The rates were already increasing in lots of areas of Manchester because of schools going back, but it's possible to identify specific local spikes that are obviously student related. Fallowfield only being one example, there's the student areas round Salford Uni too.
In respect of the wider points about blame, there are certainly people in the north (as elsewhere) who have acted very irresponsibly. I presume we have the usual quota of people who don't give a shit, conspiracy theorists and of active sociopaths who if they thought they had the virus would go out and spread it on purpose. It would be odd if we didn't.
What needs to be understood here however is that the UK went into this pandemic in a particularly bad position to weather it compared to other similarly developed countries, and a great deal of this is because of the political climate and reforms of the last decade. The north has suffered more than average because of this, and the decision of the government to impose decisions centrally and bypass local elected leaders in the northern lockdown areas is clear and telling.
So we cannot divorce the low compliance rates with isolation requests from the increase in zero/low hour contracts over the last decade, as people are worried about not getting more hours in future if they don't go in. The widespread ignoring of the rule not to use informal childcare in private homes in Greater Manchester was intrinsically linked to the way in which formal childcare is unaffordable for large swathes of the population, due to wage stagnation. If you pursue Londoncentric transport policy, people in many towns in the north are prevented from accessing better paid work in Manchester and Leeds (the sort of jobs that you can do remotely...) so you end up with areas where few people are able to earn an income from home.
These things are all about politics, about what the last ten years of government policy, and sometimes more, have done. It's interconnected. No analysis can succeed without them, and they're much more important than some absolute twat in Bolton deciding to go on a pub crawl when he was supposed to be quarantining.
That said, I do see why people are keen on the narrative that if we northerners would all just behave ourselves, we could make the virus go away. It's much more palatable than, we live in a region that has been and continues to be so significantly shat on that it's endemic now, and local lockdown isn't going to solve that. The narrative that we have done this to ourselves, while wrong, at least places us as being in charge of our own story. The prospect of that level of agency is attractive.