Manchester, Poster Child of Municipal Neoliberalism // New Socialist

Manchester has never been a city burdened by false modesty. It has many firsts to its name – cradle of the Industrial Revolution, birthplace of modern trade unionism and the women’s suffrage movement – and it has not been reticent about proclaiming them. Its musical output, most notably that of Factory Records, is celebrated around the world. For a city of relatively modest size, Manchester has always punched above its weight on the international stage.

Although Tony Wilson, Factory’s founder and impresario, was a committed socialist, the Factory fable – the subject of seemingly endless histories and hagiographies – has provided Manchester’s politicians and business boosters with a beguiling yarn to deploy when selling the city to property developers. Nor are its long-dead revolutionaries safe from being pressed into service in this way. A city-centre penthouse flat named in ‘honour’ of Friedrich Engels was recently put on the market for £2.5 million; three blocks of council housing in nearby Collyhurst, handed over by the council to Urban Splash and converted into luxury private flats, now bear the names of the Pankhurst women – including the left communist Sylvia – lending an edgy frisson to their gentrification.

The signs of this property-driven, post-industrial renaissance are everywhere you look in Manchester, from the cranes that have dominated the city skyline for most of the last two decades, to the spiralling housing costs that have locked out many Mancunians not just from homeownership but also, increasingly, the local rental market. The local waiting list for social housing now stands at more than 15,000, while the city’s rate of homelessness (17.8 per 1,000 households) is the highest anywhere in the country; last year, rents in Manchester surged by just shy of 20 per cent, easily outstripping the national rate of 14 per cent rent growth.

This decidedly mixed blessing, and how it came into being, provide the focus of Isaac Rose’s provocative and penetrating study, The Rentier City. While well known locally as an indefatigable housing activist, Rose is quick to stress that the book is not merely another addition to the growing pile of works on the housing crisis. Instead, it delves deep into Manchester’s history, and the conflicts between its contending classes and political traditions, to make sense of how the city became the lodestar of municipal neoliberalism that it is today – to the worsening detriment of many of its inhabitants.

Rose delves deep into Manchester’s history, and the conflicts between its contending classes and political traditions, to make sense of how the city became the lodestar of municipal neoliberalism that it is today.

Hell upon Earth

Having been a provincial market town prior to the Industrial Revolution, Manchester was thrown up in a speculative frenzy as its textile industry boomed in the 19th century. The city’s infamously damp and relatively mild climate made it an ideal location for cotton spinning, as it meant cotton fibres were less susceptible to breaking. Its close proximity to several rivers provided good sources of water power, and being near to the port of Liverpool, Manchester also had easy access to imported raw cotton, picked by slaves, from the Caribbean and the southern United States. The construction of the canals and railways served as an important spur to growth, as did productivity-boosting inventions such as the water frame and spinning jenny. The decline of domestic textile production supplied the nascent cotton industry with an army of wage labourers from the surrounding towns and villages, and whose efforts to resist the imposition of the factory system had ultimately proved unsuccessful.

Manchester’s rise to industrial pre-eminence was also, from the outset, totally dependent on British imperial exploitation. Along with being the source of the raw material processed into finished goods by the textile mills, the empire also provided imported labourers from Ireland – first dispossessed of their lands by their British overlords, and then starved by them into emigration – who worked in the mills, and in the ancillary industries that sprung up around them. Despite, or perhaps in part because of this, the Mancunian working class was capable of heroic acts of self-sacrifice. In 1862, amid a depression in the Lancashire textile industry, the city’s cotton workers resolved to support Abraham Lincoln’s cotton embargo against the Confederate states and to refuse to handle slave-picked cotton. For Karl Marx, this was “brilliant proof of the indestructible staunchness of the English popular masses”. Lincoln wrote a letter to the Manchester workers, thanking them profusely for their support; a statue of him, with a plaque containing an excerpt from his letter affixed to its base, still stands in the city’s Lincoln Square.

The British empire provided imported labourers from Ireland – first dispossessed of their lands by their British overlords, and then starved by them into emigration – who worked in the mills.

