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largeondon is a giant pantomime this summer. Look at the politicians and journalists, breathless with excitement, haggling over who will be the Tories’ next premier. But if you want the truth about how power and money work in Britain today, then ditch Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss for Manchester.Yes, Manchester: A revival city that traded cotton mills for skyscrapers, now Financial Times cheers and George Osborne. The metropolis that preached industrial capitalism to the world 200 years ago now offers another harsh lesson for its 21st century version of financialization.
Walk a few minutes east from the city centre and walk from New Islington to Ancots. The block follows blocks of new and newly remodeled apartments and houses, many on a lovely marina that gleams in the July sun.You can rent or buy these places now, as long as you don’t mind what they look like stacked student boxes and they all spend a pack. This is what post-industrial regeneration looks like, right? Red bricks on teeth and paws. But be warned: Nearly 1,500 of these homes come from just one developer, and it packs a whole slew of thought-provoking stories.
Launched in 2014, Manchester Life Hailed as a “£1bn deal” between City Council and the owners of Manchester City Football Club Abu Dhabi. Local authorities own large swathes of brownfields, and the club’s owner, Sheikh Mansour, ranks among the richest men on the planet. Working together, the result will be homes and lots of cash for those who desperately need them. The council’s then-leader, Richard Liss, pledged to “become a world-class example of regeneration”.
Meanwhile, human rights groups have warned Manchester councils about its powerful new business partner. The Abu Dhabi Group Investment Fund is officially independent from the kingdom, but its owner, Sheikh Mansour, is the deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and brother of Abu Dhabi’s ruling crown prince. In April, documents published by reporters for Der Spiegel magazine indicated that Abu Dhabi State had Facilitate payment to Manchester.At the very least, investment funds are closely related to what Amnesty International described Known as “one of the most brutal police states in the Middle East”. To dissent in the UAE is to rot in prison, in a regime that has more political prisoners than anywhere else in the world. Human Rights Watch says low-income immigrant nannies or construction workers are, “forced labor“However, these facts did not stop the Labour leadership of the committee from moving forward.
This is a huge improvement for Sheikh Mansour, who bought a struggling football clubNow, his investment fund is setting up a joint venture with the UK government (albeit at a local level) to venture into prime real estate and shape the city’s geography. The oligarchs of Vladimir Putin, who wore pants across large swaths of London, could not have dreamed of such a dazzling prize.
As one of the rulers of an autocratic kingdom known for its repression and addiction to oil revenue, Sheikh Mansour would benefit a lot from this partnership. Almost all cards are in the hands of the council: hectares of public land, planning systems, public subsidies.Yet, somehow, according to new research shared exclusively with The Guardian today and written by academics at the University of Sheffield, it was Sheikh Mansour who made the money almost all bonuses. The report said nine parcels of land were sold to the chief for a fraction of their value, well below what other nearby parcels were selling for (the committee said it used standard valuations by independent experts, but would not provide more details). Their lease lasted 999 years, well beyond the norm. The fund transfers public assets to companies registered in Jersey.
The waterway from New Islington to Ancoats now passes through private parcels of land owned in offshore tax havens, bringing data to key members of the wealthy elite running a company million dollars in revenue. monitoring status half the earth. One of the world’s greatest cities has sold itself to a high-ranking figure under a brutal dictatorship — and not for much.
This is the devastating impact of the first thorough study of the Manchester Life scheme, the product of months of research into company accounts and scheme applications. City councils are sometimes more keen to criticize their critics than to listen to them: Leese, its leader for 25 years until 2021, once responded For those calling for more affordable housing, they are “middle-class homeless, I hate them”. So, any personal attacks have us knocking: the experts have lived in the city for decades, and I am one of the independent and pro bono advisors on the advisory panel, a report published entirely in the public interest .
in a political establishment that is still groping How to upgrade, Manchester is hailed as a pioneer. Its Labour leadership has been praised by the Conservative government, while Osborne said its chief executive Sir Howard Bernstein said, “British local government star“.
Until 2017, Bernstein managed the committee for nearly two decades and was a board member of Manchester Life.However its For the little guy who happens to live in the city, success comes at a high price. The assets they own are not only sold at low prices, but they also receive almost nothing in return. Nine developed sites have no social housing or affordable housing, as evidenced by city council planning officials with statements such as “there is already a high level of affordable housing in nearby areas.”The same committee admitted earlier this year that nearly 4,000 children in the city sleep in temporary accommodation.
A £369,000 two-bedroom flat in the Manchester Life development is considered a bargain – a price that makes Couple working full time on the average salary. As for taxes, the payments to the treasury seem ludicrous.One of its main subsidiaries earned more than £26m in the five years to 2021 but paid less than £10,000 in tax – an effective tax rate of just 4p per £100 of income, researchers found. Manchester Life told me that its subsidiary “pays all UK corporate or income tax rental income and profits”. However, it would not disclose how much tax it paid or how much income it had.
Arguably New Islington and the Ancoats are more enjoyable than they were five years ago – but the big question is who wins and who loses in the rebuild.when there is so much about Manchester LIFE – venture capital using public assets and public subsidies from public institutions – is kept strictly confidential.
I asked the report’s authors to calculate how much the council could earn from the deal. Looking at other land deals and examples from other local councils, their conservative estimate is £33m, plus a whopping £1.70 a year in rent. Both the council and the joint venture described the payment as “speculative”. The committee also said it expected to receive more funding through excess or profit-sharing arrangements, although it did not provide any details of the agreement or public records.But by comparison, the £33 million more than coverage The cost that the city pays for a year to house families in temporary housing.
Sheikh Mansour will presumably know exactly how much Manchester Life has brought him – and can expect 10 centuries of rental income from land in the great city. He seemed happy with the arrangement.A few months after Bernstein retired from the council, he was appointed senior strategic adviser to the City Football Group, which has sheikh mansour. I asked what procedures the Council followed in Bernstein’s subsequent appointment of such an important business partner. It can’t tell me.
Perhaps Manchester Life’s best development is Murray’s Mill, one of the world’s first steam-powered cotton mills converted into a bungalow. It is located in the heart of Ancoats, next to Bangla Street. My family is originally from Bengal, a region that used to weave some of the finest textiles in the world, muslins so fine that the French sighed at their perfection. It was the entry point for the East India Company into the wealth of South Asia.
Look at these names etched in bricks to remember how Manchester became an industrial wealth, how Britain became global preeminence from slave-picked cotton and by undermining foreign industrial competition and even criminalizing the sale of Indian textiles of. But today, it symbolizes something else: a nation celebrating capital from other nations as a victory on the most humble of terms. The difference is that Indians have no illusions about what happened to them.
Aditya Chakrabortty is a columnist for The Guardian
This article was revised on July 21, 2022. An earlier version described the effective tax rate paid by the Manchester Life subsidiary as “fourpence per pound”; it was actually fourpence per £100.
Do you have comments on the issues raised in this article?If you would like to submit a letter of no more than 300 words for consideration for publication, please email us Guardian.letters@theguardian.com
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