The revolt over lockdown has given rise to a new political era of powerful local leadership

Never before has a middle-aged man in a cagoule ranting outside Manchester Central Library done so with such authority and with such impact as did Andy Burnham when he stood up for the north this week.  

With the unanimous support of his local government colleagues and the region’s MPs, including Conservatives, he brought a rare moral fervour to his cause. He nailed the government’s plan to make Greater Manchester into a kind of laboratory experiment for lockdown on the cheap, or the “regional approach” as the prime minister prefers to term it. Mr Burnham wants more economic support for people and businesses in Greater Manchester if they are going to be forcibly deprived of their livelihoods. It is what happened during the first lockdown in the spring, and it is logical and fair that the same should apply now, in Manchester, across Lancashire and in the Liverpool City Region too. At the moment, it feels rather too much as though Conservative ministers in London, not for the first time, regard the north as expendable.  

In his brief public appearance yesterday, Boris Johnson had no argument to offer beyond a routine plea to work together and that “this is about saving lives”. So it is, but it is also about treating people fairly.

Mr Johnson seemed rather shamefaced when he tried to justify his government’s attitude, with just the suspicion that he’d like to splash the cash but his chancellor won’t let him. It’s worth wondering, in passing, whatever happened to Dominic Cummings plan for No 10 to take over the Treasury. Rishi Sunak does not seem to be playing the poodle role allocated to him.

In any case, true to form, it was left to Dominic Raab to play the hard man. The foreign secretary declared that Mayor Burnham was “effectively trying to hold the government over a barrel over money and politics”. It was crudely expressed and takes no account of the merit of Manchester’s case, but that is precisely what Mr Burnham and other municipal leaders are doing. It is a direct challenge to the power of central government of a kind not seen since the Thatcher government tried, and succeeded, in abolishing the Greater London Council and other large metropolitan authorities more than three decades ago.  

Like the trade union leaders of the 1960s and 1970s, Mr Burnham has discovered that he has great informal power, and he has the confidence to use it. Legally, technically and constitutionally, Whitehall can impose whatever restrictions on life in a northern town that it wishes. In reality, the powers can only be used with the consent of those being governed. If local authorities refuse to cooperate then the effort to protect public health and the spread of Covid-19 regionally but also nationally is compromised. If such resistance is supported by the population as a whole, by businesses and even by individual police officers on the beat, then whatever rules are dreamt up in London become irrelevant. Is Mr Johnson going to send in the parachute regiment to turf everyone out of the pubs in Bolton? They’d probably stay for a pint.  

This, then, is a new dimension to British politics, born of devolution and the expansion of directly elected mayors. Though they want different things, leaders in Scotland, Wales, Manchester, Teesside, Yorkshire, Liverpool and elsewhere are defying London in an unprecedented manner. Much of it is actually down to the arrogance of UK ministers refusing to consult with others, ignoring letters and requests for meetings, neglecting the machinery of devolution and generally acting as though they’d rather pretend that Mayor Burnham, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister Mark Drakeford and Mayor Khan didn’t exist. Well, they do, and at the moment they enjoy far greater popular support and display far better leadership than the prime minister. With a no-deal Brexit soon adding to the chaos, Mr Johnson and his government face a winter of emergencies. They will only have themselves to blame for the discontent.