Zöe Bread shows us that ‘Manchesterism’ is neoliberalism

Andy Burnham‘s busy soundtracking campaign videos with Elbow and Oasis, and declaring himself “the end of neoliberalism.” But one intrepid investigator, Zöe Bread, suggests otherwise.

Zoë Bread is Manchester’s favourite

Zoë Bread is a TikTok superstar sleuth with 1.5 million-followers and an impressive citizen journalist. She’s renowned for her engaging video investigations and antics, filmed wearing a bread mask. (See the Mill‘s profile.)

She’s spent the last year or so methodically dismantling Manchester City Council (MCC)’s credibility, one Freedom of Information request or dogged phone call at a time. Her persistent investigation even forced MCC to refund a load of parking ticket fines issued despite “confusing” parking payment signs.

Since a parking fine on Collier Street sent her down that rabbit hole, Zöe Bread has gone from fighting misleading road signs to investigating the financing of Manchester’s biggest developments. Online, people even hail her as the only journalist Manchester has left. (This humble reporter begs to differ.)

In particular, she’s turned her lens on the architecture of Burnham’s ‘Manchesterism’. What she uncovered looks less like “the end of neoliberalism” and more like plain old neoliberalism, only with better PR.

All eyes on Andy Burnham

Last week, Burnham released his official campaign video for the Makerfield by-election.

In it, he wanders the red brick streets of Ashton-in-Makerfield, invoking the damage done by Thatcher’s government to places like this. He positions himself and his Northern-tinged philosophy as the antidote: “Manchesterism is the end of neoliberalism.”

This was, by any measure, a polished piece of political communication. Oasis on the soundtrack. Elbow. The “only man” who knows exactly which emotional buttons to press in a post-industrial constituency that Labour needs to hold against Reform.

The problem — and Zoë Bread is not the first to notice this, but she may be the most effective at explaining it — is that the record doesn’t match the rhetoric.

“Manchesterism is the end of neoliberalism”

— Lewis Goodall (@lewis_goodall) May 18, 2026

For a deep, measured look at Burnham’s actual record and insight into his inner circle, I’d recommend Mill editor Joshi Hermann’s recent piece on Burnhamism.

What does ‘Manchesterism’ really stand for?

Zoë Bread’s investigation into property development company Renaker and its boss’ links with Burnham is a stellar case in point. Bread picks apart the housing reality beneath Burnham’s mayoral tenure.

Those investigations repeatedly surfaced the façade of ‘Burnhamism’, ‘Manchesterism’ or whatever you call ‘it’. This is familiar territory for Zöe Bread, and important now — for us all.

Yes, Burnham brought the ‘Bee’ bus network back under public control in Greater Manchester. But it was actually set in motion before he took office, despite him claiming credit, ‘Boris Bike‘-like. Really, the Thatcherite wholesaling of public buses should never have occurred.

Yes, Burnham stood up, vocally at least, for the North during Covid. But he also oversaw £400,000 in Covid-era Arts Council funding funnelled to his pal Sacha Lord for negligible public benefit.

Bread-related, he’s also allowed tax-exile developers to build skyscrapers with zero affordable housing.

The great housing heist

The GMCA’s housing investment loans fund, it turns out, isn’t creating much affordable housing. That’s despite the fund’s stated intention to do so. This is precisely the problem.

The GMCA creates loopholes for developers to make millions with little or no benefit to most taxpayers lending them that money. Mainly to one company: Renaker.

The Mill reported earlier this year that one prominent developer, Daren Whitaker, funded virtually all of his developments with nearly £700 million in loans from the GMCA’s housing fund. Meanwhile, he took £40 million in private dividends from projects backed by those loans over two years.

Whitaker became one of the UK’s wealthiest men off of taxpayers’ money. Then, as Zöe Bread reported, he liquidated one of many companies, took out over £345 million in loans and moved to tax exile in Monaco (briefly).

Renaker made no affordable housing, and Burnham chairs the GMCA fund. The GMCA’s planning committee eventually rejected one of Whitaker’s schemes, unanimously, with one councillor stating bluntly:

We should not be seeing fancy yoga rooms. We should be seeing affordable housing.

The theory doing the rounds online, the Mill noted with some delight, was simply:

Zoë Bread strikes again.

‘Manchesterism’ and its contradictions

Into this context drop countless write-ups of Burnham’s ‘Manchesterism vision’. Much of the UK’s left and centre-spectrum, from Novara to the New Statesman, is seemingly embracing Burnhamism. But why?

Burnham says he would still obey Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules. That means accepting the same Treasury constraints that have blocked serious public investment for decades. Can you really challenge neoliberalism while simultaneously reassuring bond markets, protecting fiscal rules, and refusing to confront financiers?

Burnham’s own description of Manchesterism is as “neither Blue Labour nor soft left, Blairite nor Brownite, but a form of consensual, business-friendly socialism”.

Market socialism is perfectly viable, but those two words sit uncomfortably next to each other here. Does Burnham really mean taxpayer-funded socialism for Renaker types but market misery for the rest of us?

We’re hearing calls for “change“, yet again, less than two years after that vacuous, any-and-all message got us into this very mess. That, and “For Us“. But for who, exactly?

Daren Whitaker? Sacha Lord? Labour Together cronies like Josh Simons? Few are pausing to ask whether Burnham’s mayoral record actually bears out the egalitarian framings.

‘Manchesterism’ is just neoliberalism

Few interrogate the substance of ‘Manchesterism’ at any meaningful depth. They’re treating the phrase as a coherent ideology, rather than just political branding.

The developer dividend scandals Zoë Bread excavated are not peripheral to Manchesterism. They are a core feature of it. Public investment funds flowing into private hands, with luxury towers rising where affordable housing was promised, is not a glitch. It’s the pattern of neoliberalism all over.

‘Manchesterism’ is the archetypal neoliberal model, as GMTU tenant organiser and author Isaac Rose writes in The Rentier City: Manchester and the Making of the Neoliberal Metropolis. Rose stresses the role of Renaker-style public-private partnerships over decades in Labour-controlled Manchester city centre.

Burnham barely even provides a more rhetorically progressive version of these tired arrangements. They’ve defined British and especially Mancunian urban governance for forty years. The public provides the risk capital; the private sector captures the returns.

Why does this matter beyond Makerfield?

The Makerfield by-election is not simply Labour internal drama, though that’s considerable too. Burnham is running on an explicitly anti-Starmer platform, hoping to soon become prime minister.

Starmer’s allies describe the vote as “unnecessary“, while many others declare it the “most consequential” of our history. Across the spectrum they’re right — it’s very consequential.

What’s needed, in such consequential times, is asking qui bono — who exactly benefits — from the economic model being sold as liberation from neoliberalism? Really, it looks like more of the same.

Zoë Bread doesn’t have a press pass. But she has 1.5 million people watching her read out GMCA loan fund documents in a car park. That, right now, seems the most important public service.

Featured image via the BBC