ll be the first place to show us whether our new cities work. Manchester, as the Mancs love to tell you, is ahead of the game.'
You can follow Jonathan Schofield on Twitter @JonathSchofield or connect via Google+ This article was adapted from one first published in Manchester: The Complete Guide 2015.
It can be hard to make out how things might develop in Manchester
Striding forward
