International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Volume 24.

3 September 2000

Manchester First: From Municipal

Socialism to the Entrepreneurial City

STEPHEN QUILLEY

Introduction
During the early 1980s many of the larger British cities became sites of intense political
struggle as Labour authorities sought to resist the incursions of a hostile and battle-
hardened Tory government. Since 1987 the same local authorities have shifted ground no
less dramatically than the national Labour Party. The resulting economic strategies,
foregrounding public-private partnerships, place-marketing and arts-led regeneration, can
be seen in terms of an accommodation between the voluntarism of the Municipal Left,
and the ideological hegemony of the supply-side, market-based strategies imposed by
central government via the development corporations. Given the political sea change that
has accompanied New Labour’s emphatic victory at the general election, now is perhaps
an appropriate time to reflect on the experience of the Municipal Left in local
government.
Manchester is perhaps the most interesting case, not least because the physical and
cultural transformation of the city has gone further, but also because these changes have
been so clearly identified with the political project initiated by the New Left from 1984.
Many of those leading the radical councils in the early 1980s had already been elevated to
the ranks of the Parliamentary Labour Party well before 1997. Some, and notably
Blunkett, went on to become leading figures of what was to become New Labour. That
Graham Stringer stayed in Manchester and did not enter parliament until 1997, is not
unconnected with the fact that only in Manchester could it be claimed that the project of
the Municipal Left resulted in any significant transformation of the city. The fact that this
transformation, which has been associated with a proactive entrepreneurial model of
development, is seemingly at odds with the early rhetoric of municipal socialism obscures
important continuities. Stringer’s singular and single-minded leadership throughout the
period underlines this point.
The almost seamless shift from the rhetoric of municipal socialism into the kind of
local boosterism associated with the entrepreneurial city clearly reflects changing
political priorities, but also changing perceptions of what is and is not possible in terms of
local strategy. The intention of this paper is to provide a straightforward narrative account
of the successive political and economic projects carried forward by Stringer’s
administration over the period 1984–97. It is not intended as an account of the internal
politics of the Manchester City Labour Party, nor the undoubted tensions between the
CLP and the Labour group on the council. Although there is certainly a story about the
rise and subsequent fall-off in party membership and participation after 1987, it has little
direct bearing on the structural constraints on local economic strategy, the changing
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602 Stephen Quilley

perception of these constraints and the different strategies which, in fact, emerged at the
level of the council leadership. For this reason the paper draws on interviews with
committee members, council officers and officials working for other relevant institutions
such as the Central Manchester Development Corporation (CMDC), and not rank and file
members.1
In the first section, the rise to power of Manchester’s New Left is discussed in
relation to the strategic dilemmas facing both the Labour Party and the wider labour
movement from the late 1970s onwards. Endless debates around the idea of a
prefigurative municipal socialism notwithstanding, it is argued that the putative
economic radicalism which dominated local policy-making discourse within both the
party and the council was driven by the overwhelming necessity of political resistance
to Thatcherism. The paper goes on to argue that a substantive economic project
developed only as the prospect of a Labour government receded after 1987. The urban
entrepreneurialism which ensued owed much to an increasing perception of local
strategy in global terms, over and above any ongoing political conflict with the national
(Conservative) government. Specifically, the imperatives of globalization came to be
understood in terms of competition between European city-regions. Following on from
this, the entrepreneurial model of development is analysed in terms of an ‘executive
shift’ away from the preoccupation with process towards an instrumental emphasis on
results and the gradual embrace of the politics of partnership. In the final section of the
paper it is argued that the apparent political volte-face after 1987, which signalled the
retreat from municipal socialism, belies significant and enduring continuities. With
hindsight, the legacy of the New Left has been to consolidate a much more proactive
and dynamic orientation to local strategy which contrasts with the more passive
preoccupation with growth management and service delivery that characterized
postwar Labourism.

Manchester’s New Urban Left

The emergence of the New Urban Left from the late 1970s and the subsequent
radicalization of Labour councils in opposition to the Thatcher government has been well
documented (Gyford, 1985; Wainwright, 1987; Lansley et al., 1989). In broad terms,
municipal socialism can be seen as a response from the Left to the implosion of postwar
consensus politics in the face of systemic economic crisis. The movement should also be
seen in terms of a positive critique of the legacies of postwar Labourism: i.e. Morrisonian
nationalization, the centralized nature of the welfare state, a pervasive statism and the
undemocratic and monolithic nature of the large public bureaucracies (Boddy and Fudge,
1984). As in other cities, an important factor in the emergence of the Municipal Left was
the return of a ‘prodigal generation’ that had moved away from the party during the late
1960s (Gyford, 1985: 22; Wainwright, 1987: 116). Important as it was, this political
transfusion simply compounded existing trends in the party, which resulted from the
transformation of its working-class base. The massive decline in membership (Whiteley,
1982; 1983: 62) and the changing social composition of the party, facilitated the
radicalization of the late 1970s. At the same time as there was an influx of individual
members from the expanding public-sector service class, the hegemony of the large
industrial trade unions was undermined by the erosion of Britain’s manufacturing base.
1 The interviews referred to in the text were carried out in the context of doctoral research in the Sociology
Department, Manchester University. My research was funded by the ESRC for which I am grateful. I would
like to acknowledge the contributions of my supervisors, Professors Jamie Peck and Huw Beynon.
Interviews with members of the local TECs and members of the ‘Manchester Mafia’ were carried out by
Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell. I would also like to thank Kevin Ward for helpful comments on the first
draft.

