I think there's a fundamental gap in this analysis, which is how hyper-local many of the inequalities are.
Manchester has a GDP per capita of £59,000. Tameside, the poorest area in Greater Manchester, has a GDP per capita of £19,000. Leeds has a GDP per capita of £42k; ten miles away, Bradford has a GDP per capita of £23.6k.
Those disparities are really difficult to explain in terms of infrastructure or commercial investment. Similar disparities exist within London, although for plausibly different reasons; compare Lewisham with the neighbouring Southwark, Camden with Haringey, or that one bit of Tower Hamlets with the rest of Tower Hamlets.
I think we need to be looking much more granularly at the gaps between neighbouring areas, schools and families - the human capital factors that trap people in lives of poverty. Building a university or innovation hub in Knowsley probably won't do much for the huge numbers of kids there who leave school unable to read and write.
Specifically on the GDP per capita numbers you quote, it's important to know what the "capita" means here. In your numbers, the capita is of residents. So people who commute into Manchester to work are counted in the GDP side of the equation and not in the capita side of the equation giving a largely meaningless number when comparing the strength of an economy. In the case of Leeds and Bradford that you mention it's largely the same effect. When someone commutes from Ilkley or Harrogate to Leeds to work their GDP is counted in Leeds but their capita is counted in Bradford or North Yorkshire.
While I agree that looking at smaller geographies is useful, and indeed I do in the link top, we need to consider that overall Greater Manchester, and all of the North's other cities, just have very little prosperity to go around. There are pockets of wealth, but they are pockets against a backdrop of poverty. And of course in London there are pockets of poverty, but they are pockets against a backdrop of wealth. You can convince yourself of this by looking at the ONS small area income estimate dataset and map.
I don't think you are an idiot. Being mistaken or providing an incomplete analysis doesn't make you an idiot, it most likely just means you had neither the time nor the tools to do better just now. Your response clarified the article for me.
And admitting to the error puts you right at the top of the list of non-idiots in my opinion!
I live down the road from OP in Harrogate and it's an incredibly desirable and affluent place
Also while I'm commenting. I know OP isn't saying the North is shit. Just poor(ish).
Nevertheless I just want to say I love the north of England and genuinely think it's one of the best places in the world. We've already established that I'm in one of the better areas so my perspective might be a little skewed, but I honestly think it's an incredible place and I hope this doesn't put people off visiting.
Also from the Harrogate area, but moved to London for uni and haven't made it back yet. Whilst Harrogate is very nice and affluent, I'd say the biggest difference isn't the personal wealth but the council wealth. There's far far far more wealth in the south and I've honestly been amazed at just how big the gap is, especially noticeable in infrastructure and services like roads and schools. Even the schools in poor areas of London are better than the local Harrogate schools. Just look at Yorks council funding (now merged with Harrogate) which has the lowest funding per capita in the UK.
Despite this tho I'd much rather live in Harrogate and enjoy the countryside than London tbh, plus people are less miserable there...
Poor vs shit is an interesting discussion. If your life, your environment, isn't shit, why would you even care if are poor? Would you rather be rich and unhappy? (I spend very little, yet I don't feel deprived.)
Isn't this similar in, say, US cities? I'm not well travelled in the US, but Chicago, New York, LA, are all incredibly wealthy cities with pockets of abject poverty.
Same elsewhere in (some parts of) Europe. Paris for example, though perhaps for different reasons.
It would appear that just having access to good education (or worse, merely being close to places with good education) doesn't mean you can consume it and advance in life. Probably ditto for other levelling up tools like apprenticeships, jobs etc.
It's a 15 minute train ride to Manchester. 30-40 min drive/bus trip to Manchester, 1 hour train ride to Leeds and slightly longer drive.
Generally Tameside is well serviced, you got all the amenities you would expect and location wise you have very good access for commuting. Manchester, Salford, Leeds university all easily accessible. Tamesides location makes it popular as a commuter location looking for lower costs of living.
It's always been a working class place. Despite the wealth of the industrial revolution, the grand factories mostly now demolished and buildings, the majority of people where/are working class low paid workers and didn't see that money although the money built grand markets and highstreets for workers to spend the wages.
Tameside is a low socioeconomic area which is generational.
I went to an at best, average school. The importance of school wasn't really seen, or taught at home or in school. Myself, I had a mixed schooling history. Troublesome/difficult, likely influenced through parents attitudes, being bullied at times, not academically smart but not dumb, dyslexic and can remember one specific teacher publicly shaming me for not being able to spell my surname instead of trying to teach me. My social worker partner is adamant i'm on the spectrum. I feel there was a nurturing missing generally at these average, low social economic schools and my time could of been better with the right support in school. Eck I got a C GCSE in maths but learnt a bit of category theory, Haskell and functional programming myself.
Those who had a reasonable fortunate home life seem to of done just ok in their adult life from the area.
Those who were disruptive, high level of truancy, poor parenting, some are dead, some are in prison, some look like they should be dead with addiction. Their kids will likely follow down the same path they did and they've had more kids than the people who turned out alright.
Growing up in low social economic environments is hard to break out of. It starts at home with the importance of education and it's hard to start at home when your parents and parents parents never seen the importance and then the schooling isn't prepared to deal with it.
I broke out of it leaving as fast as I could, hard work when younger and some luck.
The north can be raw, probably not so much these days but "southern pansy" or "posh", "gay" is used disparagingly for people trying to better themself. I grew up not in poverty and not well off, in a area that wasn't the worst but not great. My mum see's anyone who has done well for themselfs as "posh" looking down on her and that can be a common theme with the less fortunate people I know in the area. This is a generational attitude.
