The people of Greater Manchester are being penalised in a game of political chicken

Editorial: The question now is one of compliance. Because the PM refused to budge, he will very possibly be confronted with civil disobedience and millions of people disinclined to follow the new rules

Andy Burnham has led a local campaign of resistance (Dave Brown)

In the great Greater Manchester stand-off, it was the mayor, Andy Burnham, and the people he represents, who won a moral and political victory,  if not an economic or financial one.

In the end, some £60m for the city region was not sufficient to win Mr Burnham’s backing for the tier 3 lockdown. The briefing is that Mr Burnham was holding out for another £5m, but Boris Johnson and the Treasury could not quite bridge the gap.

Instead, with some degree of spite, Mr Johnson has offered only £22m to Greater Manchester for measures to enhance track and trace; there is however no clarity about how much will be directed to the region for additional business support. The indications are that Mr Johnson will bypass Mr Burnham, and his ministers will negotiate directly with the 10 borough councils within Greater Manchester, such as Stockport, Wigan, Salford, Bolton and Manchester itself. 

As a result of that picking off of individual, smaller councils, the region may well end up receiving a total that is below the £60m Mr Johnson was previously happy to disburse. People in the region will feel aggrieved, to say the least, as to why £60m was deemed acceptable to Westminster at one moment but too much the next. There is no economic or logical justification for such an adjustment downwards and there will be much anger that people are being penalised in this game of political chicken.

With such a moral victory behind him, the mayor is now near enough king of the north, leading a cross-party campaign of resistance (though the Conservatives had different motives). Mr Burnham will thus reap his political bonus of being such a doughty champion of the northwest. He said he would not roll over at the first glimpse of a cheque, and he certainly kept his word. 

The bad-tempered fight over money for Greater Manchester has raised questions about local leaderships’ tactics, and threatens further resentment in different local authority areas. Although they have financial resources of their own, the devolved administrations in Belfast, Edinburgh and Cardiff Bay will be seeking parity with the best-treated regions of England. The discord between the nations and regions and the anger levelled by all of them at Whitehall is unprecedented. One Labour MP claims the government “hates Greater Manchester”, which, on this evidence, does not seem extreme.  

The question now is one of compliance. Because Mr Johnson refused to budge, he will very possibly be confronted with civil disobedience and millions of people disinclined to comply with the new rules. That will have made the lockdown far less effective, and cost lives in the northwest and nationally as the virus continues to spread. The new rules may not be followed with the same enthusiasm as would have happened if the £5m had been found and an agreement reached. From the point of view of former Labour voters in the north who “lent” their support to Mr Johnson at the last election, this has not been an obvious example of “levelling up”.

As with Brussels, so with Manchester. This is a prime minister and a government that doesn’t seem to possess the basic skills of successful negotiation. The row with Manchester is, in the language of the prime minister, just another failure of statecraft. The worse news is that as the lockdown grows region by region, county by county, city by city into a national one, and then that collides with a no-deal Brexit, there will be many more failures of statecraft to appal the country.  

As people become disenchanted with how their government is behaving, they will become less inclined to “do the right thing” and without financial support some of them will be unable to do so in any case.