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Manchester first: from municipal socialism to the entrepreneurial city 603

This unbalancing ‘scissors effect’ gained momentum with the savage recession of the
early 1980s.
More generally, Labour’s electoral disaster and simultaneous radicalization during
the early 1980s can be seen as the culmination of decades of relative decline. As
Hobsbawm (1983) pointed out, the party’s share of the vote had declined consistently
from 1951 as a direct result of the contraction of its core constituency; the manual
working class. From 1980 all these trends came together at a local level, as radical Labour
councils became a focus for resistance to Tory cuts in local government services. Thus,
the rise of the ‘New Urban Left’ can be seen in terms of a response to a triple imperative:
• the need to resist the assault by the Tory government on local government and the
labour movement;
• the contraction of the Labour Party’s core constituency and the perceived need to
broaden the appeal of the party and its ‘socialist message’;
• the national economic crisis that had in turn undermined the basis for the Keynesian
Welfare State (KWS).
Although the character of the New Urban Left varied between cities, there were a number
of common threads, notably: a shared critique of paternalistic Labourism in favour of
decentralization and participation; a rhetorical commitment to socialism as opposed to the
social-democratic compact embodied in the Keynesian welfare state; and a commitment
to the local state as a key strategic site for the development of prefigurative models. The
tensions between a genuinely transformative politics and the need to defend local jobs and
services within the context of a capitalist state were glossed over with discursive
formulations such as ‘within and against the market’ (Cochrane, 1988). Having said this,
the proponents of local socialism did initiate a serious debate about the role of the local
state in the economy. Where Labour authorities had traditionally seen their role in terms
of the delivery of welfare services (Lawless 1990: 136) and estates management
(Cochrane and Clarke, 1987: 5), the Municipal Left sought to expand the remit of the
local state to include interventions at the level of production. This orientation coalesced
around the notion of ‘local economic strategy’ (Cochrane, 1987; 1988; 1989a; Eisenschitz
and Gough, 1993).
Manchester was a latecomer to the fold of municipal socialism. The Left took
control of the council in 1984 after a bitter struggle with the right-wing leadership over
spending cuts which had led to a four-year period of exile on the part of thirteen rebel
councillors. Over this period, Stringer forged contacts with a range of community
activists, feminists and anti-racist groups which became the basis for the rainbow
alliance strategy as it developed in Manchester. This orientation towards marginalized
social groups outside the Labour traditional movement provided a major plank of the
subsequent municipal socialist project: radical democratization, enfranchisement and the
political empowerment of marginalized and disadvantaged groups (see Wainwright,
1987). As in London, the heterogeneity of the social base was complemented by a strong
power base in the white-collar, public-sector trade unions, reflecting the importance of
public spending and employment cuts in mobilizing opposition to the Thatcher
government.
They were young . .. they came in with a new broom and were well educated compared to the
old guard [who tended to be working class, manual workers . . . and] didn’t like the white-collar
trade unions. The new group came in and as far as NALGO were concerned they weren’t as
jaundiced as the old right had been. They didn’t sort of say ‘well, you are a white-collar worker
so you don’t count’ (Officer, UNISON, formerly NALGO, September 1994).

The nature of the emerging politics of radical alliance was reflected in the immediate
priorities of the incoming labour group: the creation of the equal opportunities
committee structure; the attempt to develop decentralized neighbourhood services; the

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604 Stephen Quilley

defence of the gay community in the face of police harassment etc. (Quilley, 1997). The
preoccupation with issues of political process and representation also reflected the fact
that the council was in no position to develop serious interventions in the local
economy. If the economic experiments of the GLC and the local enterprise boards were
ineffective, Manchester’s forays into the field were doubly so because it had no
resources and the rate capping and cuts were beginning to bite almost as soon as the
Left took control. However, even the strategy of prioritizing community alliance
politics quickly ran into funding problems. For instance, the programme of developing
decentralized neighbourhood services stalled almost immediately for lack of capital
resources (interview with Housing Officers, February 1994). It was not surprising,
therefore, that serious economic strategy was effectively postponed for a future Labour
government. Thus, although between 1984 and 1987 the leadership advanced their own
version of ‘local socialism’, the central theme, to which all else was subordinated, was
the political struggle against Thatcher. Only after 1987, when hopes of a Labour
government had been dashed, did the council reverse these priorities in favour of a
genuine local development strategy.

Socialist economics or the politics of resistance?

As a serious attempt to develop local socialism, the ostensible economic project of the
Left in Manchester in the early years of the Stringer administration was desultory.
Town Hall rhetoric conflated the historic weakness of the British economy with the
specific crisis in manufacturing induced by Thatcherite monetarism on the one hand,
and the deep-seated global shift which was restructuring all European economies on the
other. Understandably, the main emphasis was placed on reversing the damage
inflicted by Thatcherism. With the political imperative of resistance paramount, the
administration was naturally predisposed to economic analyses that emphasized policy
failure and ascribed blame. The rhetorical assumption as to the possibility of
straightforward national and local responses to the economic crisis was rooted in a
political rather than economic logic. Thus, the sober assessment of relative economic
impotence was invariably combined with a defiant voluntarism. Reflecting the political
base in the public sector, this often took the form of naive assertions of local economic
sovereignty and the possibility for the council, as the largest employer, to exert
leverage on behalf of the workers and the community (e.g. MCC, 1984b: 4). Stringer’s
declaration in November 1986 is typical: ‘Manchester council rejects the defeatist
Keynesian and monetarist policies that would consign the city to the economic scrap
heap. That is why we are developing a radical strategy for employment’ (see also
MCC, 1986a; 1986b; 1986c). Policy documents were littered with rhetorical statements
about the need for local planning and the possibility of developing prefigurative models
of a socialist economy at a municipal level (e.g. MCC, 1984a: 2; 1984b: 9). Finally, the
principle of solidarity became a prime directive as the council emphatically rejected the
logic of competition with other cities and local authorities: ‘Encouraging firms to bring
jobs in from another local authority area is seen as working against local government
solidarity and as helping private capital to play authorities off against each other’
(MCC, 1984a). The capital-labour relation became the axiomatic dimension of political
struggle and the focus for putative economic intervention. In this way, between 1984
and 1987 strategic thinking subordinated economics to politics; the overriding priority
was to use the council as a base for the wider struggle against the Tories. Until the early
1980s, even fairly left-wing councils talked about partnership in terms of a tripartite
corporatism which included the private sector. But, just as the Tories rejected
corporatism and redefined partnership exclusively in terms of private-sector
involvement in urban regeneration (eventually excluding even local government), so