The story seems common over the world. People growing up less well off struggle to get out of being less well off and it often starts at home and education and it's hard to start at home in the environment you are in and education doesn't happen due to home environment apart from the few outliers who do overcome the odds stacked against them.
It's funny reading these articles from people who haven't grew up poor, in the north, never seen a council estate, or the way of life, talking about Universities in 1066 and Northern Conquests as a reason.
"It's funny reading these articles from people who haven't grew up poor, in the north, never seen a council estate, or the way of life". I didn't grow up poor, but I did grow up in the North, went to the local comprehensive, and have lived on plenty of council estates. When I lived in Manchester I went to Ashton plenty of times, it's not that different to Hull.
It's not to different from a lot of working class towns world over with social economic issues from my travels. Nothing to do with 1066 and I'd say a lot of other points in the article.
This comment needs exploring more please! The fundamental ask of policymakers is "what can we do?" and you've alluded to some factors you think are key, eg stable family units, respect for education and attainment etc. Would love to read more.
I grew up on a council estate and escaped that environment. I credit a headteacher that directed me to one of the better secondary schools, and a well run public library that was a safe third space between home and school. Curious what other escapees credit, and what lessons might be drawn.
To a certain extent, would making the productive parts of manchester, even just 2X more productive not fix this over time in the same way that it has in London?
If you look back even say 30 years ago in London, you'd of said the same thing about places like Hackney, as you do now about Tameside. Today it houses some of the most desired and valuable real estate not only in London, and by extension the UK, but in the world.
One could argue that the money flowing into Hackney was largely from the London media/finance elite who probably were made 2X more productive by IT and City deregulation. The result was Hackney's gentrification.
But gentrification, is not the same as a community leveling up. The former provides an influx of new residents with money to spend in the community. The latter creates new opportunities for the existing residents within the community.
>30 years ago in London, you'd of said the same thing about places like Hackney...[and] today it houses some of the most desired and valuable real estate
are you saying that gentrification of Hackney did not simply entail wealthier people moving in and displacing the local population, but rather soaring incomes for the people who lived there?
A "gentrified" community will involve higher incomes for those non-tradable services that have to be provided locally and can't simply be outsourced to somewhere else. So it's both.
(This is in addition to the high productivity that's driving the gentrification in the first place, which will often result in increased opportunity in that very sector - but that's not always very relevant, especially in the short term.)
Educational outcomes need to be improved yesterday, no disagreement on that.
There's some displacement, yes. However anyone who isn't in privately rented accommodation would be choosing to leave, perhaps even with some decent money from selling their house.
Many people stay, if you'd like proof, take a walk down to hackney.
Specific to London but there were a lot of working class home owners who bought under the right to buy schenlme who have benefited hugely from gentrification (not just from increased home prices but from lower crime, better schools etc).
Also a lot of non-market housing being rented, all those people also benefit.
Sure a small percentage of displaced people benefit significantly. That’s offset by those who simply see higher rent then get forced to relocate to a less desirable location further from work / family/ etc.
Poor areas have few people with the knowledge/ resources to really leverage gentrification which is why they are living in poorer neighborhoods to begin with. So the average outcome may be a slight improvement due to the major winners, but the median outcome is likely a net loss.
The people who move in and out aren't just shuffling seats. They may be moving in because of their increased ability to exercise that position in society. The consequence may be a center of regional productivity and true national gain. In other words, you don't get a Bay Area unless a lot of tech and business types mingle together.
We also shifted largely into a service based economy, shutdown a lot of mines and mills (for better or for worse) which were primarily more north based.
More than 2/3rds of my graduating physics class went straight into banking, as there was no relevant industry to pick them up... and as someone with several postdoctoral degrees, yet no house or meaningful assets... who could blame them for going into banking in this large miserable sprawl of a city utterly devoted to it?
> More than 2/3rds of my graduating physics class went straight into banking
This is why I advise people to never study physical sciences or non-software engineering. There just aren’t many jobs for it in the UK. And even fewer that pay well.
The usefulness of that depends on whether you think academic higher education is vocational ("I'm doing a chemistry degree so that I can be a chemist") or inquisitive ("I'm doing a chemistry degree because it's so heckin' interesting").
I'd tend to advise people to study stuff they find interesting. I'd wager the percentage of degree holders doing a job that's directly related to their degree is in the minority, and that's not a bad thing.
Those people don’t have those jobs because of their degree.
As a non-wealthy, not particularly bright creative writing major, the focus of your degree only holds you back if you let it, or if you are utterly unwilling to work outside of your focus area. Tech, especially, has an absurd number of on-ramps for anyone willing to do the tiniest modicum of extra-curricular work.
I don't live in the UK, but here in the USA I studied Physics and Music and then got a job programming. A lot of it was dumb luck, but I want to emphasize that school is about learning, not about vocational training. My experience in programming was due to being a giant nerd, not school.
I think another big difference is that in the UK higher education is not really valued. In Germany people get PhDs because then they can get into much higher paying jobs, even if the PhD is not in a topic related much to the job. For example because I have a physics PhD I was able to get an entry level software dev position with a wage of 73k where someone with a bachelors may get only 40-50k. I don’t think that dynamic exists in the UK
At the moment on LinkedIn there are about 15k results for jobs containing the “software engineer” keyword in the UK, compared to just over 3k for the “biology” keyword.
