Change at Home and Abroad: the lessons of Manchester
Andy Burnham had been Mayor of Greater Manchester for less than three weeks when Salman Abedi detonated a bomb at the Manchester Arena in May 2017, killing 22 people and injuring more than a thousand. For the new Mayor, it marked the beginning of his remaking.
Although Burnham served in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, he left Westminster tarnished by his New Labour association. In Manchester, he began to build the relatable everyman persona that propelled him into Downing Street.
For Corbyn, Manchester also provided a beginning, but in his case, it was the beginning of the end. It did not look that way at the time.
Only a few months earlier Labour had lost the Copeland by-election, a seat it had held since 1935, giving Theresa May the confidence to call an early general election.
Then, four days after the attack, Corbyn relaunched Labour’s campaign by arguing that Britain had to be ‘strong against terrorism and strong against the causes of terrorism’. The blame lay with the terrorists, he said, but experts had long drawn connections between wars Britain had fought abroad and terrorism at home. In the weeks that followed, his popularity surged, and Labour recorded its highest vote share since 2001.
Manchester provided a backdrop for Corbyn’s radical intervention, one that offered a different vision of Britain’s place in the world, less reliant on military power and alignment with Washington.
Polling for the Independent found that around three-quarters of the public agreed that British actions abroad had consequences at home. Voters did not necessarily share Corbyn’s politics, but they could see the connection he drew. The official inquiry into the bombing later described the conflict in Libya as the ‘critical background’ to Abedi’s radicalisation.
Foreign policy is usually the area of government most insulated from popular debate. Yet Brexit put politics back into foreign policy, and Corbyn’s response to the Manchester bombing showed what was at stake. From the vantage point of 2026, that politicisation has receded. Disagreements remain over how foreign policy objectives are pursued, but there is broad agreement on what is possible and desirable.
In our recent article in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, we make sense of this situation by presenting the bombing and its aftermath as a critical juncture, a moment with the potential for a radical reorientation of British foreign policy.
Drawing on the historian A.J.P. Taylor, we distinguish critics, who argue over the means of foreign policy, from dissenters, who question its ends. Corbyn was a longstanding dissenter who seized the Manchester moment and promised radical change at home and abroad. Because so much was at stake, supporters of Britain’s prevailing foreign policy responded ferociously.
Theresa May accused Corbyn of saying the attack was ‘our own fault’. Boris Johnson called his remarks ‘absolutely monstrous’. The day before the election, the Daily Mail put Corbyn, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott on its front page above the words ‘Apologists for terror’. The Sun set him beside two radical clerics. Image after image associated him with terrorism, and there was rarely any engagement with the substance of Corbyn’s argument.
We argue that this was much more than electioneering. It was a defence of the boundaries of acceptable foreign policy. Attacks against Corbyn intensified following the election, and each time they returned to the same charge that Corbyn was anti-British, until his defeat in 2019.
Burnham has also spoken of radically changing British politics, and in his first 100 days, he has offered some departures from existing foreign policy that suggest he might connect change at home and abroad.
At Prime Minister’s Questions in September, he said national security ‘can’t come at the expense of social security’. It was a modest remark about priorities, yet his opponents quickly seized on it. The Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband’s move to put sanctions on Israeli settlements in the West Bank, in concert with allies such as Canada and France, also drew angry criticism.
The recent Budget also highlighted how conflict abroad affects the British public at home, with the government stepping in to support households with a means-tested £100.
While the government has since been criticised for delaying defence spending decisions to next year, it maintains its commitment to the 3.5% of GDP spending target, which closes the space for debates about what Britain’s armed forces are for.
Another test of Burnham’s change-making potential came in September, when five men were arrested near RAF Fairford, the base from which US forces have struck Iran. Burnham cited ‘strong indications’ of Iranian involvement: he accepts that Britain’s role in a foreign war can bring danger home, but not that the role itself might be reconsidered.
Indeed, Burnham’s government is deepening Britain’s involvement in conflicts in West Asia by committing the RAF to defend Saudi Arabia from Houthi attacks, in an escalation of a war that has already produced a humanitarian disaster.
In Taylor’s terms, Burnham is more a critic than a dissenter; he is less interested in foreign policy than Corbyn, and the calculation is likely that linking change at home and abroad is too politically costly, in keeping with Labourism’s longstanding tendency to divorce them. A leader who has watched what happened to Corbyn has every reason to avoid the link.
Manchester, his own city, showed that the two cannot be separated. The question now is what lessons Burnham took from his time as mayor.
- Maximillian Guarini is a visual politics and media researcher with over 18 years of diverse teaching experience in the UK and Japan. He specializes in politics, critical media studies and international relations. His current research focuses on the intersection of political communication, visual politics, and the transnational far right, with a specific interest in historical memory, national identities and the role of generative AI in shaping political realities.
- Thomas Howe is a Monash-Warwick Alliance Associate whose interests include international relations theory, critical security studies, psychoanalysis, and British foreign policy. Alongside his research, Tom has worked as an Early Career Researcher at a UK Changing Europe think tank and as a Senior Graduate Teaching Assistant on an Introduction to International Relations course.
