Gherm

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THE CASE FOR MANCHESTERISM by @DantonsHead Ask someone in Wythenshawe or Rochdale whether the buses are better than they were three years ago and they will say yes. Greater Manchester’s Bee Network is the most instructive public transport experiment in Britain not because it is radical in design but because it works. Since franchising began under Andy Burnham’s leadership, passenger numbers have risen for the first time in a generation. Routes have expanded into communities that private operators had abandoned as insufficiently profitable. Fares are capped at levels the deregulated system could not deliver. The model is now spreading. A public operator optimising for coverage and frequency rather than fare recovery serves a social need that private calculation screens out, while reducing system costs through public coordination. Manchesterism  works. Public control of essentials reduces the cost of provision by eliminating the privatisation premium and lowering coordination frictions, which in turn reduces the fiscal transfers required to make essentials accessible – progressively deflating the upward pressure on public spending that currently exposes the country to the harsh judgement of bond markets. Rebuilding public provision is not the alternative to fiscal prudence. It is fiscal prudence. What has been done for buses can be done with similar ambition for energy, water, housing, and care. The architecture operates at multiple scales simultaneously: national corporations for network infrastructure like energy and water, regional and municipal authorities for transport and housing, municipal providers for care and local services. The institutional template is already being built, sector by sector, in the places that have chosen to reclaim public control. That is why this is an argument for Manchesterism rather than a blueprint for Whitehall – its political character is decentralised, plural and democratically accountable. The question is whether national politics has the ambition to match it.