The very poorest layers of Manchester’s Irish proletariat inhabited Angel Meadow, surely the most abject of Manchester’s Victorian slum districts, and the subject of some of the most harrowing passages in Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England. The area’s idyllic name can only have been some sort of sick cosmic joke: so impoverished were its residents that the graveyard of the local church, St Michael’s, was regularly dug up and its soil sold as fertiliser, prompting the city council to put concrete flags over it in order to put an end to the practice. Many Mancunians today, around a fifth of whom are estimated to be of Irish descent, can trace their ancestry back to this blighted hovel,¹ long since redeveloped into a desirable residential area for young, white-collar professionals, more recently rechristened ‘Noma’ by developers.

At this time, the abject poverty of the working class and the growing wealth of Manchester’s rising bourgeoisie were still cheek by jowl. But the encroachment of the slums – with diseases,their unpredictable, often volatile inhabitants, and their proclivity towards political radicalism – into the more respectable bourgeois districts of the inner city prompted the affluent to take flight. Developers, with an eye to the main chance then as now, were happy to assist, building new, semi-rural suburbs in Manchester’s hinterlands – including Broughton, Prestwich, Didsbury and Chorlton-cum-Hardy, to name a few – which formed a defensive outer ring around the proletarian areas. As Rose points out, the affluence and apparent serenity of these outer suburbs was always “predicated on the poverty and slums of Ancoats and the rest,” just as it was on the even worse poverty and slums of the empire upon which Manchester’s industrial pre-eminence rested.

Manchester’s built environment, therefore, was primarily shaped from the start by the imperatives of private profit rather than the social needs of most of its residents. While the middle classes had sealed themselves away in their suburbs, however, they could not ignore the prevalence of diseases such as cholera in the slums, which always threatened to spill over. The aristocracy, with its stately homes nestled deep in the countryside, could cut itself off almost completely, but this was not yet an option open to the rising industrial bourgeoisie, which was acutely aware that its privileges were more tenuous. It thus became clear to the modernising, civic-minded Mancunian bourgeois that the semi-feudal structure of local government needed to be modernised and rationalised accordingly; this class could afford to be more patrician once the revolutionary European wave of 1848, and the final upsurge of the Chartist movement, had been beaten back.

Euthanising the Rentier

These concessions, for all their limitations and qualifications, represented a partial but important victory for the popular classes. In particular,new legislation at the national level gave paternalistic local reformers in Manchester and elsewhere greater freedom to build council houses for the workers. Over time, public housing became “the key way the city’s working class [was] housed”, transforming the way Mancunian proletarians lived. For example, in 1897, a new row of terraced council houses was built in Ancoats featuring indoor plumbing, a real rarity for the time, and was named Sanitary Street to reflect its superior standards of hygiene. Later renamed Anita Street, these characterful houses are now some of the most sought-after in Manchester, in an area extensively gentrified in recent years; a flat in a subdivided house on Anita Street was recently put up for sale at £340,000.

Manchester’s working class had long been left to stew and seethe in the slums. It became apparent to the bourgeois reformers that it needed more breathing space. The city’s boundaries were, after a struggle and overcoming the ingrained snobbery of its neighbours, extended south into Cheshire; this area became known was Wythenshawe and was developed into the largest council estate in Europe, originally designed on the ‘garden city’ model, which drew inspiration from William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. Thus, by the inter-war years of the 20th century, Rose observes, it was broadly recognised that “only decisive municipal action could address the city’s long-term housing problems”.

But this newfound consensus did not merely come about through calm and rational persuasion of the powers that be. In fact, the latent threat of revolution continued to stalk the British ruling class, which wisely concluded that it would have to reform if it was to preserve its wealth and power. Periodic upsurges of industrial and political militancy – including the celebrated Glasgow rent strike of 1915 and the wider unrest of the Red Clydeside era – reminded the bourgeoisie that it would have to offer some concessions if it was to hang on to its privileges. It was assisted, however, by racist demagogues who sought to make political capital out of the working class’s housing grievances, fanning anxieties and whipping up hostility towards “aliens”. Over the years, this racism would have a persistent influence over council housing policy, and all too often local authorities would yield to it by allocating the least desirable housing to racialised minorities or denying them access to it altogether.

