In an interview last week with Larry Elliott, the Guardian’s economics editor, Mr Burnham emphasised that Greater Manchester’s devolution could deliver more for places like Oldham and Rochdale. To that end, he is backing an ambitious plan – dubbed Atom Valley in homage to Manchester’s role in splitting the atom – aimed at establishing a hi-tech manufacturing and research hub in the north of Greater Manchester. The aspiration is to establish a 21st-century cluster effect, encouraging inward investment from major advanced manufacturing companies and potentially creating 20,000 jobs.

This is the kind of project that needs to succeed for political and social reasons as well as economic ones. Unacceptably high levels of regional and intra-regional levels of inequality are part of the national story of anaemic growth, low productivity and stagnant pay. But it is also now a truism of British politics that a sense of marginalisation in such places has made the country a corrosively divided place.1

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• 1. There is no good reason why Britain’s underpowered research and development base should be disproportionately located in the south-east and around Cambridge. And in places such as Rochdale and Oldham, a flourishing relationship between properly funded technical colleges and local hi-tech manufacturers would transform communities that have become both older and relatively poorer. A new powerhouse of innovation, smartly situated in a region globally associated with the Industrial Revolution, would also find synergies with the groundbreaking scientific research at Manchester’s universities.