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Manchester first: from municipal socialism to the entrepreneurial city 605

the Municipal Left sought to exclude the private sector, whilst bringing in new
community and minority interests. Between 1984 and 1987 the private sector was
downgraded as a partner and redefined as the opposition.2
In terms of economic strategy, Manchester’s experiment with municipal socialism
achieved very little, certainly compared to Liverpool’s housing programme or the more
developed local strategies pursued in Sheffield. The city started late in the field and had
little time to build up an effective economic development department with the staff and
resources to develop a strategy. It was not until 1986 that an internal reorganization along
these lines was started when a senior officer was brought in from the Sheffield
Employment Department to coordinate a similar strategic initiative in Manchester. At the
same time, the Centre for Local Economic Strategies had been established in the city.
With a Labour government in prospect, the situation looked favourable. However it was
not to be!
The vision in 1986 was for a restructuring of the economic development department along the
lines of Sheffield, with a whole load of teams. The employment plan for the city [was the first
step in this direction]. [It was set up ] in the expectation of a Labour government. . . At the time
they imagined 60–70 people coming into the department, which would have been a massive
transformation in the political considerations of the city. But all of that was jettisoned when the
Tories won the election (Officer, Economic Initiatives Group, August 1994).
Much general policy was developed, but, as elsewhere, little attention was paid to
restructuring the institutional mechanisms of management and implementation (see
Cooper, 1994). The result was policy indigestion but little action. And, in fact, as
economic strategy, the various policies and reports were often not taken that seriously.
There was a half hearted attempt [at an economic strategy] in the early eighties, when they had
this economic development department . . . which failed almost as soon as it had taken off.
[They] went round in circles. . . It was good propaganda . . . in terms of the press. When
companies were closing down there would be a blurb on it. But we never took it very seriously
(Official, GMB, September 1994).
In the end, the elevation of political resistance as the overriding principle governing the
agenda of the local authority meant that even service provision suffered.
[I]t was completely oppositional to the Thatcher government. Part of what they were saying was
right but the housing service was lousy and conditions for tenants were [terrible] . . . they were
ill treated. They didn’t get any service or maintenance done (Housing Officer, February 1994).

From solidarity to city pride: the New Left as urban

entrepreneurs
It is widely acknowledged that the Conservative’s third successive victory at the
general election of June 1987 pulled the rug from under the experiment in municipal
socialism (Lansley et al., 1989: 176; see also Cooper, 1994 and Eisenschitz and Gough,
1993). At the same time as financial and political constraints were pushing the Left
onto the defensive, there was an increasing recognition that local socialism in practice
had experienced serious problems (e.g. Sullivan, 1987: 2). Policy indigestion and
problems of ‘ideological steerage’ and bureaucratic diversion greatly reduced the
practical import of a whole range of interventions that looked very radical on paper
(see Cooper, 1994). Stringer was learning these lessons in effective corporate
2 E.g. Work: a strategy for employment (MCC, 1986e). Under the section called ‘The private sector’, the
strategy talks only in terms of giving resources to those ‘fighting to preserve jobs threatened with changing
work patterns’ and expanding the worker-controlled segment of the Manchester economy by backing
cooperatives (ibid.: 2).

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606 Stephen Quilley

management, but in the context of securing effective union acquiescence to a political

U-turn, rather than advancing the cause of local socialism, which was seen to be a lost
cause. Over the next three years, the administration began to espouse a new
entrepreneurial model of development (NEMD).
In place of outright resistance to the Tories, the Labour administration started down
the road towards critical cooperation. Eventually this was to involve active cooperation
with local partners in the private sector, the acceptance of a property-led strategy of urban
regeneration, cooperation with the government-imposed Central Manchester Develop-
ment Corporation and participation in competitive urban redevelopment schemes such as
City Challenge and City Pride. For left-wing critics, the most reprehensible aspect of this
apparent volte-face involved the abandonment of the principle of solidarity as a prime
directive. This was most obvious in the place-marketing strategy which was so central to
the successive Olympic/Commonwealth bids and the City Pride initiative, as well as
participation in the competitive bidding process associated with schemes such as City
Challenge.
[Graham Stringer’s passion] is to get Labour ministers to admit that the word competition
exists. He has had quite a hard time from within the Labour Party for some of the stuff we have
done. But we are willing to go into competition with other cities because you have to. It is the
only way forward. . . Of course [there have to be losers] . . . but unfortunately the rest of the
world does it [and] unless we jump in and compete with them we are going to lose anyway
(Officer, City Marketing Department, July 1994).

