YOU will never hear Andy Burnham talk about subsidiarity. He talks the language of the living room, not social theology. But the concept is key to the vision that our future Prime Minister set out this week. A score of major papal texts find echoes in his new manifesto.
Catholic social teaching had its genesis in Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which presented a critique of how the Industrial Revolution had changed the relationship between workers and capital. Subsidiarity, one of the encyclical’s pillars, was defined in Quadragesimo Anno by Pius XI, who declared it “a grave evil” for the State to do something that could be done at a lower level. Mr Burnham’s assertion that “growth cannot be ordered from the top down [but] only be nurtured from the bottom up” is a secular expression of this. “Catholic social teaching underpins my politics,” he once explicitly stated.
The tradition affirms that every person, being made in the image of God, has inherent dignity. The pastoral constitution of the Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes, insisted that political institutions existed for people, not vice versa. Mr Burnham’s proposal for a huge transfer of power away from Westminster, moving part of 10 Downing Street to Manchester, is not simply a managerial reform: it restores agency to the politically marginalised. In Centesimus Annus, Pope John Paul II specifically linked human dignity with participation in social and political life. And, in Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis endorsed the idea that no people or region should be treated as disposable or “left behind” by economic or political systems.
Mr Burnham’s pledge to build the most council houses in 50 years acknowledges another requirement of human dignity. So does his plan to reduce the Welfare Bill “in a way that is fair and lasting”. His determination that vocational education should enjoy equal esteem with the academic resonates strongly with Laborem Exercens, in which John Paul II declared that the dignity of work derived from the dignity of the worker rather than from social status or economic productivity.
The other great pillar alongside subsidiarity is solidarity. This, Pope John Paul II asserted in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, was “not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes” of others, but “on the contrary . . . a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to” another key concept in Catholic social teaching: “the common good”. This undergirds the Burnham desire for economic “growth in every postcode and hope in every heart”, and for a less adversarial politics.
His promise of “greater public control of essential services” — water, energy, housing, and transport — echoes one of the most consistent papal themes. Leo XIII, Pius XI, John XXIII, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis all endorsed the free market, with varying degrees of enthusiasm; but all insisted that “the right ordering of economic life cannot be left to a free competition of forces,” and that “government must intervene when justice requires it.” The Burnham proposal agrees with the current Pope, Leo XIV, who has declared that “the economy and enterprise can and must be engines of inclusion, and of justice.”
Manchesterism, it seems, is the new word for Catholic social teaching.
The New Politics: Catholic social teaching for the twenty-first century, edited by Paul Vallely, is published by SCM Press.
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