Andy Burnham's early weeks as prime minister have centred on a plan to radically decentralise power away from Westminster, an approach he has termed "Manchesterism". The former Greater Manchester mayor wants to shift decision-making and funding to local communities, giving city-region mayors a share of income tax revenue and pursuing public control of essential services, arguing this would mark the "end of neoliberalism" in British politics.

For a working example of this approach, the article points to Bilbao in Spain's Basque Country, roughly 700 miles from Burnham's old patch, which suffered similar deindustrialisation to British port cities, hitting 25 per cent unemployment in the 1980s. Since then, aided by sweeping devolved powers over tax, education, health and welfare, Bilbao has transformed into a hub for clean energy, manufacturing, biotechnology and tourism, with GDP more than doubling between the Guggenheim museum's 1997 opening and 2015, and the city recording Spain's highest economic growth between 2000 and 2018.