Bishop Auckland or bust: rebalancing the regions.
| Author | Goodall, Lewis |
| Position | Report |
The North-South divide is as long-standing as it is depressing. In the twelfth-century poem 'The Owl and the Nightingale', the songbird expresses a reluctance to warble in the North where men had such uncouth manners; and the fifteenth-century 'Shepherd's Play' was an early example of the idea that southerners were somehow 'soft' or la-di-dah. Today's differences are more brutal. Today unemployment in the North East has risen by 25 per cent in a single year and in the North West by 18 per cent. The average house price in London tops [pounds sterling]330,000 whilst a mere [pounds sterling]120,000 can purchase a home in the North East. In Middlesbrough and West Dunbartonshire, over twenty job seekers fight over every job, whilst in Richmond and North Warwickshire there is virtually full employment. These trends, present even in the good times, have got much, much worse in the bad.
Disparities such as these are hard for social democrats to stomach. Ed Miliband's conference speech of 2011 has been described by a friend in a high place as 'the best argument for social democracy in the last thirty years.' That it was. What it missed, what British social democracy in the last decades has missed, is an explicit commitment that social democracy must be universal. Though it is at risk of stating the obvious, it is worth repeating. No one, no nation, no city, no region must be left behind, and all must be given the tools they need to fulfill their potential. It's no good being a social democrat if you're not for social democracy everywhere and prosperity for everyone. Nor is it valuable or just to have a group of people, cities, or regions dependent on others for their resources, whether they are benefactor or beneficiary.
In order to secure a social democracy (or society) of real value, we must therefore arrest the ostensibly chronic decline of our regions. The regions must not forgo their right to become places of economic and cultural prosperity, just as the capital must not become a neo-liberal idyll to provide the growth teat on which the rest of the economy suckles. On every measure, regional prosperity is national prosperity. For three main reasons, the next Labour government must seek to rebalance our political economy geographically and sectorally as a matter of urgency: it is economically inefficient; it is socially unjust and exclusive (to both London and everywhere else); and it has often been the case that the left has to redress regional imbalances that the right leaves behind.
The idea that it can't be done is laughable, as history shows us. It just requires political will. The most important of these reasons is the economy. Now, the regions look like economic basket-cases. In truth, they hold the key to our economic recovery. In particular, the North and Midlands, with their collection of core cities, neglected for many years, have the potential to inject new life into our stagnating economic model.
The economic case
Talk of the North-South divide instantly leads to a rapacious right jumping on the 'feckless' North (conversely, it has also created something of a victim culture on the part of many Northern local authorities and institutions). These knee-jerk reactions have many manifestations, from the eminently ignorable Kelvin McKenzie, who believes that anyone who doesn't live in the capital is somehow 'unproductive', to those like the London mayor who put it more politely by simply saying that London is the 'motor' of the British economy and therefore deserves nearly all capital investment: 'A pound spent in Croydon is of far more value to the country than a pound spent in Strathclyde. You generate jobs in Strathclyde far more effectively if you invest in parts of London' (quoted in Wimpress, 2012). It is a curious Conservative embrace of Keynesianism, so long as it is within the bounds of the M25.
This view has been given credibility by an assortment of the great and the good. Tim Leunig of the LSE and the Tory think tank Policy Exchange have argued that entire cities (across the North of England in particular) should be abandoned and that the populations of 'hyper productive' cities like Oxford and Cambridge be expanded north of a million to compensate (cue collective gasp of terror from the cloisters) (Leunig and Swaffield, 2008). Then there are those like human geographer Henry Overmann or Tony Travers of the LSE (note the theme here), who advocate investing much of our collective resource in those areas likely to experience the most intense economic 'agglomeration', i.e. investing in areas where businesses already possess the strongest economic linkages in the belief this yields the greatest growth.
This received wisdom, alongside the worst-felt effects of deindustrialisation in the North and Midlands, has led governments of both stripes over the past thirty years to follow a clear regional policy. It was, however, an inversion of that which all the other governments in the post-war period employed. As opposed to an active attempt to address regional imbalances, recent government...
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