Where the Municipal Left had sought emphatically to embrace new constituencies
among disadvantaged and marginalized groups in society, the effect of the emerging
entrepreneurial strategy was to embrace ‘new realism’ by the back door. The emphasis on
partnership foregrounded the role of the private sector, whilst the emerging preoccupation
with culture, leisure and the upbeat presentation of a cosmopolitan, postindustrial city
appealed to the city’s middle classes.3 The new political project, like the economic vision
in which it was rooted, was essentially centrist. It amounted to the construction of a new,
local consensus politics, but a consensus which is exclusive and which, at least to some
extent, now denies the special claims of minority groups. After 1987 there was much less
mention of decentralizing power and enfranchising the most disadvantaged. For instance,
the previously high-profile Lesbian and Gay subcommittees were wound up and absorbed
into the powerful Policy and Resources Committee, chaired personally by Stringer
(Quilley, 1997). Likewise, democratization and distributional issues have been
progressively displaced from the strategic mindset. The new order of priorities,

Table 1 Number of seats won of the 33 coming up each election year

1983 1984 1986 1987 1988 1990 1991 1992 1994 1995

Labour 27 28 29 19 29 30 26 26 28 29
Liberal* 2 2 2 5 2 2 5 5 5 4
Tory 4 3 2 9 2 1 2 2 0 0
Total 33 33 33 33 33 33 33 33 33 33

* Variously Liberal — SDP Alliance, Social and Liberal Democrats and more latterly the Liberal-Democratic
Party.

3 This is born out by the electoral data which graphically reveals the increasing hegemony of the Labour Party
over the whole city, including middle-class and traditionally Tory wards such as Didsbury and Brooklands.
By contrast, the Conservative Party has virtually been eliminated as an electoral force in local government
elections in the city, winning not a single one of the 66 seats which came up during 1994 and 1995 (see
Tables 1 and 2).

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Manchester first: from municipal socialism to the entrepreneurial city 607

Table 2 Percentage of Tory and Labour vote in Tory stronghold wards 1983–95

1983 1984 1986 1987 1988 1990 1991 1992 1994 1995

Whally
Range Labour 37.96 41.76 33.60 38.61 47.28 54.11 49.15 49.66 62.17 55.73
Tory 45.94 42.44 49.66 42.69 40.31 32.18 41.34 40.96 19.19 28.26
Brooklands Labour 42.37 49.31 48.56 32.37 42.27 48.81 40.97 38.11 58.56 67.08
Tory 45.53 39.24 36.32 49.47 50.62 36.93 45.57 54.33 28.23 21.22
Didsbury Labour 20.98 22.52 31.96 20.09 30.96 39.04 32.44 15.55 40.11 43.12
Tory 52.34 48.48 43.41 54.26 53.93 47.01 51.46 50.18 31.89 28.74
Chorlton Labour 36.47 41.13 48.25 32.77 44.26 52.18 39.84 50.71 58.93 67.94
Tory 46.78 42.36 38.01 44.37 43.63 31.12 33.32 35.46 19.85 15.24

Source: Local Government Chronicle Elections Centre, University of Plymouth.

exemplified by the Olympic bid process can be summed up as ‘investment, growth and
jobs first, (residual) welfare later’ (Cochrane et al., 1995: 9).
Finally, Stringer’s new project for Manchester rested on a very different and
perhaps more realistic understanding of the nature of Manchester’s economic crisis. In
adopting the credo of the entrepreneurial city, the new project arguably shows a more
acute understanding of the ‘dog eat dog’ reality of globalization, that neither local
strategy nor the nation-state could be relied on to protect cities from the vagaries of the
increasingly disembedded circuits of capital accumulation. The new approach to local
strategy foregrounds competition between cities on the basis of cross-class growth
(read grant) coalitions organized around particular places. This mantra recurs endlessly
in the Manchester script (e.g. MCC, 1992b: 5). However, it would not be accurate to
see this reorientation of the Left project in Manchester as simply a product of Labour’s
defeat in 1987. There was a genuine feeling among both councillors and officers of
policy indigestion, and that the ‘panoply of Community Development and Equality
Units wasn’t having a great impact on people, [that the structures were not
representative] and that they deterred ordinary people’ (Officer, City Pride initiative,
September 1994).
More generally, the desire to achieve something concrete for the city predisposed the
administration to move away from their initially partisan orientation in favour of a more
practical approach. As local politics became less ideological and more pragmatic, the
understanding of ‘partnership’ was increasingly extended to include local authorities that
previously had an indifferent or actively hostile attitude towards each other. The
consensus around urban entrepreneurialism, which developed across the conurbation, and
to some extent the region, became a vehicle through which the Manchester authority was
able to exert a degree of hegemony in terms of setting the wider agenda (see Quilley and
Ward, 1999). The most important aspect of this was an acquiescence on the part of the
other authorities as to the strategic importance of the city centre. Cooperation in the City
Pride initiative as well as the successive bids for the Olympic and Commonwealth games
exemplified this new pragmatic spirit of partnership.4
Another marked change can be described in terms of an ‘executive shift’ and a
reassertion of the managerial prerogative. This transition is implicit in the change of
slogan that took place not long after 1987: from ‘Defending Jobs, Improving Services’ to
‘Making it Happen’. Whereas the municipal socialist project foregrounded the political

4 The Manchester-Salford Partnership had previously been in receipt of £22m Urban Programme money. But
it existed as little more than a joint bank account since the money was split and administered separately by
the two authorities. Starting with the City Pride initiative, Salford has agreed to work more closely with
Manchester, allowing itself to be subsumed within ‘(Greater) Manchester’ for the purpose of marketing.