Despite this, 56k people graduated in biological sciences but 24k people graduated in computer science.
(Graduation data is from 2019/20 so may have changed slightly, but unlikely enough to move the needle)
The vast majority of jobs on LinkedIn are fake. Even so your figures confirm my claim; 24k graduates versus 15k jobs. The supply is greater than the demand.
As a sibling comment has pointed out, there are too many software engineers in the UK.
Only because there are too many software engineers, not the fact that AI will replace those jobs. Experienced software engineers are still required for successful businesses.
I do wonder how long this will hold up. It's true (though cliche) that software is "eating the world", but as the low hanging fruit gets automated away you do need people that understand more complex underlying processes to work on the software. I feel the right combination at this point is to do a little of both.
It’s slightly more nuanced than that. Investment banks and consultancy companies are really interested in graduates who are smart and articulate. The nature of their degree is not that relevant.
I know an extremely clever young woman who graduated in performance arts. She had no difficulty in getting a job at a top tier consultancy company. This company was far more interested in her than some mediocre plodder who hacked his way through a comp. Sci degree.
It’s not that these degrees are totally without value. Most banks and consultancies accept any quantitative degree as long as it’s from a prestigious university.
But if you know you’re going into banking anyway you might as well do something vaguely relevant like accounting, economics or statistics.
It's a consequence of companies outsourcing to countries where they can get away with slave labor and a complete lack of environmental regulation. There's nothing natural about it.
Exactly this. Don't think of it as "moving to a service-based economy", think of it as "outsourcing manufacturing and resource extraction". They are two sides of the same coin, but people tend to only look at the one shiny side.
Like any race to the bottom, it works great until you hit the bottom. Only now you don't have any of the fundamental industry, and you've lost all of the domain knowledge of those industries. Short-term thinking is incredibly seductive.
It also creates this weird power imbalance. 'Advanced economies' are supposed to be just that, yet 'developing economies' cutting off their grain, steel and manufacturing is a far bigger threat than an advanced economy cutting off digital services, luxury goods, and financial markets.
But "advanced" means "gone farther in a particular direction", not "more powerful", "independent", or some such. Mostly it's about giving the population more comfort. Equally, staying on a sofa can give you more comfort than hitting a gym, but it usually does not make you stronger.
OK, let it be not outsourcing to places with lower cost of labor, but to machines. There are whole factories that are operated by half-dozen people who mostly oversee its interaction with other human-run systems, such as trucks.
It will still keep most population away from industrial production. Same thing happened is agriculture a century ago, when machines made 90% of agricultural workers redundant, and huge farms are run by half-dozen people.
(Wait until AI will make a ton of service workers redundant.)
OK, sounds good... hey, you're going to pay taxes on those machines, right? Because no business operates in a vacuum. Gotta pay for that military, police, and fire that allow you to continue operating. Think of it as the labor element of the manufacturing sector shifting to the defense sector. It's natural. :D
Machines can't go on strike, and don't need to be ordered back to work at gunpoint. The part of the defense sector allocated to manufacturing was much bigger prior to automation.
Its not that simple. The UK experts a lot of manufactured goods to exactly those sorts of countries, and imports a lot from the EU and the US.
What you say is true of cheap consumer goods, but remember everything else. Even with some consumer goods, its pretty even - the UK exports cars about as much as it imports (by value, not numbers though). https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uk-trade-in-numbers...
Its other big goods exports are things that are not that visible to consumers.
Are you sure you want to get into everything else? Because I could've sworn we just had a major controversy with Vivek Ramaswamy running his mouth about the supposed laziness of American workers to justify racial discrimination against them through mass hiring of H1B workers... a stance so obviously wrong it forced his exit from the Trump administration. He certainly wasn't referring to people employed producing "cheap consumer goods", and there's nothing natural about the shift to the use of H1B labor. Just to be clear, though: This phenomenon is not unique to the United States. Imperialists everywhere try to pit one people against another to maintain power and extract maximum value for minimum input. Just once I'd like the bourgeoisie-adjacent to acknowledge political reality.
We were talking about the UK. Since Brexit immigration policy has shifted to favouring highly skilled workers, especially skills in short supply, over cheap labour.
There are definitely people here who think like that, and we do still import cheap labour for some things (difficult low paying jobs), that British people “will not do” ( which means ”will not do for minimum wage”) but in general we have had what the govt and central bank call “wage inflation”.
We are also talking about the north of England and non-EU immigrants strongly prefer certain areas, tilted to the South. Where I live I see few non-white faces.
That includes services, and reflects success of polices in attracting inward investment. You cannot have it both ways: capital account + current account + changes in foreign currency holdings have to balance, and the last is small comparatively.
It's basically a modern form of economic colonialism replacing the old style of colonialism with ships, guns and slaves in chains.
The brutal hard work gets done off-shore for poor pay and the spoils(profits) get shipped to the western finance capitals of the world where people who put in little effort get the cream.
It's still dependent on rich countries having historical leverage (economic, political and especially military) over the poor countries where the dirty manufacturing and hard labor happens, rather than based on any meritocracy.
Or how trade made places rich... Well you always have the buyer and seller. And less they get and more they pay worse is it for them... Trade has value generation, but also exploitation and extraction...
Not true. Those countries have become a lot richer. The transformation in standards of living since the 80s has been spectacular in many countries. The biggest drag on that has been the profits being taken by the wealthy in those countries. The west does not have he position it used to. There are a lot of British workers working for Indian capitalists. China's manufacturing is mostly Chinese owned. In a lot of other places the forreign ownership is Asian, not western. The west no longer dominates the world although westerners have been slow to bting themselves to acknowledge this.
