Andy Burnham is now the frontrunner to be Britain's next Prime Minister.
Nobody is asking what he actually built in Manchester, which has everything to do with Zone Fever, which is quietly extracting massive amounts of State aid (public money) to privatise the entire UK without any mention in the MSM whatsoever.
Let me explain why that matters.
Please read, share and subscribe to my Substack. No one else in the UK is focusing on the stealth nationwide rollout of free zones, initiated by the Tories, and fully backed and continued under the Labour Party.
🧵
open.substack.com/pub/europeanpo…
On 22 June, Manchester United announced it had secured land for its new 100,000-seat stadium.
The land was owned by Indurent, a UK warehouse company owned by Blackstone, the world's largest alternative asset manager, with $1 trillion under management.
Four days earlier, Burnham had left office.
The timing is not incidental.
For nine years, Burnham was the primary architect of the institutional and regulatory framework that made the Old Trafford regeneration zone investable.
And made Blackstone's land, sitting inside it, enormously valuable.
In November 2023, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced the Greater Manchester Investment Zone.
£160 million in state aid. Planning powers. Infrastructure earmarks.
Burnham welcomed it. "A vote of confidence in devolution."
What he didn't say: this was a Labour mayor co-signing a Tory deregulation framework.
This is the same architecture Labour officially opposed.
Metro Mayor Rotheram signed off on the Liverpool Freeport. Labour MPs, Lords and Baronesses sit on freeport boards from Teesside to the Firth of Forth.
The pattern is consistent: public opposition, private participation.
Blackstone didn't wait for an invitation.
In 2023 it acquired roughly 7 million sq ft of Greater Manchester industrial space, including major holdings at Trafford Park, for around £480 million.
It became the dominant landlord inside one of the zone's most strategically significant areas.
Blackstone's record, on the record:
Settled for $19.6m after disclosing Motel 6 guest lists to ICE without a warrant
Majority stake in Ancestry.com, controlling millions of people's genetic data
Linked to Amazon deforestation
Legal action over child labour in its supply chains
This is who the zone made rich.
This is about a structural methodology.
Democratic institutions de-risk private capital. Public money removes planning friction. Land appreciates. Private equity extracts the gain.
It happened in Teesside. It is happening in Manchester. It will happen everywhere.
Burnham is pitching himself as the socialist alternative. The press is buying it.
Not one commentator covering the Labour leadership race is examining the zone architecture any of these candidates built or backed.
That silence is the story.
If you want to understand what British "devolution" actually does in practice, follow the land, follow the zones, follow the capital.
I am a volunteer, please support my research, I've been writing on this for 9 years. It only gets clearer.
ko-fi.com/europeanpowell
unroll @threadreaderapp
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.