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608 Stephen Quilley

process, and the importance of democratization and questions of access (‘opening up the
Town Hall’), the new approach emphasized concrete results.
[There is a] big change because at the start the New Left was incredibly process oriented. The
whole thing was about creating new channels between [the people and the Labour
administration] . . . procedures, equal opportunities. . . That seems to have been thrown out. . .
[Now it is a case of] . . . let’s get it done . . . let’s not go through all this process rubbish. Let’s
just get what it is that we want. . . I think that the emphasis has changed as the council has
become prepared to work in partnership. In order to get things done [discussion about what we
want in the future has been curtailed]. . . So that immediately alienates and disadvantages the
voluntary organizations whose culture doesn’t really fit in (Housing Officer, February 1995).
This new charismatic style and the reassertion of the managerial prerogative was thus
integral to the new economic project, which placed a premium on cooperation between
local political and business elites and the achievement of a limited number of very
concrete goals in the form of flagship projects such as the Millennium Stadium or the
Bridgewater Concert Hall. This partly reflected a split between these flagship
developments and traditional municipal initiatives entirely controlled by the council
which ‘still go through the processes with the range of consultative procedures’. In
contrast, the new partnership projects that straddle institutional lines were, and are,
insulated from the democratic process. Clearly there was an element of ‘he who pays the
piper calls the tune’ in the new partnership mechanisms.
In a more cynical vein, it also reflected Stringer’s increasingly unassailable political
position. The assertion of control, which accompanied this executive shift, was not
limited to the internal politics of the Labour group. Stringer also asserted his personal
(charismatic) authority over the administrative hierarchy within council bureaucracy.
During the middle and late 1980s the politicians gained a reputation for chopping Chief
Officers. [They didn’t want them] to feel secure. . . To some extent it was the making of Stringer
in 1987 . . . to get a grip. [Interviewer: And has he ‘got a grip’?] Oh yes! . . .even to the point of
him being the one person for whole periods of time who decides about filling posts. For an
organization the size of the council that is one hell of an overview to try and have. . . In 1992
they [stopped making] any promises . . . [about job security and no compulsory redundancies]
. . . and during that time he was the person who decided everything about every post (Housing
Officer, February 1995).
Stringer is also said to have deliberately undermined structures of line management in
order to stop officers becoming entrenched and building up power bases in the
organization.
The entrepreneurial strategy that gathered momentum from 1989 was broadly similar
to that which has taken root in many cities around the world (see Harvey, 1989). The new
discourse of economic development is suffused with positivity and the voluntarist
understanding that a city’s economic fate is far from sealed, but can be swayed decisively
by the action or inaction of local elites. But it also rests on a more implicit understanding
of the limits to economic sovereignty in the era of globalization. Thus, in Manchester
‘there is a strategy that is partly informed by an understanding of what we can’t do
anymore’ (Economic Development Officer, November 1994). ‘What we can’t do’ is to
develop integrated industrial policies, based upon indicative planning and sectoral
interventions aimed at changing the underlying structure and balance of the economic
base — with the support of a strongly interventionist national state. What can be done is
limited to supply-side, infrastructural initiatives, place-marketing and more or less overt
competition with cities deemed to be adjacent or of comparable ranking in a putative
league of European cities. These are the parameters within which the NEMD has been
developed.
In essence, what happened in Manchester was that the politicians accepted these
parameters and determined, on that basis, to get the best possible deal for the city in

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Manchester first: from municipal socialism to the entrepreneurial city 609

terms of attracting both inward investment and grant-aid. Setting out explicitly to
garner inspiration from cities such as Baltimore and Barcelona, local policy-makers
began to think in terms of a package of measures which focused in the first instance on
the rehabilitation and re-imaging of Manchester as a major European city-regional
capital. In so far as it entails a common language and conceptual vocabulary, one could
talk about a script — shared and adhered to by actors involved in all aspects of urban
regeneration; a script which crosses institutional and political lines. For instance,
officers in the city-planning department talk about doing their ‘spiel’: ‘We are in the
business of re-imaging the city. The copy goes something like: Manchester is a major
European city, it has cosmopolitan qualities’ (March 1994). As actors become familiar
with the script, it becomes relatively easy to juggle the various components in order to
generate endless, glossy reports and documents, tailored to the needs of specific
initiatives and funding applications. A council officer in Manchester describes this
process:
It is more like a whirlwind, like being punch-drunk . . . [we produce report after report] . . . and
in the end you don’t know really what you are doing. It is like a word game . . . mixing all the
buzz phrases up together . . . and producing another piece of paper (February 1995).
According to the Manchester script, the city has been reborn as a postmodern,
postindustrial and cosmopolitan city, standing in Europe’s ‘premier league’. New
Manchester is a vibrant and culturally diverse place to live, and well connected to take
advantage of the emerging information economy.
Looking around the city centre in 1999, it is difficult not to be impressed by the
extent to which Manchester has reinvented itself. The pace of change has not let up in
fifteen years and the physical reconstruction can be disorienting.
The centre of Manchester has become virtually a new city in the North. . . [Former Guardian
editor] CP Scott and his political mentor John Bright, would get very muddled with the layout.
Exiles who left only, say, five years ago discover whole new streets, topped by residential lofts
which have buyers queuing in the street (Wainwright, 1999: 17).
Up to the 1980s, the city centre had been virtually deserted as a residential district for
over 150 years. The trickle of apartment dwellers who bought into the refurbished
warehouses around the Gay Village in the late 1980s has now turned into a flood, and the
city’s claims to have reinvented and embedded a genuine metropolitan culture of city
living, are in large part justified. The village patchwork has been extended by similar
developments in Piccadilly, Castlefield and the Northern Quarter. The days when a new
café bar warranted special comment in city life are long gone. The new city dwellers no
longer have to rely on a solitary Spar for their food shopping. A free-standing M&S food
centre and the newly opened Tesco Metro are now complemented by a growing number
of high-class delicatessens.
Since the late 1980s, the city has consistently secured a disproportionate share of
discretionary grant funding, and remained at the forefront of urban regeneration. Major
infrastructural planks of the city-centre’s revival were set in motion during the early
1980s, even before the Stringer administration came to power: notably the continuing
expansion of the airport, the early development of the Castlefield area, the creation of the
GMEX centre and the planned Metrolink. After 1987, such flagship projects came centre-
stage, and Stringer’s effective corporate management and ability to sustain the active
endorsement and participation of local business leaders ensured that the city presented a
united front in tendering for project funding. As a result, the City of Manchester and
neighbouring authorities have notched up a seemingly endless string of flagship
developments, including the Velodrome, The Bridgewater Concert Hall, the Manchester
Evening News Arena, the £60m Urbis project to extend the city art galleries, the Lowry
Centre in Salford and the Imperial War Museum in Trafford.

