Northerners don’t need Andy Burnham’s pity politics

Outsiders to British politics could be forgiven for believing that the UK is about to get its first-ever northern prime minister. We’ve actually had several before, including Harold Wilson from Yorkshire and Anthony Eden from County Durham. But it’s a fair assumption, given just how central Andy Burnham, our PM-in-waiting, makes Being Northern to his identity.

Burnham, who was until recently mayor of Greater Manchester, gave his first major policy speech on Monday, giving us a taste of what life might be like in the reign of the King of the North. Most notably, the Aintree-born, Culcheth-raised Burnham pledged the creation of ‘No10 North’ in Manchester to act as the ‘nerve centre of a rewired Britain’ and to help oversee an increased programme of devolution. This would be part of his broader plan to ‘drive good growth in every postcode’ – particularly, one suspects, in postcodes with a high concentration of Greggs.

Trying to drive home his disdain for London, Burnham has let it be known he has no plans to live in the capital permanently at all, preferring to remain in his family home near Wigan rather than moving into one of the flats on Downing Street. This would make him the first PM not to do so since Wilson in 1974 – although Wilson chose to live 10 minutes down the road on Lord North Street and not 200 miles across the country.

Burnham’s designs for a more northern-centric Britain go beyond these performative gestures, though. In a 2024 book he co-authored, Head North: A Rallying Cry for a More Equal Britain, he describes his desire to introduce a ‘basic law’ that would force the government to prove that each new policy takes action to reduce regional inequality. This sounds like a terrible idea, given we have already seen the damage similar mandates have done in the form of Net Zero or the Equality Act’s Public Sector Equality Duty. But Burnham, who was born near Liverpool, has already explicitly stated that constitutional reforms are high on his agenda for when he gets into No10 – or, rather, when he doesn’t.

This kind of language and mode of thinking certainly sounds familiar. Where identitarians once told us that every institution must be audited for racism, sexism and transphobia, Burnham, who comes from the north, seems to also want every policy audited for its impact on the north. In fact, much of Burnhamism has the whiff of identity politics about it.

In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell wrote of the ‘curious cult of northernness’ in the England of his time. That cult persists today, the belief that ‘it is only in the north that life is “real” life, that the industrial work done in the north is the only “real” work, that the north is inhabited by “real” people’. Orwell very accurately describes this kind of reverse snobbery: ‘The northerner has “grit”, he is grim, “dour”, plucky, warm-hearted and democratic; the southerner is snobbish, effeminate and lazy.’ It’s incredible that Orwell wrote those words in 1937, having never even seen a Ken Loach film.

This is the core of Burnhamism and Manchesterism – the idea that northerners are a protected class, who can both do no wrong and must be given special treatment. The north is not merely a geographical distinction, but a moral one. Anyone born above the Watford Gap is seen as inherently oppressed and therefore inherently virtuous.

It is striking how similar the mindset and language are to other forms of identity politics. Northerners are encouraged to see themselves as an indigenous people of sorts, with their own sacred ways of knowing: smiling at strangers, eating chips and gravy and listening to Oasis. They Do Things Differently Here, like going to the pub and watching the footie, unlike those softie southerners. Burnham even claimed in Head North that, as a northerner, he faced ‘microaggressions’ during his time in the ‘shark-infested waters’ of Westminster… One can only imagine the trauma of having to witness a Home Counties SpAd order an oat flat white. At this rate, Burnham (who’s northern, by the way) is weeks away from declaring his pronouns to be ey / up and demanding reparations for William the Conqueror’s Harrying of the North.

This noble savage view of the north is oddly patronising. Naturally, it is much easier to wallow in geographical grievance than to confront the real reasons so much of the country beyond London has been left stagnant: high energy costs, poor infrastructure, over-regulation and deindustrialisation. After all, when the north was the UK’s economic powerhouse – from the late 18th century to the early 20th – there was never any suggestion that we ought to dismantle the factories and move them to Devon, lest the south west be ‘left behind’.

Let’s give northerners a bit of agency here. As with all forms of identity politics, Burnhamism ends up infantilising the very people it claims to champion. Northerners don’t need to have their lived experiences validated or get a pat on the back for how they say ‘bath’. We certainly shouldn’t reconfigure our entire government just to give Manchester a Tesco Value No10.

It’s grating for us southerners, too, to be endlessly told that some regions are more regional than others. Why should wheelbarrow tiramisu be treated as a brilliant Mancunian invention, while smashed avocado on sourdough toast is mocked as woke and elitist? How come the tones of Yorkshire and Newcastle get diversity points on our TVs and radios, while the native accents of Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire are pushed out for being too posh and stuffy?

Provided that Burnham (a northerner from the north) can last longer than a few months as PM, who knows how far his reign of terror against southerners will go? How long before Waitrose is nationalised and use of the word ‘supper’ is classified as a hate crime?

Burnham presumably imagines this all playing out as a neat north-south grievance axis – the capital-N North is oppressed, while the lowercase-s south is the oppressor. But grievance politics, as we’ve seen time and again, is never that tidy. As soon as you start the victimhood Olympics, everyone will want a prize. Just as the number of genders steadily rose to 72 (at least according to the latest official figures), Burnham’s push for northern identity politics has already prompted identitarian clamouring from other parts of the country, too. Already, we’ve seen local politicians demand to know Burnham’s intent for the East Midlands, the south-west and Norfolk. This is the problem with explicitly announcing that you are governing for a small subset of the country, rather than for all of it – it tells people that the only way to get attention is if they, too, are an Oppressed Minority Interest Group.

You’d like to think that we’d all learnt our lesson by now – that identity politics is a waste of everyone’s time and energy. Instead, politicians seem intent on promoting and fetishising an ever-wider array of identities.

Lauren Smith is a writer based in London.