The problem is de-industrialization gets your society dependent on authoritarians who rent out there slaves to the lowest bidder and who then can wield you like a puppet.
And the focusing on a more abstract economy- produces a inability to even perceive physical products, limitations and overall reality and the world.
If everything is an abstraction, then problems like climate change, running out of energy or societal instability, surely can be doctored, narrated and abstracted away. And they cant. Which is a fundamental incompetence that is pretty obvious by now.
One stuck in such a delusion, would imagine it optimal to blast furnace a mountain of money towards "elegant" formulas, unable to perceive, that those formulas at the end of the day have to produce fertilizer to feed a world of billions even when the crops fail.
>More than 2/3rds of my graduating physics class went straight into banking
How does one get hired into banking with a physics degree? For what kinds of jobs? Where I live right now you only get into banking with a economics/business degree. Anything else and your resume goes in the bin.
I think banks / insurance companies are looking for solid math skills. If you can learn / work with higher math for physics, you can work with financial math.
A bank is a very diverse organism. There was a group at our bank, they knew very little English and none of the business/economy. Their task was to solve differential equations, something physicists are trained to do.
I haven't been in banking for a while (I'm on the investment side of finance now) but I have been in finance for 20 years now. I'd say that at least in London, my experience is that a majority have degrees which weren't economics/business - sciences and (general) engineering degrees are very common, and maths and comp sci aren't uncommon.
That's a vague answer that doesn't answer my specific question. I also have a STEM degree (electrical engineering) but would never be considered for finance roles.
I have a chemistry degree and an entire career doing software / system engineering in financial services.
I've also hired a boatload of people with STEM degrees. In fact (massive generalisation warning) I prefer hiring them to those with computer science degrees.
How does one pivot into finance with a stem degree and computer engineering experience? What are you looking for in a resume and what's the interview process like?
I guess it depends on what you mean by "finance". I'm talking specifically about technology & engineering in financial services.
But mostly, in a resume, I'm looking for 1) evidence of competence (do you know what software is and how to make it), 2) evidence of interest in the domain and 3) evidence of being able to communicate with others.
Everything else specialist can be taught / learned. You don't need to know either how to balance a tree, or how to calculate the value of an IR swap.
I agree it sounds odd. It's a phrase I've moved to using after fifteen years of being shouted at for using other phrases. North England, while sounding a bit odd, generates much fewer rage replies than other formulations. There's also a slight preference on my part for shorter phrases because of social media.
Any article which seeks to explore the problems of northern England and doesn't mention the weather is fundamentally incomplete.
I've lived in every part of England, but being in the north west for the last decade has highlighted how much our mental health can be damaged by constant grey skies and rain. A population predisposed to feeling hopeless naturally leads to a less vibrant economy.
The diagram of the northern "urban" centre also fails to point out the Peak District, though you can detect it by noticing what looks like an obvious gap in the middle of the circle. In the middle of the London circle is, of course, the centre of London, world-famous capital city of the United Kingdom, seat of power of its government and monarchy. In the middle of the Northern circle? Some mountains and the occasional picturesque little village...
(The weather might also be a factor here too. The elevated regions are much colder, snowier and windier, causing problems with transport. Getting between Sheffield and Manchester at this time of year can be a painful business.)
In my comparisons with the Netherlands I explore this in detail. The centre of the Netherlands' main urban region is a six metre below sea level swamp that the Dutch never have and never will build on and which is just as much of an obstacle to agglomeration as the Pennines. So I really don't think this matters.
As for the weather, Ireland, Scotland, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Denmark are hardly renowned for their fantastic weather and they're all doing much better than North England. Meanwhile Southern Spain, Southern Italy, and Greece are lovely places but not doing well economically. I don't think the weather is a good excuse for Northern underperformance.
The bad weather places you mention have largely uniform bad weather, which is not true of England - the south east is noticeably warmer and drier than the north west.
Weather is of course only a contributing factor, just like the historical influences.
The author says that the region is poor because, after the decline of industry, it didn’t have universities to drive tech, finance and services. But it sounds like the problem is simply deindustrialization in the first place, same as the US Rust Belt.
Material wealth means having stuff. You can only get stuff by making it or taking it from the earth.
Meanwhile Chinese cities are sparkling and new, and their workers enjoy a high standard of living at low cost, not unlike Northern England or Cleveland, Ohio 100 years ago.
Because they make a lot of stuff. It’s that simple.
Industrialization worked for China recently for the same reason it worked for western nations more than a century ago: you can drive local economic growth even if the population has low education.
Once you have a strong local economy based on manufacturing, you have to drive innovation to sustain it. So you use the economic output to fund education and research, to create new categories of products and services, which create durable competitive advantage.
The U.S. has succeeded wildly with this playbook. China is currently following this playbook. The author is saying that the playbook in Northern England was interrupted by the South.
Deindustrialization happened all across Europe.
Some countries got over it and found new ways to make money. Besides you can make money with trading stuff... Anything that is sold in central Europe has to pass through the port of Rotterdam.
The brain drain from northern England to London is massive.
There are four high income tech/finance/media households on my culdesac in east London, thankfully including my own. Of the eight adults, I am from London but the other seven are from the midlands or north of England.
Sort of an aside from the article, but I never feel like these geographic averages translate well to densely populated countries like England.
The North, like all parts of the country, has pockets of extreme affluence near areas of relative poverty, with a lot of middle income households scattered about the place too.
