Local people hated the idea, forcing the council to concoct an alternative scheme with Westminster. Many of Britain’s biggest metropolises are weak. The former steel town of Sheffield is not just far poorer than the former steel town of Pittsburgh in America; it is also poorer than its surrounding region, Yorkshire and the Humber. National politicians know this. Over the past decade they have concentrated on building metropolitan institutions a little like the ones that were abolished in the 1980s, and giving them more responsibility. Local councils that agree to form “combined authorities”, with elected mayors, have been rewarded with slightly more powers. The most potent, such as Greater Manchester and the West Midlands, now hold sway over transport and have some influence over adult education and health. Central- government grants come to them in the form of single pots. The combined authorities have some leeway to spend more on this, less on that, although they must still try to hit numerous performance targets agreed with Westminster. This hesitant devolution seems to have worked. Greater Manchester has built a tram network with 99 stops and has taken control of its buses. Since 2012, when the central government signed a “city deal” with the metropolis, output has grown faster than in Britain as a whole. Research by Michiel Daams, Colin Mayer and Mr McCann shows that real-estate investors have long tolerated lower returns in London than in other cities. Recently Greater Manchester and the West Midlands have converged with the capital. Their comparatively strong governments may have made them seem safer investments. True autonomy will come only from giving areas more control over taxes. That would allow local politicians to raise money to fund local priorities and to create revenue streams that can be borrowed against. Crucially, local economic growth would benefit them more. Research by the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, suggests that devolving taxes boosts incomes more than devolving spending. But how to do it? The path away from centralisation is strewn with obstacles, starting with the wildly varying capacities of local governments.
The slickest metropolitan authorities have inward-investment arms; the weakest local councils are little more than glorified litter-collectors. Many, including Northampton, are yet to join combined authorities. Britain’s regional inequality is another problem. Letting local areas keep more of their tax revenue could lead to rich places getting richer and poor places getting poorer. A safe first step for Mr Burnham is to continue with his predecessors’ plans. Ms Reeves announced last autumn that mayors would be allowed to tax overnight visitors. Tapping tourists would raise only small sums outside London (one estimate suggested Liverpool might get £11m a year). But getting the tax onto the statute book this year would be a sign of intent. Bolder would be to give the most competent combined authorities a share of the national taxes that are raised locally—something that Ms Reeves promised to explore. The choice of levy will be crucial. VAT is a poor candidate. As a consumption tax, it is too messy to apportion when supply chains cross administrative boundaries. Property taxes already flow to local authorities, but they are the linchpin of the current byzantine redistribution system between areas. Disrupting it risks starving services in poorer regions. The best candidate is income tax. It is easy to divvy up (a person can have only one main residence) and incentives are well-aligned. If a place manages to create more and better-paying jobs, it would reap the benefits through a higher tax take. The sums need not be huge at first. The Centre for Cities, a think-tank, reckons that around 2% of income tax raised locally is enough on average to replace the grants that existing mayors receive. Mr Burnham could go further and let places set their own income-tax rates, as the Scottish and Welsh governments can do. Citizens might vote with their feet, moving to areas with low taxes and basic services or the opposite. That is the American way: income taxes are hefty in Massachusetts, for example, but so is school funding. Such a move is best treated as a long-term aspiration, given the need to build up local government’s capability to manage such large responsibilities. This still leaves the question of how to achieve fairness across cities and regions. Mr Burnham has previously looked to Germany for inspiration. The
country’s Basic Law stipulates that there must be “equivalent living standards” across its states, a goal backed up by a complicated system for redistributing money from richer to poorer places. Britain has a similar mechanism for the little spending it currently lets local areas control. If fiscal devolution is to work at a grander scale, Mr Burnham will have to find a formula for redistribution that prevents growing inequality while preserving growth incentives. Britain’s new prime minister insists that it should be possible to achieve growth across the entire country, if every arm of government pulls together. It is a nice sentiment, but an unrealistic one. Meaningful devolution within England is bound to create winners and losers, as some places exploit opportunities better than others. The losers will cry foul. Listen for their howls: it will suggest that Mr Burnham’s devolution revolution is working.■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/britain/2026/07/30/having-clawed-his-way-to-power-andy- burnham-wants-to-give-some-away