Local authorities increasingly took the initiative on housing, constructing and renting it out themselves on a larger scale – and increasingly sidelining private developers and landlords. In Manchester as elsewhere, landlords were hated and feared in equal measure by their working class tenants, who were often hesitant to voice complaints about their rents or the dilapidated condition of their homes for fear of reprisal. But those tenants’ responses to slum clearances were also mixed. However much they preferred renting from the council to local slumlords, many were wary about having their communities uprooted and relocated miles away. Manchester’s Black community, which established a tentative foothold in Moss Side soon after the Second World War, also included a number of homeowners – people for whom council housing was simply not on offer, and who had bought slum houses nobody else wanted only to find themselves threatened with having those houses bulldozed.

The condescending attitudes of housing reformers and planners, always keen to rid the workers of their perceived vices – alcohol chief among them – also rankled. Nonetheless, the 1945 Manchester Plan promised an egalitarian programme of redevelopment and urban renewal. For Rose, this 300-page blueprint was “one of the most radical reimaginings of a British city ever conceived”, and covered every conceivable aspect of urban planning; its authors had the admirable aim of finally ridding the city of its slums and its racketeering landlords once and for all. But the ambition of the Manchester Plan was no match for the bean-counters of the Treasury, and in a context of post-war austerity, the resources that could have made it a reality failed to materialise. The dreaded rentier had lived to fight another day.

The New Urban Left

With the Manchester Plan mothballed, the city’s industries entered into a precipitous and terminal decline. Industrial capital piled out of Manchester at a quickening pace, plunging the city into a crisis that would escalate into the 1970s and ‘80s. Manchester’s population, too, contracted sharply: having peaked at just over 760,000 in 1931, it had dipped below 400,000 by 2001. This was partly due to the decanting of inner-city residents to so-called overspill estates like Hattersley, Langley and Darnhill, built outside the boundaries of Manchester itself, but it also reflected the city’s decline as a centre of industrial production.

Slum clearances gathered pace during the post-war decades; during the 1950s alone, some 46,000 homes in Manchester were demolished. The back-to-back terraced houses that had defined Manchester’s urban sprawl for decades were by now in a terrible state, draughty and damp, compounded by unrepaired wartime damage. The city council was thus under increasing pressure to build new homes, with the rate of rebuilding lagging behind need well into the 1960s. While the construction of the overspill estates provided a partial solution to the problem, it was constrained by a shortage of land, forcing the local authority to look to other alternatives.

One such alternative was systems building, where components and panels were manufactured in factories and then bolted into place on-site. This, it was hoped, would allow for the construction of modern housing within the inner city, reusing brownfield land. But the quality of homes was often poor, and the corner-cutting during construction became apparent to tenants almost as soon as they moved in. Hulme’s Crescents, in particular, were plagued by structural problems due to the complex’s cheap build quality, while the maze-like layout of the flats and a lack of local amenities weakened any sense of community. The city’s deindustrialisation and economic decline further exacerbated its social problems.

Inevitably, discontent at the shortcomings of patrician social democracy – its parsimoniousness, its aloofness and its inability or simple unwillingness to take the needs of the city’s growing minority communities seriously – mounted. A new cadre of young activists, left-libertarian in their political outlook and drawn from the ranks of the soixante-huitard New Left, joined the Labour Party in Manchester in an attempt to change both the party and the local council from within. This new urban left, as it was termed by academic John Gyford,² had been disappointed by the record of the 1964-70 Labour governments under Harold Wilson – himself a former Bevanite whose promises of industrial renewal and regeneration had run aground – and was also dismayed by the persistent corruption of Labour councils, whose members were by this time notorious for accepting kickbacks from developers in return for permission to build shoddy housing.

Labour’s defeat in the 1987 general election prompted Manchester’s new urban left to effectively capitulate to the Thatcherites and sue for peace.