Talking to some southerners you’d think the whole of the North was a dump, and I worry people write off a truly beautiful part of the UK because of this misconception.
> Limited success such as in Manchester, whose economy has nearly kept up with East German cities while the rest of North England falls behind,
Woa is this a typo? I know little about England, and I hadn't realized that "keeping up with East German cities" is considered a success. I mean isn't East Germany rather well known for not keeping up all that well with the rest of Germany either?
Not a typo I'm afraid. East Germany's economy overtook North England's economy in 2010. Excluding Berlin, East Germany's economy overtook North England's economy in 2013. Every East German large city (Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, Halle, Chemnitz) is today a stronger economy than every North English large city except Manchester. Manchester is still a weaker economy than Berlin, Dresden, and Leipzig.
Yes. I think the author's point is that the standards are that low up here in North England, and outside of Manchester it's worse than in East Germany.
I think that means growth rates, not absolute wealth.
Not all of the north is poor. Cheshire is richer than outer London or the home counties. If you adjust for the cost of living more of the north would be.
I think it's a bit more subtle than that. For one the author tells us they think this is an example of success story. Although I guess it depends on when you are measuring from, and they may be being somewhat tongue in cheek with their choice of East Germany
I think the point is that we would expect East German cities to have reasonable relative growth post-unification because we are taking a relatively structurally deprived area within a wider more successful economy.
That Manchester has kept up with areas where you'd expect to see reasonable growth, is positive. I suppose there's also the hint that this suggests that this has been allowed to happen by central government, but I could be making that up.
Lot's of coal mining, used for steel production, used for boat building ...
The high paying jobs are centered around London and the financial industry (20% of UK GDP), although post-Brexit the whole country is not doing well. Glad I left in the late 80's.
It was still big up until the 70's at least - I remember the huge Miner's Galas in Durhan, attended by people like Harold Wilson, Tony Benn and Arthur Scargill. There are still lot's of former miner villages in the area that don't look like they've changed much. Maybe my comments on steel & ship building are equally dated(?), but I think it was coal driving these related industries that got the north entrenched as a poorer working class part of the country. Of course there is also the fishing industry and sheep farming due to poor quality land, again all low paying jobs.
One of the best predictors of individual financial success is the wealth of your parents, and I wonder how many generations this effect lasts for ...
Interesting perspective, but it really seems like state capitals just tend to siphon money from far away to invest nearby, and consequently, grow. Selecting a major city as your capital seems to accelerate the process, but even countries which select minor towns as their capitals have had this happen.
The process is quite simple and fairly obvious. Government policy is the bedrock of all economic development. Government officials will always have the most knowledge about the capital, so all policy is tailored to it. It's no surprise that they don't make policies that benefit the North given that they don't live there.
What policy would benefit the north, without (even further) subsidising it?
If we could invest £10Bn and get £20Bn back for the economy with our money back over time then not a single politician would turn that down, there's actually been a load of support over the past ~5+ years for "levelling up" (AKA investment in the north) but we've not invested much because the returns are abysmal. Meanwhile there's a whole stack of projects with good returns in london, but politically it's really difficult to "give more money to london" so we don't really do them. Bakerloo line extension and crossrail 2 for example.
The Elizabeth line, will over time pay for itself entirely with fares alone, yet has also already added ~£2.50 to the economy for every £1 spent.
This is a absolutely classic example of chicken and egg, network effects and first mover advantage. There's perhaps a case for being absolutely ruthless and just spending an obscene amount of money on Manchester/Leeds/Liverpool. What might it look like?
-No third runway for heathrow, instead BHX gets 2 more runways (or MAN 1 more) and all the funding it needs to become an international hub, including an reduction in APD for 5 years or something. Central London in ~48Mins via HS2 is already committed and being built, frankly that's not that much different to what it practically takes to get from a random heathrow terminal to central.
-HS2 to Manchester AND Leeds (via the branch just above BHX), that would connect BHX to those cities in <30 Mins or so and to London much quicker.
-Trams for Leeds, maybe a metro for Manchester.
-Liverpool>Manchester>Leeds express line (which seems committed).
-Enterprise zone covering all underdeveloped commercial areas in Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham. Give rates, or tax relief on businesses investing, or employing in the zone, planning exemptions, easier permitting.
Anything short of an absolutely insane bet like this, just isn't going to work. Chucking 1Bn to Leeds for them to buy some trams just isn't going to have a transformative effect, it might actually be a total waste because, in short, network effects.
The North of England frequently runs a combined fiscal deficit in the tens of billions, with all of that subsidy coming, effectively, from London and the SE.
The reason for investing in the North is pretty simple: people live there. We have three options: do something productive with he area, do nothing and continue to pay for its decline, or move all the people to London and let house prices rise accordingly. What you said about first mover advantage rings true here. We can either pick the most developed city and devote resources elusively that area, or we can accept a proportionally smaller economy spread out across the whole country.
I also fail to see how London is subsidising these areas. It seems to me that they'd be much better off if they were able to run themselves. This is a classic case of purposeful under-investment. You see it in business as well. If someone wants to kill off a given project, they'll deprive it of funding to he point it can't operate properly then use the lack of profit generated as an excuse to axe it. The issue we have is that we can't just axe the North.