The world is entering a post-postcard era This means fewer ghastly pictures of sunsets. More ghastly Instagram Jul 30th 2026 The postcards looked lighthearted, frivolous even. One offered this “Vue” of a French beach; another that “Plage” in Normandy; another a “Rue” in a pretty coastal town. They could not have been more serious. It was March 1942. Britain was readying itself to fight the Nazis on the beaches and on the landing grounds. But they had very little idea what those beaches and landing grounds looked like. Admiral John Godfrey, the head of British naval intelligence, took to the BBC with a public plea. Your photos and postcards, he said, might look like holiday frivolity but “experts may see a lot more”. He asked people to send them in—and they did. In droves. 10,000 were expected; 10m were received. Then British intelligence started to sort them; not now under words
like “rue” or “plage” but under different names: under “Omaha”, “Sword” and “Juno”. The preparations for what would become known as “D-Day” had begun. Postcards—cheap, smutty, sometimes saucy—are often assumed to be silly but their effects have been very serious indeed. They have changed the world. One historian has called them “the largest class of artefacts humankind has ever exchanged”. An international treaty was signed to enable their travel across borders; wars have been chronicled with them; battles planned using them. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida even wrote a book about them, rich in phrases such as “supplementary prosthesis”. Now they are dying out. All (flat) physical post is in trouble: 20 years ago the Royal Mail, Britain’s postal service, sent 20bn letters a year; by 2025 that number was 6.6bn. Postcards are doing worse still: only 8% of British adults now send postcards, according to a study by English Heritage, a charity. The postcard, it observed, as it launched a summer campaign this July to revive them, is “in terminal decline”. Its rise was similarly swift. The first postcard was sent in 1840, when a British novelist called Theodore Hook sent a card through the post to
himself in Fulham, a London neighbourhood. This card featured a picture (which would become common) and (soon to be commoner still) a lame joke. The idea caught on. In September 1869 Austria’s postal service started to sell “Correspondenz-Karten”; within three months, as Lydia Pyne records in her book “Postcards”, 3m had been sent. Their advantages were clear. They lifted a physical burden from postal services (a single leaf of card was far lighter and cheaper to transport than the triplicate thickness of a letter in an envelope) and a literary burden from the writer: like teenagers turning to text, Victorians relished the limits imposed on their prose. Some 200bn to 300bn were estimated to have been in circulation between 1895 and 1915. Britons, with their empire, were particularly keen. Postcards, says Ms Pyne, were the “first worldwide social network”. And they were loved. A physical letter is not merely words, it is “far more personal, even intimate, than a text or email”, says Robert Douglas- Fairhurst, a professor of English at Oxford. Part memo, part memento, it bears the “physical traces of the person who sent it”. Postcards changed the way the world was seen. Often, critics said, by making it look worse. Their visual style—palm trees, sunsets, saturated
colour—is as recognisable as a Greek vase and, thanks to photographers like Martin Parr, as parodied. The postcard became a byword for saccharine beauty (“picture postcard”) and even a unit of measurement (“postcard- sized”). Cheap and cheerful, they gave tourists an invaluable sense of place—and intellectuals an invaluable sense of superiority. George Orwell, a writer of many things (though not, one senses, of many postcards) noted comic postcards’ appearance of “overpowering vulgarity” and general “hideousness”. Though arguably they are not as hideous as the world of Instagram-influencers that replaced them. It is hard to look at the era of the postcard and not wish that you were there.■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/britain/2026/07/29/the-world-is-entering-a-post-postcard- era
A widely repeated statistic is shaping Britain’s grooming-gangs debate The Economist investigates whether it stands up Jul 30th 2026 SCANDAL IS an overused term. But the decades-long sexual abuse of (mostly white) British girls by gangs of men of predominantly Pakistani heritage, often ignored by the authorities, more than deserves the label. It has also become an obsession of the international far right. On July 22nd Jordan Peterson, a popular conservative commentator, described it as a “sexual atrocity now seemingly integral to multicultural Britain”. Asked in a recent interview with The Economist whether he is anti-Muslim, Elon Musk said, “I am against rape and murder.” He has previously claimed on his social-media platform, X, that the media “hid the fact that a quarter million little girls were—still are—being systematically raped by migrant gangs in