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610 Stephen Quilley

In many ways the city has benefited from the 3300lb IRA bomb which ripped apart
the city centre in 1996. This cleared the way for a £1.2bn root and branch redevelopment
which has transformed the cityscape, opening out the River Irwell for the first time since
the industrial revolution, and allowing for the construction of palatial new developments
(the world’s biggest M&S opposite an equally superlative Boots). But if the IRA
inadvertently created the opportunity, it is also true that the speed and imagination of the
subsequent redevelopment was only the logical extension of the previous ten years of
regeneration — both in terms of the sustained vision of what the city could be like, but
also the high-level partnerships which have been further consolidated with each
development and with each phase of boosterish hype.
Initially, the city council was forced to cooperate with the Central Manchester
Development Corporation, which had been imposed by the Thatcher government in place
of the existing Phoenix initiative (a partnership structure favoured by both the local
authority and regional business leaders; see Quilley, 1996: Chapter 6; Quilley and Ward,
1999). However the CMDC proved a relatively benign institution, devoid of strategic
vision. In the event, Stringer was able to use it as a conduit through which to assert his
own agenda for the city and the wider conurbation. The Labour leader’s directive role in
subsequent developments is acknowledged, even by influential conservatives such as
former minister David Trippier: ‘[Graham Stringer] set out to create a new dynamic
creative city. . . [He led Manchester] out of the shadows. . . I was glad to bury the political
hatchet and do everything I could to help’ (quoted in Wainwright, 1999: 17).
Whilst the private-sector ‘movers and shakers’ never amounted to an American-style
growth coalition (Peck and Tickell, 1993; see Logan and Molotch, 1987), their continued
presence and support for each phase in the regeneration project provided a crucial gloss of
unity and private-sector endorsement for a Labour authority working under an often
unsympathetic Tory government. The formal partnership mechanisms attached to specific
projects have been underpinned by a more informal, clubby atmosphere which has
brought North West corporate tycoons (notably from companies such as AMEC and the
Coop Bank) into regular contact with more independent operators, such as Tony Wilson
(of Granada, Factory records and the Hacienda), and a clutch of young architect-
developers who have been associated with many of the more innovative and design-led
developments in the Northern Quarter area of the city centre. It is these more locally
grounded boosters of all things Mancunian who have ensured that the regeneration vision
has retained a central, iconic place for the city’s vibrant pop culture. It is also true that
from the beginning, a number of prominent local councillors have retained close links
with the club scene, playing a significant role in ushering in a more liberal attitude
towards licensing, and perhaps more importantly, the policing of the Gay Village
(Quilley, 1997). From this has developed an understanding of the importance of street
life, which has led to a proliferation of street festivals and carnivals. The collective
determination to rebuild the city after the bombing, is widely recognized to have
‘galvanised a conventional revival . . . [turning] private-public sector partnership into real
camaraderie . . . [forcing] a change of pace’ (Wainwright, 1999). A typical expression of
this new dynamic is the ‘McEnroe Club’ (‘You can’t be serious!’) involving movers and
shakers from the business community along with some high profile lifestyle
entrepreneurs. The club’s mission is to bring together anyone wanting to get involved
in the city’s renaissance, and linking people with ideas with those having the business
clout to facilitate them.

Conclusion
Looking back on the achievements of Graham Stringer’s New Left administration, it is
tempting to present the city’s development during the 1980s in two phases: a short and