There is also the issue of measuring productivity. You say investments in London are more productive because they generate more profit, but consider that an equal investment in the North might have a much greater effect on the quality of life for the people living there. Should we measure investments by how much money they return or how much they improve people's lives? I am reminded of industrial strategy in the Soviet Union. They invested only in the most "productive" (highest ROI under capitalism) things such as heavy industry and very little in consumer technologies that make people happier. The result was rapid industrialisation which probably had the best effect in the long run. The question is how long term are we thinking? At some point, you've gotta start paying to make people happy instead of just investing in the most profitable area.
Good luck with the "but people live there, thier lives can be improved who cares about a poor ROI" argument.
I mean that kind of genuinely, I see your point, but good luck trying that argument on the treasury.
It's a fact that they're subsidised. They have regional mayors, do you think a devolved solution for each northern city is really reasonable or desirable? If we think it's desirable and will stop them being subsidised then why hasn't it worked for Scotland, Wales or NI? All of which take more than they put it.
Luckily you don't need to convince the treasury, just the electorate. And they are desperate for it. As you said, Bojo's levelling up scheme was like electoral crack. Perhaps some day we will achieve the level of democracy where the government enacts policies which are universally popular. Maybe it will happen soon if Reform UK actually follows through on proportional representation. Though it's a sorry state that those racist cretins are our best shot. Though I don't know if PR alone would be enough, we'd have to do something about the media as well and they're pretty buddy-buddy with Farage.
Historically, the UK was run for the benefit of an elite and the regions they lived in, but they discovered that that ran counter to their own interests. They reversed the economic parts of that in Ireland in the 1890s ("Killing Home Rule with Kindness"), and they did so in Northern England after the Wall Street Crash. For example, for part of the 20th century, companies were banned from expanding anywhere outside of deprived regions which caused industrial havoc in the South without providing much long-term benefit to the North. The root problem isn't that government didn't try extreme measure, it's that those measures failed at massive cost, so proposed ones are now subject to much more rigorous scrutiny.
Power in the UK is highly centralised in London, but that's not necessarily bad for regional economic development, e.g. the office ban mentioned above would not have been agreed to by southern devolved regions and the redevelopment of the former East Germany was driven by Bonn (former West Germany's capital city). Competition in government also isn't necessarily good for regional development and the corn laws and free trade that the author credits to Northern England's influence caused another famine in Ireland in 1879. It's also worth noting the North East England referendum of 2004, when London's project of devolving power to the English regions was blocked because Northern English voters overwhelmingly didn't want it.
British manufacturing suffered an unusually steep collapse relative to other western countries in the late 20th century that hit Northern England particularly hard, while the benefits of the slightly later financial services boom were inevitably focused on the country's financial centre in the South. The manufacturing collapse was partially driven by government policies, but not in the way generally thought - for decades, pre-Thatcher governments had been taking fairly regular extreme measures in response to various crises (balance of payments deficits, unbalanced regional development, oil shortages, strikes, etc.), that made life much harder for businesses. But the collapse was mainly driven by the fact that Britain in the second half of the 20th century was mind-bogglingly bad at manufacturing. I suspect that the failure of that entire section of the British economy would be a better starting point for an analysis of what went wrong in Northern England.
There's already a literature analyzing this. For instance William Lazonick's 1983 Business History Review article, "Industrial Organization and Technological Change: The Decline of the British Cotton Industry," and his subsequent book "The Decline of the British Economy: An Institutional Perspective" (1987)
Part of the issue with the UK being bad at manufacturing was (ok it’s a cliche but I’ll say it anyway) that Thatcherism in not wanting to deal with the unions and the social powers they represent, defeated socialism by destroying the work and replacing industry with nothing. There’s no reason the UK couldn’t manufacture ships or precision engineering or steel - it was set up for exactly that. But doing so involves negotiating with unionised power, who vote Labour, and it was a quicker solution to merely destroy and keep destroying social cohesion and the unions around it – “there’s no such thing as society” – by destroying and defunding the work. The London-based finance powers also lost interest in funding industrial production and its workers alongside when moving money around and corruption can be done from the office in London without having to negotiate with union bosses and their insistence for a bigger piece of the pie (that they’re baking).
If you look at somewhere like South Korea, who 60 years ago had no major engineering or shipbuilding, the UK could be leagues ahead of them. The difference is that the South Koreans had the appetite and impetus to do it, whereas in the UK the government and finance planners had the exact opposite impetus.
Interesting. If we look at the idea of subsides between region, and we accept that this the right way of thinking about it and assume it's factual and that simple. Then I think one of the questions worth asking is effectively do we want to try reduce that inequality or do we want to perpetuate it. Neither is obviously right or wrong, but I think that's the core question. If we are believe to the idea in the article then we can see a reasonable case that the disparity between the regions has been, if not deliberate, than an obvious outcome of previous policy. Which makes the argument that we shouldn't invest in the regions requiring subsidy circular.
There are investments beyond transport that we could make. Not all investments generate or should be judged against short-term returns. That a 1B tram system in Leeds may be less than effective does not mean we shouldn't invest at all. I don't see why we need an insane bet rather than a programme of improvement across the board.
I think most people would agree that some imbalance is natural, perhaps even good but the current level is bad.
Bad, that the only net positive part of the entire UK comes from London and it's dependent, the SE.
It's clearly caused societal issues and apart from everything else means we're putting all our eggs in one basket. Transporting goods, energy and people into London from all over the UK is clearly worse than if we spread it around a bit.
I'm not even sure it's that great for Londoners. What's the point of a six figure salary if it gets swallowed up buying a tiny terraced house or a flat too small for a family.
