The political earthquake in the UK has global reverberations. With the resignation of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Britain is about to have a new prime minister for the 7th time in the past decade. Nothing new there! What’s remarkable is the ascension of Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, as Starmer’s successor.
To move from Metro Mayor to Prime Minister is unusual in any electoral system, but particularly in Britain, which is one of the most financially centralized nations in the developed world.
This is a triumph, in predictable and unpredictable ways, of the experiment in British devolution which has been underway for several decades. And it has implications for the future of the United States as I will suggest.
The British media and commentariat has focused substantially, and not surprisingly, on Burnham’s charisma and communication skills and his unusual ability to connect with voters and people disaffected from politics. They have also focused on his distinctive political journey – from being a conventional “march up the ladder” politician under former Prime Ministers Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Jeremy Corbyn to the bold decision to chart a different path when he left Parliament in 2017 to seek the mayoralty of Greater Manchester.
But there has also been ample discussion of structural challenges in UK governance, namely the tension between central power and local control, the shape and specifics of greater devolution and the fundamental differences in how mayors and ministers govern. All this fits under the umbrella of what Burnham cleverly calls “Manchesterism”: his notion that economic progress must go hand in hand with social progress.
The commentary raises five separate but related points, each of which has relevance beyond Britain.
First, the direct elevation from the helm of a combined mayoral authority to the top of the national government is historically significant. As Adam Vaughan has observed, becoming a mayor could become an alternative route to national leadership.
Historically, Britain has been unusual in the extent to which political power has been concentrated in national institutions. While local government has produced influential politicians, it has rarely served as a direct launching pad to the highest offices. Unlike in many other democracies, municipal leadership has generally been viewed as subordinate to national politics, rather than a parallel route.
England’s metro mayor system is relatively young. Most combined authority mayors have held office for less than a decade, meaning the political consequences of devolution are still unfolding. Burnham may represent the first genuine test of whether these institutions have matured enough to produce a credible contender for national leadership.
Yet that should not obscure the wider significance of his return. Whatever happens to Burnham’s leadership ambitions, England’s metro mayors have moved beyond their original role as administrators of transport and economic development. Less than a decade after most of the offices were created, they are becoming independent centres of political authority potentially capable of producing national leaders. Andy Burnham is back at Westminster: what this says about Britain’s changing political system
Second, Burnham’s tenure as mayor is not just a steppingstone to national power. It has fundamentally shaped the agenda he brings to the national stage. As Andy Bruce and Sarah Young observe,
Burnham’s vision is clearest on devolution: accelerating the shift of power away from London, which has increasingly dominated Britain’s economy in recent decades. While some power has been decentralised over the last 30 years – to parliaments for Scotland and Wales and elected city-region mayors among others – progress on shifting economic levers such as control over infrastructure spending or taxation has been limited. That leaves Britain as one of the most financially centralised countries in the developed world, according to OECD data. Economists say this has widened inequality between London and elsewhere. Burnham has vowed to reshape Britain’s financial architecture by giving communities direct control over the things that shape daily life: housing, utilities, transport and education. He cites Manchester’s integrated Bee Network – a system that has drawn people back into public transport – as Manchesterism in action. What is Andy Burnham’s ‘Manchesterism’ vision for the UK? | Reuters
Third, as a finer point, Burnham’s ascension raises fundamental questions about which level of government and which group of leaders should be vested with the power to make decisions. Sarah Thomas captures this well:
“Burnham represents a politics of place. He has spent years articulating a narrative centred on devolution, regional inequality and more radical approaches to housing and homelessness. He has argued for significant change in how the state works and for empowering places rather than Whitehall. Housing, homelessness and regeneration are not simply technical issues in that worldview – they are political expressions of who holds power and where decisions are made (emphasis added). Andy Burnham, Labour and Housing: Power, Place and Devolution | See Media
Fourth, Burnham’s ascension exposes the different skill sets that are needed to govern at the local level. As Vaughan contends,
Burnham is unusual in another respect. His appeal rests not simply on electoral popularity but on the kind of political experience he has accumulated as mayor. The governance of a combined authority requires continual negotiation between councils, business leaders, public agencies and central government. Success depends less on party discipline than on coalition-building, consensus and partnership. These are skills that national politics increasingly appears to value. At a time when public trust in Westminster remains fragile and the challenges facing government cut across departmental silos, experience of assembling broad civic coalitions may prove as valuable as parliamentary combat. Andy Burnham is back at Westminster: what this says about Britain’s changing political system
Finally, a fundamental question emerges as Burnham prepares to take the reins of power: can a mayor change the way a national government functions or does the national government ultimately constrain the mayor? This blog from the Bennett School of Public Policy captures the dilemma:
[P]erhaps the ultimate political test involves the psychology of central power itself. Burnham’s entire platform is built on dismantling Westminster orthodoxy and shifting economic levers away from the centralised executive to an empowered network of regions. Yet, history shows that the view from Downing Street often alters a perspective on central control, a shift seen when both Tony Blair’s early push for devolution and David Cameron’s promises of radical localism ultimately yielded to top-down Whitehall mandates. Will a leader who has successfully acquired the vast levers of the British state truly be willing to immediately dismantle and devolve that power? Walking this tightrope, using centralised power to decentralise the state, remains the fundamental paradox of his national vision. (emphasis added) The Burnham blueprint: translating devolution lessons to the national stage – Bennett School of Public Policy
These observations dovetail well with my worldview. As nations grapple with supersized challenges and as national politics becomes mired in hyper partisanship, public, private and civic leaders are advancing innovations from the ground up and thinking seriously about reforms that push power downwards. They understand that the power to solve problems is highly correlated with the ability to act nimbly, take risks and learn from failure. In many respects, that is the antithesis of national governments which act painfully slow, layer on accretions of burdensome rules and requirements and rarely learn from mistakes.