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Manchester first: from municipal socialism to the entrepreneurial city 611

rather tepid experiment in municipal socialism followed by a rather longer and more
successful period of ‘city chauvinism’. The watershed falls unambiguously in June 1987,
with Thatcher’s third victory at the general election representing the political defeat of not
just the Labour Party, but also of municipal socialism as a credible local alternative.
However, another reading of this story would emphasize the continuities. Stringer’s role
is best seen as that of a Janus — in the sense of a bridge connecting two distinct periods of
development. His leadership spanned a series of transitions in the nature of the local
Labour Party, in the role of local government in local economic development and in the
nature of the city; from municipal Labourism and a traditional industrial city with a
specifically working-class, northern English identity, to a more heterogeneous and less
class-bound politics in a self-consciously metropolitan city with a more European
perspective. Another connotation of the Janus metaphor is that of being fickle or two
faced, which perhaps fits the sense of betrayal felt by former comrades and fellow
travellers on the Left.
However, an interpretation which foregrounds a process of apostasy and ‘sell out’ not
only ignores the enormity of the constraints facing local government during the 1980s,
but also underplays the significant transformations which have actually taken place — not
least in relation to the role of local government. Cochrane (1989b; 1995) argues that
interpretations of the municipal socialist experiments of the early 1980s tend to
overemphasize the subsequent ‘transition to partnership’ as a political U-turn, and
obscure strong continuities between the two periods (e.g. Davies, 1988; Lawless, 1990;
Seyd, 1990). The shift towards a partnership model of development, may be better
understood ‘as a necessary maturing and consolidation in the process of transition from
theories to practices within the local government system’ (Cochrane, 1989: 137). The
enduring legacy of the socialist experiments, was to legitimize and underwrite a
paradigmatic expansion of the role of the local state in developing and implementing
proactive local economic strategies. The creation of the Centre for Local Economic
Strategies in Manchester in 1986 came at a time when the radical councils were on the
point of mounting a full-scale retreat from many of the defiant positions they had taken up
during the early 1980s. But at the same time, it could also be seen as the culmination of a
process whereby the theory and practice of comprehensive local strategies started to gain
broad acceptance among mainstream local authorities (Eisenschitz and Gough, 1993). In
this light, Cochrane argues that the key break in Sheffield and elsewhere came at the start
of the decade. It was a break with Municipal Labourism.
The break needs to be defined differently, not so much in terms which stress the rise of local
socialism, as in others which point to a move away from the traditional approach emphasising
the delivery of services within the welfare state, towards one which more clearly and explicitly
recognises the economic as a legitimate concern (even a major concern) for local government or
local states (Cochrane, 1995: 20).
This perspective certainly makes sense in relation to what happened in Manchester,
particularly in the context of the management of a number of larger economic projects
inherited by the incoming Stringer administration (i.e. the planned expansion of the
airport, the Castlefield redevelopment, the Olympic bid and the Metro link). These core
projects represented a continuing focus for the city throughout the 1980s. But, at the same
time, they were always kept outside the purview and rhetorical clamour of socialist
economics, and under the direct control of Stringer himself.
The airport, the Olympic bid and so forth were always part of the Policy and Resources
Committee, the chair of which was the leader. [In contrast] economic development matters . . .
were part of the Economic Development Committee. Now it suited the leading members of the
administration to retain those matters as part of the P&R Committee, because that way they
retained control of the agenda. . . It is a common complaint among members of . . . other
departments, that they rarely find out or get involved in matters that relate to the Airport and the

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612 Stephen Quilley

Olympics. They are treated as being sufficiently important to be the personal projects of a
number of leading members . . . and by dealing with it [like this] they avoid any kind of
interference (Officer in the Chief Executive’s Office, November 1994).

These flagship developments relate to the ‘hard city’ of property-led regeneration and
infrastructure. However, perhaps a more telling area of continuity relates to the ‘soft city’
and the way in which the hype has built on Mancunian civic pride and reinvented it to
accommodate the city’s iconic role as a vibrant leading centre of popular culture. Their
formative experiences outside the mainstream Labour movement made the new
generation of Labour councillors more tuned in and sympathetic to the importance and
power of cultural identity and pluralism. The most important example of this relates to the
Gay Village. The early staunch defence of the gay scene around Canal Street from the
incursions of prejudicial and frequently violent policing created the space for the
emergence of the Gay Village. The subsequent commercialization of the scene (though
unwelcome for some within the gay community) provided a fulcrum for the enormous
success of the post-Manchester club scene. It also provided an exemplar for the ‘village in
the city’ ethos which now dominates urban residential developments in the city. Gay men,
in particular, were the first to cultivate Manchester’s invented city-living tradition by
taking advantage of the warehouse apartments around Sackville Street. In this sense they
played a catalytic role analogous to that of artists in the early rehabilitation of the SoHo
area in New York (Zukin, 1988). Likewise, the Village Madi Gras has provided the model
for a host of other street festivals which crowd the calendar in the summer months.
In short, Manchester is a totally different city to that which Stringer inherited in 1984
(see Table 3). It has become a model for many other UK cities — and the city-centre
regeneration shows little sign of slowing down. All of the principles and motifs which
find expression in the new progressive urbanism of the recent report of the Urban
Taskforce, chaired by Lord Rogers (1999 — see Lock, 1999), are to be found, in embryo
at least, in the vision followed by the Stringer administration in the period after 1987.
However, despite the city’s rediscovered sense of pride and the proactive boosterism
which now provides a common script for ‘movers and shakers’ in local government and
the business community alike, it must be recognized that the entrepreneurial project is
driven by structural dynamics which cannot but exacerbate the growing social divisions
which demarcate the post-Labourist city. These divisions are integral to the emerging
service-sector labour markets and to the cultural and social priorities of the aspiring
European metropolis. Behind the rhetoric of a city reborn, the realities of postindustrial
labour markets reflect an uninterrupted haemorrhaging of the employment base and
continuing urban decline. At the lower end of the employment scale, labour market
statistics reveal that relatively well paid (male) jobs in the formal economy are being
replaced by temporary, part-time and otherwise insecure (female) jobs in the informal
sector (Peck and Tickell, 1997). In two years of economic recovery between 1993 and
1995, while 32,700 people left the employment register across the conurbation, total
employment rose by only 2700. ‘For every 100 people leaving the dole queue, only 8 net
new jobs were being created, all of which were part-time’ (ibid.: 1). The picture for the
1990s as a whole is only marginally better. These figures merely reflect the fact that in an
era when city-regions are more vulnerable to the vagaries of mobile capital, local
government has far less purchase on the economic and social realities of marginalization.
By embracing the entrepreneurial city, the Stringer administration implicitly accepted the
new social apartheids of the post-Labourist city. Certainly, at the level of local strategy,
Stringer could claim, quite correctly, that there was no alternative. But at the same time,
the politics of ‘Manchester First’ helped to consolidate the hegemony of supply-side
entrepreneurialism more generally. Within a European context there are more radical
regulatory agendas and alternatives which are effectively ruled out of court by the now
entrenched priorities which New Labour acquired in opposition.