If we're talking about fantasy airport extensions, it might be good to have at least one decent international airport in Yorkshire rather than expanding MAN and/or BHX. Failing that, you would need to significantly improve the transport infrastructure around those airports to make other parts of the North easier to reach. Fast, reliable (!) train services for example. Car hire services suited to business people not just holidaymakers, i.e. reception desks in the same building as the terminal and cars you can drive away from just outside - not waiting an hour for a half an hour bus to where the car hire places are in a different village.
Having spent my teen years in backwater Sacramento, I can confirm that it did not feel much like the center of anything.
Adding a few more examples to your list, neither Olympia (WA), Salem (OR), nor Carson City (NV) are economic or social centers of their respective states.
This may stumble on a solution to the problem. London combines government and financial centers. Axe parliament and 10 Downing Street and rebuild government infrastructure from scratch in some inland port where it can drag influence north.
Sacramento may not be exciting, but it is self-sustaining with fairly high property costs and a huge commuter population. I think one of the things that makes California successful is the government is in a boring city with few distractions.
Agree, chuck parliament and number 10 in a office building in Leeds or something. It really would be transformational, but will it happen? Not a hope in hell.
Germany is the only Western European country with an Eastern European capital. As a result, Berlin was poorer than the rest of the country, but this is no longer the case. Since reunification, Berlin has had the fastest growing economy in Germany and is now close to Hesse in terms of GDP per capita.
Berlin is odd... for several factors. Just looking at the last 100 years, I fail to see any capital (that was not directly a war zone) be: not capital, capital, divided, part of 2 countries, an exclave...
The US somehow avoids this, likely by putting state capitals and the national capital into smaller cities. Hence NYC, SF, Chicago, Dallas, Miami, Seattle, etc are all big urban agglomerations, but are not the points that concentrate everything important in their respective areas.
Those cities aren’t really good examples of intentionally putting a state capital in a smaller city of the state.
Albany is older than NYC, and anyway the concept of NYC as a single large city is barely 125 years old. The original capital of Illinois is (strangely) west of the Mississippi River and south of St. Louis. By treaty between Great Britain and France, the current area of Illinois was off limits to European settlement, until after the revolution when the US said “that treaty doesn’t apply to us”. Chicago wasn’t a big or important city until the civil war.
Los Angeles has been the wealthiest and most populous area in Alta California since like 1800 or so. But it was established as a puebla and not a mission, so it could never be a center of government under Spanish rule.
Miami was fairly unlivable until air conditioning and malaria control, and its geographic location was extraordinarily inconvenient until after the interstate system.
The US government established a customs house in Olympia when it and Seattle were little more than a handful of homesteads. And guessed wrong on which would grow faster.
more random support for your critique of a post-hoc, and historically ignorant, classification of "small cities". Offhand the CA capital contest was ongoing one and tracked from south/central CA towards the north in the mid 1800s. It's entirely unsurprising that they landed in the Sacramento courthouse; it was ~1850 and Sacramento was 1) last inland port for shipping 2) major terminus for the gold fields 3) an obvious rail hub for the connectivity in the 1850-60s, esp bay area to Sacramento and the east. Even a trivial look at the (flawed) 1850 census shows that basically all of the (mostly new) immigrant population was in Sacramento and the goldfields. eg Los Angeles was 3,500 people compared to 9,000 in Sacramento.
Similar for the Washington Territory which was barely a collection of homesteads and tiny villages. IIRC Olympia was the first significant immigrant settlement in the northern Oregon Territory, the major (only?) early trade connection to shipping on the pacific, and connected to the few other settlers moving north in to the territory. Its not very surprising that it was the territorial capitol and remained so for the state. Yes, post statehood a lot of rail & shipping traffic moved north. But at least through the turn of the 20th century both Tacoma and Seattle were roughly equivalent in population and industry. Arguably the easier ship access for the Klondike is what cemented the prosperity of Seattle pre-war, and Boeing & related defence activity post war. But _at the time of territory & statehood_ Olympia was the major town in the region.
DC has a larger metro population than half of those cities, and is the clear economic hub of its respective area. I’m not sure the national capital is a great example of a smaller city, although of course is smaller relative to the US than London is to the UK.
I think there's truth to that, it seems like every state has 1 major city. Possibly not always the capital (e.g. Toronto vs Ottawa, Albany vs NYC vs DC).
I've heard that the book Cities and the Wealth of Nations [0] might talk about this more. I've been meaning to read it.
It mostly depends on stable borders and a culture of centralization. Some US states such California and Texas have multiple major cities. Germany and the surrounding areas were historically fragmented, leading to many regions having multiple mid-tier cities instead of a single dominant city.
The very success of Northern England in the nineteenth century may have also precipitated a great deal of its subsequent failures.
The rail, coal and manufacturing industries crowded out other forms of enterprise economically. The related union / capitalist disputes crowded out other political activity.
Similarly the great agricultural “successes” of the Scottish Highlands in the 17th & 18th century crowded out everything else, leaving it something of a backwater ever since.
Perhaps something similar will happen to London when the time of finance comes to an end? Then finally the South West will take its turn being the heart of the British economy.
We'll have the same thing for the whole country when the time of housing investment comes to an end. Why start a business when you could just buy another house?
The boundary between his North and South
roughly follows the Roman Fosse Way from Lincoln to Exeter.
The 'ditch' (fosse) and road marked the border
of the initial phase of the Roman invasion after 43 AD.
It was a military road for rapid deployment of forces
from the legionary bases to defend border incursions.