As Rose argues, Manchester’s new urban left has received much less attention than its counterparts elsewhere, particularly the Greater London Council under Ken Livingstone, Liverpool during the Militant years, and the so-called ‘People’s Republic of South Yorkshire’ in Sheffield under David Blunkett. But it would prove to have a much longer period in office than these other left-led councils; led by Graham Stringer (still a Labour MP), Manchester’s new urban left ran the local authority from 1984 until the mid-1990s, putting the city on a political trajectory well at odds with their initial intentions and setting the template for the technocratic, market-led approach that has defined local government in the city ever since.

To an extent, the new urban left in Manchester was derailed by events beyond its control. Labour’s 1980s municipal socialists were always heterogeneous in their politics, and disagreements of both policy and strategy caused the collapse of the rate-capping rebellion in 1985. A crucial defeat for the left in local government, this meant that councils were subjected to more stringent public spending restrictions; curbing the financial autonomy of local government, coupled with the sell-off of council housing through the flagship Right to Buy policy, was a central aim of the Thatcher government. Labour’s defeat in the 1987 general election, meanwhile, prompted Manchester’s new urban left – faced with mounting fiscal difficulties and continued private disinvestment from the city – to effectively capitulate to the Thatcherites and sue for peace.

Municipal Neoliberalism and its Consequences

In The Rentier City, Rose emphasises that Manchester’s embrace of municipal neoliberalism did not represent a complete break with earlier practice for the city’s new urban left. From the mid-1980s, there had been a major focus on urban renewal through leisure and consumption as key pillars of local economic strategy, particularly as a means of tackling unemployment, which hit 3.1 million nationwide in July 1986. The new urban left in Manchester also retained a degree of cultural radicalism, taking a firm stance against racism and homophobia, and hosting a 20,000-strong protest against Section 28 in 1988. But the adverse political and economic environment, and the new urban left’s somewhat jaundiced view of statist social democracy – a marker of its origins in the social movements of the ‘60s – would lead it into alliances with the private sector that, however awkward they might have seemed on the surface, had a logic to them that went beyond mere economic necessity.

The initial impetus for the neoliberal turn in Manchester was undeniably the series of political and industrial defeats that had, in quick succession, rocked the British labour movement in the 1980s and prompted it to lower its ambitions across the board. After 1987, when Thatcher was re-elected for a third successive term, Manchester City Council’s leaders began to cultivate a closer relationship with leading local businessmen, including theatre impresario Bob Scott. While many accounts give much of the credit for the city’s subsequent revival to Tony Wilson – someone who was, by his own admission, only too happy to embellish his own legend – Rose argues that it was in fact Scott who had a more direct and lasting influence in shaping the city as it is today.

It was Scott who helmed Manchester’s three bids to host the Olympic Games in 1992, 1996, and 2000. Despite the failure of these bids, Scott was successful in raising the city’s profile and attracting inward investment for flagship projects such as the Manchester Arena, Bridgewater Hall and the National Cycling Centre. The council’s powers for direct economic intervention might have been curtailed by Thatcher, but it still had significant influence over the direction of the local redevelopment agenda. However, as Rose highlights, the rising influence of business had the effect of “weakening [Manchester’s] democratic forces and empowering its private ones”. Though the council’s leading lights had originally entered local politics intending to make it more responsive to ordinary residents, their ever-cosier relationships with private business had instead made it yet more remote from them. This ‘Manchester model’, with its emphasis on public-private partnerships, foreshadowed on the local level what New Labour would go on to do nationally.

Though the council’s leading lights had entered local politics intending to make it more responsive to ordinary residents, their ever-cosier relationships with private business had instead made it yet more remote from them.

Although, by the mid-1990s, Manchester’s famous Haçienda nightclub was plagued by organised crime and approaching the end of its days, the city’s music scene was used adroitly to build Manchester’s brand and draw in international property investors. The irony, of course, was that this scene could not have flourished in the way that it did had it not been for the copious cheap space left behind by departing industries and residents – and the less disciplinarian welfare state of the post-war decades, which gave those artists who were without other means the freedom to hone their craft. As manufacturers shifted their operations abroad and the affluent fled once more for the suburbs, the space they vacated was gratefully taken over by young musicians and artists; in the late 1980s, with nobody else wanting to live there, the Hulme Crescents became home to an anarchic squatter subculture. The absence of affordable space today has left Manchester, its rents increasingly unaffordable for artists looking to establish themselves, living off and regurgitating its past cultural glories.

