The fact that Manchester City have been found guilty of 114 of the 115 charges brought against them by the Premier League over breaches of its financial rules divides people. It divides me. On one hand, as an Arsenal fan, I think that City are cheats, and that the only solution is for the club to be hit with huge fines, stripped of their trophies and banished to the lowest reaches of the football pyramid. Among fans of City’s rivals, this makes me a relative moderate in that I don’t want the club’s ground to be paved over and salted.
However, what I don’t want is for the UAE to stop investing in office and retail space in Manchester, London and the UK’s other great cities; for British wealth managers to lose out on Emirati clients to the Swiss or the Americans; and for England’s elite private schools, whether at home or their overseas franchises, to have fewer children from Abu Dhabi in them. So perhaps the paving over of the Etihad Stadium should be put on hold.
Andy Burnham, the prime minister, faces a similar dilemma. In his first gaffe since entering Number 10, when asked what he made of the charges, he responded by extolling the Abu Dhabi United Group, which owns City, for its investment in and around Manchester.
Now, I’m sympathetic to the notion that City’s punishment, whatever form it ends up taking, should be accompanied by warm words about the UAE. But I do have two nagging objections. The first is that Burnham’s words about City’s owners were warmer than anything he has said since becoming prime minister about, say, Qatari investment in Canary Wharf in east London. They were warmer, too, about money coming from Abu Dhabi than about anything that might flow from American banks or Chinese international students.
The second, and more important, objection is that Burnham’s defence of City’s owners came not 24 hours after a speech in which he railed against 40 years of economic choices that, he claims, have made Britain poorer and angrier than it should be. You can’t coherently maintain that it would be a crying shame for east Manchester to lose out on the UAE’s investment and at the same time insist that the economic policy choices made since the 1980s have been a complete disaster.
What could be more in keeping with the past 40 years of economic policy than the previous Labour government standing by when Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan bought Manchester City in 2008, and then watching approvingly as his investments in land and property, as well as the football club, reshaped the city? It’s incoherent to rail against such choices at a national level, as Burnham does when he promises to break with decades of “neoliberalism”, but to embrace and celebrate their impact on Manchester, where he was mayor for nine years.
What we are seeing here is “Manchesterism”, as a narrative about Burnham’s mayoralty designed to make the Labour Party feel good about itself, colliding with the reality of actually existing Manchesterism. In the latter, Manchester was reborn by ruthlessly marketing itself to global investment capital. Either Burnham’s premiership is defined by applying the real and useful lessons of actually existing Manchesterism to the country as a whole, or it simply allows the Labour Party to lurch towards its usual destination of electoral defeat via its preferred route of its own navel.
Which is it going to be? The signs are mixed. Burnham’s conference speech last week featured calls to scrap the triple lock and a willingness to risk votes for a closer relationship with the EU. So it isn’t entirely fair to suggest his schedule was “Tuesday — tell the Labour Party what it wants to hear; Wednesday — reflect on the things that actually help the British economy”. But it isn’t wholly unfair either.
The optimistic case for Burnham is that he might be the prime minister who gets Labour to accept that the desire for better public services and a happier society has to be preceded by a determination to deliver growth and compete on the world stage, including for the money and custom of people we don’t necessarily like.
But I can see the merits of the pessimistic case, too, which is that his vagueness about the trade-offs the country will have to make in its bid for growth reflect a large hole where a proper economic policy prospectus should be. While Burnham’s government has a surer touch than Keir Starmer’s on social care, the triple lock and public services, the Man City affair shows that it is still panicky, inconsistent and uncertain when it comes to the economy.