‘As an unabashed socialist, I am concerned with the distribution of wealth, but if you don’t create any in the first place it is a bit of an empty discussion.” For a decade I’ve repeated those words of Richard Leese, who was for 25 years the leader of Manchester city council, in policy discussions across northern England. I have never slammed them down while shouting, “This is what we believe” as Margaret Thatcher did with Friedrich Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, but I might start.

Greater Manchester, a city region with a population of nearly three million people, generates far too little wealth to make its redistribution a meaningful discussion. Unusually for a rich country, the taxes raised in Greater Manchester, just as in other city regions such as West Yorkshire, Merseyside and the West Midlands, do not meet the cost of providing local public services. Taxes raised in the south-east of England cover the gap.

The legacy of Leese, his chief executive, Howard Bernstein, and many thousands of people they worked with was to help Manchester work towards paying its way. Since 2004, as far back as the data goes, Greater Manchester has had the highest productivity growth of any other big city region in England.

Transport has been a huge factor in that success. Metrolink trams started running in 1992 and the system has grown to become the most-used such network in Britain. The newly........

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