[Puffer Fish]

This informal opinion article discusses the profound economic divide between the North and South of England. For all intents and purposes, the North might as well be a separate country. Not many people from London ever visit up there.

The land of affordable drinks, reasonable house prices and strangers at bus stops giving it a cheerful "good morning" even when - which is most of the time - it’s freezing cold, pissing it down and said bus appears to have treated itself to a lie-in.

Eh, there’s nowhere quite like it.

More and more people are moving here from London apparently. New figures show 13 per cent of those skipping the capital are heading for places like Leeds, Newcastle and Sheffield.

They're not tired of life, they insist; they’re tired of paying £3.50 for a cup of tea in their local cafe.

I once interviewed an old timer who claimed that - save for sorting out a world war - he'd never been out the county, not even on holiday. What did the planet have to show him, he asked, that God’s Own Country didn't? And I’m afraid to admit that, instead of saying the Grand Canyon (for instance?), I found myself nodding along. Who needs that when you’ve got the Calder Valley?

I like it here. If you’re keen on stunning scenery, a less hectic life and having change for chips when you buy a pint - and assuming you can survive without a Pret on every corner - you probably will too. As Lord Tennyson wrote: "True and tender is the North".

Us in the north get to feel smug that, as suspected, living in a place that’s part Barry Hines novel and part Hovis advert really does have its charms. And them down south, one suspects, take a certain pride of their own. Life’s tough in the hustle and bustle; it takes character to make it. Wimps want away.

Except I have some quibbles. I can’t help wonder what it says about a country when a tiny uptick of people moving to a particular area is considered so unusual it makes headlines. What does it say about a region when a handful of relocators coming here is celebrated like some game-changing win?

Which is to say: if this trend is so surprising, then hasn't something gone wrong?

Well, yes. Clearly it has. It's gone wrong in the north. Wages are lower here, unemployment is higher and educational attainment is poorer. Our children have less chance of going to university than their southern counterparts and more chance of going on the rock n’ roll. For what it’s worth, they’re more likely to get pregnant in their teens too.

Public transport is crumbling and receives far less investment per person than gilded London. The most common train in use - the Pacer - is so old there’s already one on display at the National Railway Museum. Staff there call it an "example of railway history". The rest of us call it an example of the 8.17 to Manchester.

More? The NHS is stretched to breaking point, and so are the police. In Hartlepool, residents set up vigilante groups because some nights they had just 10 bobbies covering an entire town of 92,000 people. We don’t even live as long here. Mortality rates in parts of Blackpool and Manchester are worse than areas of Slovakia and Romania.

Taken together, these regional inequalities are so bad that the UK 2070 commission - set up by the government to look at this stuff - has called for a national renewal fund to be created. It should be modelled, they say, on the scheme used by Germany during its east-west reunification.

We have, almost literally, become two countries. London; and the rest.

Because this isn't even really just a northern thing, is it? Swathes of the south-west, the Midlands and coastal regions – not to mention Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland - have all been severed from the capital’s economic growth for more than 40 years. Underinvestment, both private and public, has become standard. It will take more than HS2 and Channel Four chucking a few staff into Leeds to put that right.​

article by Colin Drury
The Independent


It should also be pointed out that a lot of the same exact patterns seen here are going on in the US.

[late]

England has the same problem here, for the same reason, rising levels of income inequality due largely to their Right wing.

It's certainly not the only problem. One that seems to have been forgotten is that a lot of towns and cities invested in the subprime boom that crashed several years ago. The damage to some places was immense.

But until a country realises that a country is like a team, you can't escape the downward spiral.

[Puffer Fish]

England has the same problem here, for the same reason, rising levels of income inequality due largely to their Right wing.

Is it due to the "Right wing"? Or is it due to the Left's immigration policies, which created housing shortages and tipped the balance of supply and demand, in both the housing and labour markets.

Probably a discussion for another thread.


Anyway, BACK to the topic, the Northern part of England being poorer is something that predates modern immigration policies.

We could go back to the 1980s with Margaret Thatcher, but that really just marked the terminal end point of a long deindustrialisation phenomena that had already been going on and begun long before then.

"This calamity was decades in the making. After World War II, Britain's economy grew slower than those of much of continental Europe. By the 1970s, the Brits were having a national debate about why they were falling behind and how the former empire had become a relatively insular and sleepy economy."
(source: How the U.K. Became One of the Poorest Countries in Western Europe, by Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, October 25, 2022)


https://novaramedia.com/2021/10/06/the- ... l-problem/

[late]

Is it due to the "Right wing"?

Or is it due to the Left's immigration policies, which created housing shortages and tipped the balance of supply and demand, in both the housing and labour markets.

Yes.

The EU was not Left, and Brexit body slammed the British economy.

Part of what was happening was the upper classes arranging the economy to suit themselves, which didn't work out all that well.

You keep swimming in the shallow end, it's tedious.