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Manchester neo-liberal city
OpenCity editor, 11/1/2006
Manchester's entrepreneurial turn At the start of the twentieth century Manchester was a city of industrial might and urban squalor – a city of both incredible wealth and of absolute poverty and destitution. Despite a century of reforms Manchester is still a city of incredible wealth and absolute poverty. Manchester is a one-party city. The story of Manchester City Council is also the story of the Manchester Labour Party. In the late 1980s Manchester City Council abandoned socialism in favour of a pragmatic strand of interventionist neoliberalism – which has been summed up as “talking up, making over and trickling down”1. The embrace of neoliberalism was, at least in part, a tactical response to the loss of local government power and the centralising neoliberal agenda of the Conservative national government. In the late 1980s, under Graham Stringer’s leadership, Manchester City Council went to work on reinventing itself politically, as a friend of central government and local business. Manchester chose not to fight the Conservatives in central government but rather to accept their neoliberal agenda. Manchester decided to work with both central government and the private sector, creating a new way of “doing” local politics. Nationally, in the late 1980s the Labour Party was reevaluating its ideological base. 1989 was the year of Kinnock’s Policy Review which saw the dropping of the commitment to unilateral disarmament and the begging of the process of shedding Clause IV of the party’s constitution. The City’s Olympic bids were key moments in this process of governance restructuring. The 2000 Olympic bid drew together a network of private and public sector elites behind a common goal. The “partnerships” formed around the Olympic bid set the pattern in which Manchester has approached regeneration and economic development ever since. How established the new ways of working in partnership with both central government had become was clear in the aftermath of the IRA bomb of June 1996. When within weeks a new private – public company was set up with ambitious plans for redevelopment of the city centre. At the start of the 21st century Manchester has gone from being a global economic player, a founding globaliser, to being just another potential site for investment. Manchester has been globalised. “Five or so years ago, our challenge was to establish Manchester as a genuine business product. The changes we have made have manifested themselves in many ways and now we are able to drive the competitive agenda that is so important both for us and the UK.” - Howard Bernstein
Submitted by , Monday 6 February 2006