Apart from the Fosse Way, almost all other major Roman roads
fanned out from London. This structure is still visible in the
numbering scheme of roads today:
The natural routes for roads also influenced railways,
so the boundaries of the original private railway companies
(GWR, LNER, LMS, SR), and the regions of the current
unified rail system, follow the same structure:
> the boundaries of the original private railway companies (GWR, LNER, LMS, SR)
Minor point, though maybe less minor in context of the original post. They are not the original private railway companies. They are the companies created in the 1920s by the London government as it forced railway companies together after it had took them under state control during ww1.
The original private railway companies were originally primarily northern companies, some of who eventually developed mainlines to the rich south eastern markets.
A useful measure of the centralization of a state is the ratio
of the size (population, economy) of the capital to the rest
of the country.
A large capital usually means workers and companies
cluster around the government to get work and contracts,
but also lobby and bribe to win such favors.
Highly centralized countries include UK, France and Thailand.
Centralized countries that have a strong geographical excuse
might include Egypt and Chile.
It's interesting that in India, which inherited some of the worst aspects of British governance from the Raj (like perfecting red tape), there is also strong centralization in Delhi, but the richest and best educated parts of the country are the Dravidian South.
I'd put less blame on London and more on secondary cities than the author does because he misses an important point: London is the only UK city that tolerates growth.
The UK system heavily centralised in tax-and-spend powers, but heavily decentralised in veto powers. Secondary cities have used their veto powers to either stop development or make it so expensive that very little gets developed.
City centres are not being built up to concentrate talent, and I wouldn't blame London or lack of public money. Housing and rents are high enough to justify private spending on concentrated development if not for the regulatory burdens and delays.
The author points out Leeds and Manchester having no metro system that exists in other similarly sized cities. But how much of a useful metro system could Leeds build given the same money spent by Toulouse or Lyon? My guess is none, the money would be consumed by lawsuits and addressing local veto owner concerns.
HS2 is cut short because of money that people outside of London demand be spent on making it so expensive on a per-mile basis. If the line were developed similar to other lines in Europe there would be money available for the full length.
I'm somewhat bullish on Manchester in the long run, they may emerge as a second city that tolerates growth. If they develop enough to become an affordable and large city then they will attract a lot of businesses who would otherwise be in London.
In my city we have a "housing crisis" while the city council owns large empty lots in the city centre from torn down or empty buildings. They have been waiting 8 years on handouts from London to afford to develop it themselves, spending £15m so far without a single unit built. It could be sold to developers and fixed council finances, but there is such a strong aversion to allowing a private company make a profit. The council actually has assets to develop the sites, but has preferred to pursue handouts instead of spending their own money.
I don't think this is right. Secondary cities in Britain are consistently more positive about development than London. I give the example in the piece of Leeds voting to expand its airport and how this was blocked by the UK government. In London it is the UK government trying to force that city to expand Heathrow after London itself rejected it.
The best data I can suggest to try and convince yourself of this is from a fantastic London Centric article on approving 5G masts. This is just one example of how open cities are to growth, but the results are really clear --- "The end result is that in London it is uniquely hard to get permission for new equipment. According to Mobile UK’s internal data in Greater Manchester, Leeds, and Edinburgh more than 80% of requests for new masts are approved at the planning stage. In Greater London this approval rate plummets to less than 40%, one of the worst in the country."
> I'd put less blame on London and more on secondary cities
> HS2 is cut short because of money that people outside of London demand be spent on making it so expensive on a per-mile basis.
I'm not sure that's accurate. Cost overruns have also come from inability to find efficiencies, high inflation in the construction sector, low contingency estimate (half cross rails) and a misunderstanding of ground conditions.
The expense increases due to consultation / public demand have come from demands made on the route between London and Birmingham. For example the Chiltern tunnel extension. There aren't many cities in that gap, and most of that area is London facing rather than Birmingham or north facing.
HS2 between London and Birmingham has the worse cost:benefit ratio of the whole initial plan, and yet it's the only bit being built.
> expense increases due to consultation / public demand have come from demands made on the route between London and Birmingham.
I'm pointing out the problems in the whole country outside London, not just the north. So this includes the demand for 100km of unnecessary tunnels. Tunnels that the create higher risk and uncertainty.
I'm sure Wales, Ireland and Scotland could have told you much the same just speculating off the top of their heads. England has always been a colonial project in one form or another, from day one. In fact a lot of it is common knowledge at least among the online left. One difference though: I think he under-emphasizes the shutting down of the coal mines; or at least others have historically emphasizes that more.
Mass immigration has also been highly destructive to the social fabric of North England, with the Labour government covering up primarily Pakistani Muslim rape gangs, in order to keep votes.
From a long-time HN user: please provide a high quality source when making claims connected to a people group. This place works better when we avoid culture wars and demographic-based blame.
Manchester has a GDP per capita of £59,000. Tameside, the poorest area in Greater Manchester, has a GDP per capita of £19,000. Leeds has a GDP per capita of £42k; ten miles away, Bradford has a GDP per capita of £23.6k.
Those disparities are really difficult to explain in terms of infrastructure or commercial investment. Similar disparities exist within London, although for plausibly different reasons; compare Lewisham with the neighbouring Southwark, Camden with Haringey, or that one bit of Tower Hamlets with the rest of Tower Hamlets.
I think we need to be looking much more granularly at the gaps between neighbouring areas, schools and families - the human capital factors that trap people in lives of poverty. Building a university or innovation hub in Knowsley probably won't do much for the huge numbers of kids there who leave school unable to read and write.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/bulle...