To add to the commentary above, enhancing the power of local and metropolitan decisionmakers and practitioners brings a slew of benefits. The potential to customize responses to market differences and local priorities. The ability to use soft power to harness the energies of private and civic actors and mobilize private and civic resources. The propensity to test solutions, see what works and then bottle innovations for adoption and adaptation by other communities; to take “the best to the rest.” The potential to scale state and local solutions via national reforms.
For localists like myself, this is exciting stuff. But I have to ask: are there implications for the United States?
On the surface, the US has much to teach the UK as it embraces devolution more fully. Despite President Trump’s assertion of centralized power, the genius of American federalism is distributed power, not just among states, the original constitutional partners, but among cities, municipalities and counties. The local bias towards problem solving is robust in the US, not just among local governments but across networks of corporate, private and civic institutions and leaders.
All that said, I am struck by Vaughan’s perceptive observation:
The question raised by Burnham’s return is not simply whether he can lead Labour. It is whether England’s experiment with devolution has reached the point where governing a city-region can be considered preparation for governing the country.
As the United States wrestles with the most pronounced constitutional crisis since the Civil War, I am struck by the clarity of vision offered by three former Mayors.
Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, made a strong showing in the Democratic primaries in 2020, which set him up to be President Biden’s Secretary of Transportation. There, he presided over the nation’s largest ever peacetime investment in infrastructure, running the DOT with a mayor’s keen understanding of how the world really works. With unprecedented resources flowing due to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, he designed program implementation such that local leaders could fit federal resources to local priorities, rather than the other way around. And with climate high on the Administration’s agenda, he deftly collaborated with other agencies to link housing, environmental, and transportation programs, rather than just managing his own vertically organized bureaucracy – just as he brought in corporate leaders to help design, finance and deliver solutions to the stalling of global shipping during the pandemic.
Buttigieg’s tenure at DOT provided a taste of how to embed state and local sensibility inside the federal government. He made the localist-style problem solving the new way of operating and began to reverse engineer the federal government by distilling the implications of state or local innovation for federal statutes, regulations, administrative guidelines and action.
In the aftermath of Trump’s election, Buttigieg has also begun to chart a new course for the Democratic Party. His message has been provocative and clear. As he told NPR in July 2025:
“You’ve got an administration that is burning down so many of the most important institutions that we have in this country, which is wrong. It is also wrong to imagine that we should have just kept everything going along the way it was.
It is wrong to burn down the Department of Education, but I actually think it’s also wrong to suppose that the Department of Education was just right in 2024….It’s also wrong to suppose that if Democrats come back to power, our project should be to just tape the pieces together just the way that they were.”
Whether Mayor Pete is going to make another run for the presidency is not known. But his discomfort with the status quo ante is echoed by other former mayors who have also played leadership roles at the federal level.
Eric Garcetti, the former mayor of Los Angeles, who recently served as US Ambassador to India, has said that Trump has thrown a “volatile cocktail” into a “building” — referring to “the way we do government” in the US. Garcetti has said that even if Trump never came along, it was time for the “building” to “come down.”
Expanding on this metaphor, Garcetti has said that political thinkers need to act like engineers and architects, instead of being firefighters. “What are we going to build next?” Garcetti said. “It’s not going to be as big and grand and stable as what we’ve lived through in our lifetimes. But it’s necessary for some thinkers who aren’t running for office, and who aren’t in office, to be thinking about what that looks like.”[i]
Rahm Emanuel, the former mayor of Chicago, served in the Clinton and Obama White Houses, as a Member of Congress and as Ambassador to Japan. He is a formidable thinker and strategist, who has crystallized in tours of New Hampshire the failure of the economy and public policy to deliver for large swaths of the population. He has made education reform a major focus of what is seen as a prelude to a 2028 presidential bid, even touting Red State Mississippi as a model for the federal government to emulate.
Three Mayors. Three individuals grounded in getting stuff done at the local and federal level. Three leaders offering sharp critiques of the existing order and intriguing ideas for what comes next, beyond the simple notion that “the government will simply bounce back.”
Does the ascension of Andy Burnham matter for the US? Hell yes, if we take seriously the imperative of the moment to reimagine the division of responsibilities in our 250-year-old Republic and fundamentally rethink how the federal government governs in a volatile age.
Bruce Katz is Founder of New Localism Associates and a Senior Advisor to the National Housing Crisis Task Force.
[i] Eric Garcetti speaks about ambassadorship and leading an ‘imperfect paradise’ – The Occidental