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Manchester first: from municipal socialism to the entrepreneurial city
Table 3 Municipal socialism and the entrepreneurial city
Municipal Socialism
Relationship • Economics subordinated to the politics
between politics of resistance.
and economics
Political project • Politics of radical alliance — expressed • Reorientation towards the political centre —
through a commitment to Equal
Opportunities (women, ethnic
minorities, lesbians and gay men etc.);
• Partnership as ‘class-based political
alliance’ organized in opposition to
both the private sector and the national
government.
Understanding of • Emphasis on local strategies as
and responses to exemplars for future Labour
economic crisis government;
• Local strategies formally oriented
towards developing a more self-
sufficient economic base BUT
substantively directed towards
ameliorating the social crisis and its
impact on the most disadvantaged
groups;
• Acknowledgement of global/external
forces beyond the control of local
policy BUT downplayed by political
emphasis on the culpability of
Thatcherism.
Orientation to • Emphasis on social aims and
urban policy community development. Urban policy
as an extension of the welfare state,
dealing with the symptoms of economic
crisis;
• Political agenda for democratization
and bringing excluded groups into the
political process. Part of wider struggle
against the Tory government.
Orientation to • Strong rhetorical commitment to the
manufacturing manufacturing base and the need for
(neo-Fordist) reorganization and
modernization. Practice limited to
monitoring decline.
Style of • Orientation towards process.
decision-making Participative, strong emphasis on
democratization, decentralization and
consultation. Rhetoric of community
based policies and ‘bottom-up’ policies.
Relation to other • Commitment to principle of solidarity
cities and between cities and communities.
communities
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613
Entrepreneurial City
• Socialist political project subordinated to the
economics of selling Manchester in the
national/European economies and securing
discretionary funding.
local version of New Realism — appeal to
middle classes on the basis of economic
competence and getting things done (‘Making
it Happen’): cultural agenda of ‘city living’,
emphasis on service sector, Olympic bid,
flagship projects, city centre housing projects
for professional classes etc.;
• Partnership as a cross-class growth coalition
rooted in a strong chauvinist city identity.
Acceptance of central role for the private
sector.
• Emphasis on local agency and economic self-
determination;
• Partnership as a ‘growth coalition’ and a spur
to endogenous economic development
• City-region competing in a European/global
system for investment (and discretionary
funding).
• Urban renewal seen primarily as a vehicle to
relocate the city higher up a putative European
urban hierarchy: emphasis on property-led
regeneration, flagship developments, the
centrality of place marketing etc.;
• Elitist orientation to ‘key player’ politics —
(legitimacy of conflicting claims assessed
according to the relative status of key
players).
• Commitment to a ‘postindustrial script’ and
willingness to abandon manufacturing as the
necessary foundation for the regional
economy.
• Orientation to end results and getting things
done. Executive driven. Greatly increased
political authority at the centre. ‘Charismatic’
authority. New corporate slogan: ‘Making it
Happen’ replaces ‘Defending Jobs and
Improving Services’
• Acceptance of institutionalized competition
between cities (e.g. for discretionary funding
in the case of City Pride) — and the
inevitability of losers as well as winners.
614 Stephen Quilley

What left-wing councils were forced to accept after 1987 was that they could no
longer rely on the protective shield of national Keynesian regulation. Rhetoric aside, they
learned to compete — city against city, region against region — for discretionary grant
funding and, to a much lesser extent, for mobile inward investment. The concomitant
orientation to supply-side interventions aimed at enhancing local competitiveness
certainly prefigures the certitudes of New Labour macroeconomics. Whilst Gordon
Brown has enlarged the target of such interventions, which focus less on bricks and
mortar infrastructure and more on skills and training (full ‘employability’ — see Peck,
1998), there remains a paradigmatic acceptance of global market forces as a given. Thus,
if municipal socialism created a space for the active, interventionist local government, it
is also true that the experience of the Municipal Left during the late 1980s, created a
discursive space for the supply-side emphasis on global markets, flexibility, competition
and partnership which have come to frame the economics of New Labour. This is not to
suggest that there was any obvious transfer of experience and personnel from
entrepreneurial Labour cities to the Labour front bench. It was more a case of mutual
convergence around a similar perception of what is possible in contemporary economic
conditions. However, it could be argued that New Labour now make a virtue of what the
Municipal Left experienced as political necessity. More generally, the experience of local
strategy during the last fifteen years suggests that deeply embedded structural
impediments to any kind of local economic sovereignty remain well beyond the reach
of local policy-makers, at least within the existing political-institutional framework.

Stephen Quilley (steve.quilley@ucd.ie), Sociology Department, University College

Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland.

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