Rose argues that while the repercussions of Manchester’s property boom have been lavishly rewarding for some, they have been pernicious and damaging for many more. Once again, as in the 19th century, there are two Manchesters “rubbing up against one another but barely crossing”. Two-thirds of Mancunians rent, many in properties that were once owned by the council and are now in the hands of buy-to-let landlords. One study cited by Rose found Manchester to be the most unequal of 56 English cities surveyed; the city centre – now home to a population of around 85,000, having had only a few thousand permanent residents only 30 years ago – has served as ground zero, with rocketing property prices rippling out to surrounding areas. But even if you overlook the rough sleepers around the city centre, you don’t have to venture far out of town to see evidence of real hardship: the Manchester Central parliamentary constituency, which also includes neighbouring inner-city areas such as Collyhurst, Miles Platting, and Clayton, has a child poverty rate in excess of 50 per cent.

For those on the breadline in Manchester, there is no respite on the horizon. There is a school of thought, currently in vogue among wonkish circles, and apparently heavily influential on the Labour Party leadership as well, that the answer to the housing crisis is to tear down planning rules and let the market have its way. However, it is not that houses haven’t been built in Manchester, but the question of what gets built, and for whom, cannot be waved away as it generally is by advocates of accelerated for-profit development, nor is it apparent why it should be the prerogative of private builders to determine what form our communities should take. Yet Manchester City Council, particularly under the long-serving leadership triumvirate of Richard Leese, Pat Karney and Howard Bernstein, has been doggedly neoliberal in its housing policy, transferring large swathes of public land into private hands at fire-sale prices. Although councils can use Section 106 agreements to compel developers to reserve a proportion of new homes for ‘affordable housing’, this requires a willingness to impose them that has often proven lacking in Manchester.

The Rentier City is a much-needed riposte to the siren song of trickle-down housing. Rose insists, correctly, that the “central goal” of movements for housing justice must be the greatly expanded provision of affordable, high-quality public housing. However, in the absence of a supportive central government, under-resourced and underpowered councils are no match for the sheer muscle of finance and property developers. To be fair, the example of Preston indicates that not all Labour councils are as devoid of new ideas, or as cap-doffing before business as Manchester’s has become. But councils’ limited powers to raise and spend money, the major cuts to their budgets since 2010, and the continuation of Right to Buy all make it much harder to undo the damage caused by landlordism and property speculation through local government even where councils might be minded to try. In neighbouring Salford, for instance, where a more left-leaning Labour council has taken some positive measures on housing, rents are still rocketing.

With the new Labour government making it clear that it will place its trust in private builders, council housing barely features in the party’s verbiage, let alone its policy. Inevitably, Labour’s purported cure for the housing crisis fights shy of the underlying cause of the disease. Housing stock in Britain and the occupied Six Counties is now valued at nearly £8.7 trillion, and rentierism is central to a sclerotic British capitalism. Thus, grasping the housing crisis at its root would not only antagonise powerful business interests – a confrontation for which Keir Starmer and his government have no stomach whatsoever – but also those homeowners who have come to expect endless house price appreciation as a birthright, as well as Britain’s large layer of petty landlords, which includes, incidentally, scores of Labour MPs. In a climate of profound demoralisation and despair, which Starmer and the political centre have done much to create, it is only too easy to envisage the extreme right, with the recent riots as a preliminary skirmish, inserting itself into the void.

New Socialist £5 and above subscribers can get 50% off The Rentier City from our comrades at Repeater Books.

Incidentally, this includes me. My Irish-born five-times great-grandparents, William Gray and Catherine Feeley, and their four children lived in Angel Meadow for a number of years in the 1850s. The 1861 census lists William’s occupation as “street sweeper”, which must have been an especially putrid job in Victorian Manchester. ↩
See John Gyford, The Politics of Local Socialism, London: Allen & Unwin 1985. ↩