Some Might Say
What Burnham might means for entrepreneurs — plus Josh Lerner on the limits of the state, and why honours for entrepreneurship are still too rare
Andy Burnham won the Makerfield by-election last night in one of Reform’s target seats, returning to Westminster and all but declaring a challenge to Keir Starmer’s leadership. For entrepreneurs, the question I’m being asked is: what could it mean for them and their businesses? There will be plenty to come over the coming weeks, but the best place to start is Manchesterism.
Burnham describes it as economic progress alongside social progress, delivered locally through devolution. After all, since the first devolution deal, the city region has averaged around 3% growth annually, with the highest productivity growth in the country. Oxford Economics called it the “star performer of the UK economy since 2008,” with central Manchester’s employment growth in the top five in Europe.
If you want Burnham’s own case, Politics UK published it in May. Politico has perhaps the most comprehensive account of what Manchesterism means in practice and whether it can scale, including the observation from Jim O’Neill that the story “pre-dates Andy” and rested on decades of political and policy stability. The Centre for Cities offers a sympathetic view of the devolution mechanics, while the New Statesman argues that Manchesterism is not socialism, and that Burnham has largely inherited rather than built the model.
The most rigorous empirical treatment is Michael Hill’s recent piece on our Adviser Sam Dumitriu’s Notes on Growth substack, asking whether Manchesterism is working. His conclusion is more nuanced than many: Greater Manchester is a genuinely strong performer among British city regions, though Edinburgh and Bristol have done better, and the growth has been concentrated in the centre, which Hill argues is a feature of agglomeration economics, not a flaw. If you want to be the smartest person in the room when this topic inevitably gets raised, this is the article for you.
It would be premature to judge Burnham. Events may yet conspire against his ambitions for the top job. Not that you’ll find many people to take the other side of that bet right now.
Sunset Boulevard
The British state is fast becoming a sizeable shareholder in startups and scaleups. Given the direction of travel, it’s worth revisiting Josh Lerner’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
Lerner is the foremost expert on the economics of venture capital and how governments try (and mostly fail) to nurture it. He is no enemy of state support; he’s just a realist on its limits. There are, he argues, two ways to help venture capital: raise the demand for it, by making the country somewhere worth building in, or raise the supply, by writing cheques. Politicians reach for the cheques, because the money is the satisfying part.
The neglected half is what Lerner calls setting the table — the tax, regulatory and labour conditions that decide whether the capital has anywhere worth going. His starkest example is Japan, which funded a venture industry directly for years. The moment the money stopped, the industry went with it.
His other recurring complaint is the urge to be fair with the butter — to spread it so thinly across every region that it cannot be tasted anywhere, when venture is lumpy and rewards concentration. Geographic mandates have a poor record.
Then there is the picking itself. Take a stake in a company, the argument runs, and Whitehall gains a reason to clear its regulatory path. But if a barrier is worth removing for the firm the state owns a slice of, it is worth removing for all of them.
None of which is a case for doing nothing. The interventions that have worked share a shape. They match private money rather than allocate it directly, so the market signals where it should go. They keep ministers at arm’s length from the picking, behind the sort of moat New Zealand built around its fund of funds. And they carry sunset clauses and honest evaluation, so a scheme that isn’t working is allowed to end rather than harden into a permanent subsidy.
Backing British firms is the easy part. Setting the table is the hard part.
Ink-redible
Congratulations to our Patron Chris Hulatt, co-founder of Octopus, who was made a CBE in the King’s Birthday Honours for services to entrepreneurship. In his own words:
“When we started Octopus, many people told us we were crazy and that our idea would never work — but entrepreneurship rewards the bold. From cold-calling 15,000 people from the Yellow Pages to raise our start-up capital, Octopus has grown into a group of businesses spanning energy, money and investments, education, death and divorce.”
As I argued in this week’s Three Big Ideas, honours for entrepreneurship remain far too rare. More of this, please – including a new order of chivalry for innovators.
Our Next Events
No Agenda Breakfast: Forsters
🗓 Wednesday, 24 June 2026
🕐 08:45 to 10:00
📍 Baker Street, London
ℹ️ Join us for coffee, pastries, and honest conversation with a dozen entrepreneurs — no agenda, no pitches and no panels
⏩ Request a place
Ecosystem Builders Meetup: LSE Generate
🗓 Thursday, 2 July 2026
🕐 09:30 to 11:00
📍 LSE, London
ℹ️ Join The Entrepreneurs Network for an informal morning meetup for Ecosystem Builders at LSE Generate
⏩ Request a place
No Agenda Breakfast: Evelyn Partners
🗓 Thursday, 23 July 2026
🕐 10:00 to 11:30
📍 The City, London
ℹ️ Join us for coffee, pastries, and honest conversation with a dozen entrepreneurs — no agenda, no pitches and no panels
⏩ Request a place
News and Views
Late payments are preventing SMEs from investing and are costing the UK economy £11bn
Wes Streeting has pledged a global talent drive alongside a North Sea investment plan (Paywall — Bloomberg)
Google DeepMind and the UK government have unveiled an AI planning assistant intended to halve householder application decision times and help get Britain building
Kemi Badenoch has pledged to take the axe to post-financial-crisis banking regulation
Anton Leicht sets out what it would really take for middle powers to build sovereign frontier AI — a coalition and roughly $500 billion — and argues that anything short of that isn’t worth doing
Startup Genome published its 2026 Global Startup Ecosystem Report, in which London ranked third
Pieter Garicano and Simon Grimm set out nineteen thoughts on AI and Europe, arguing that protectionism and industrial policy won’t fix the continent’s problems
Martha Dacombe calls for a new strategy for AI sovereignty (Paywall — Arguably)
Ben Southwood and Kara Dimitruk argue that it was the Glorious Revolution’s dismantling of entangled property rights — abolishing the “stakeholder state” — that paved the way for the Industrial Revolution
The University of Southampton makes the case for a domestic production line for Britain’s silicon photonics scaleups, placing light-on-silicon chips at the centre of a sovereign tech strategy
Jordan Dworkin argues that AI’s uneven acceleration of science means the slowest fields will end up dictating the overall pace of discovery
Join Us
Our Supporters, Advisers and Strategic Partners are essential to helping us understand what entrepreneurs need to flourish, and are closely connected with our work. If you already support us — thank you. If you don’t, please consider helping us make the UK the best place in the world to start and grow a business.
Friends of the Network
Engage Your Curiosity Through Freewriting
🗓 Tuesday, 23 June 2026
🕐 13:00 to 14:00
📍 Online
ℹ️ Writing freely by hand can help you build confidence in your own critical thinking
⏩ Find out more
CoSTAR Emerge-AI
⏰️ Deadline: Tuesday, 18 August 2026
ℹ️ Emerge-AI is an accelerator programme designed to help early-stage creative tech startups working with AI take their prototype to initial validation
⏩ Find out more
Support for UK Entrepreneurs
We’re often asked where founders should turn for practical support beyond policy. So we’ve curated a list of government sites and trusted organisations we regularly recommend. Each week, we share a section from our Support for UK Entrepreneurs page. Are we missing something? Let us know.
Data, Benchmarking and Market Intelligence
Office for National Statistics (ONS) provides free official data on the UK economy, labour markets and business trends
Business & IP Centre provides free access to premium market research databases and industry reports
Best wishes,
Philip
Philip Salter
Founder
The Entrepreneurs Network