Last month at the UN general assembly, Andy Burnham spoke movingly about Manchester’s statue of Abraham Lincoln, which stands outside the offices of No. 10 North. The oversized bronze commemorates the decision by Manchester’s mill workers, at great personal cost, to boycott slave-picked cotton from the South during the US Civil War. ‘In 1862, people with little power used it to help those with none on the other side of the world,’ the Prime Minister told delegates.

It is an unfortunate irony that, two weeks after his UN speech, Burnham is facing a reckoning over his adopted city’s deep links to the UAE, a country with one of the worst records on modern slavery in the developed world.

The story, as is often the case in Manchester, begins with football. Last Tuesday, an independent commission found Manchester City guilty of 114 charges related to its finances. A day later, rather unwisely, Burnham said he would be ‘really concerned’ if City’s owners decided to sell up as a result of the scandal, and cast doubt on the club’s guilt. Downing Street hastily clarified Burnham’s comments but the damage was done. Attention soon turned to City’s owner and UAE vice-president Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan and the part his investment company, Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG), has played in Manchester’s construction boom.

The UAE has one of the worst records on modern slavery in the developed world

The UAE has one of the worst records on modern slavery in the developed world

There were signs as far back as 2019 that Manchester was becoming uncomfortably close to the UAE. At a commemoration for the 200th anniversary of Peterloo, a performance about the massacre – which saw hundreds of protestors for male suffrage mown down by the cavalry – remarked on the city being ‘bought’ by the UAE: ‘Man City, Etihad Campus, Emirates Old Trafford; our housing, our streets, our silence on human rights, you can’t keep selling, if you’re already selling out.’ After the council complained, the offending line was removed. One Labour councillor told the Sunday Times: ‘For our council to seek to remove a voice of protest from the Peterloo event is unconscionable.’

So far the scandal has largely focused on Abu Dhabi’s property empire, and with good reason. Ever since Manchester City was taken over by the Emiratis in 2008, Abu Dhabi has been able to buy up vast swathes of Manchester for development. In 2014, it even formed a joint venture with the city council called Manchester Life, which aimed to invest £1 billion over a decade to build homes in the previously rundown Ancoats and New Islington areas.

The anti-Semitic alliance between........

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