Showing posts with label North-South Divide. Show all posts
Showing posts with label North-South Divide. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 05, 2015

Five reasons why the Tories do not deserve to be re-elected

Despite having a very good local constituency MP in Pauline Latham, here's why I won't be voting for her party on Thursday.

1.  The Tories have fought a negative and uninspiring campaign characterised mainly by telling lies about Labour's tax plans, lies about Labour's 'relationship' with the Scottish National Party, and a complete lack of candour about their own plans to slash welfare benefits in the next Parliament. Apart from a brief period around their manifesto launch, when David Cameron brought his 'sunshine' agenda back out of cold storage, the party's campaign has focused almost exclusively on spreading fear rather than hope. Such an approach is unworthy of a major political party and does not deserve to succeed.

2.  David Cameron has failed to engage with the public at any level, turning the campaign into a series of carefully-managed photo-ops rather than the conversation with the voters it should have been. His disdainful treatment of the regional press - for instance keeping local journalists in a room while he toured a factory - has been well-documented on HoldtheFrontPage, but is symptomatic of a wider reluctance to engage, of which the scrapping of the morning press conferences and his refusal to debate Ed Miliband head to head are also part and parcel.  The British public deserve better than a Prime Minister who is seemingly afraid of the voters, afraid of legitimate questioning by the media and afraid of what an opponent he has repeatedly sought to denigrate as not up to the job might do him in a one-on-one encounter.

3.  The Tories cannot be trusted with the National Health Service. Having pledged not to introduce a top-down reorganisation of the NHS at the last election, they then passed the Health and Social Care Act 2012.  This provides a route-map towards a nightmarish future in which the NHS ceases to exist as an organisational entity, with health care commissioned by GPs from a panoply of mainly private providers.  Once the profit-motive becomes embedded in our health service, it will be impossible to maintain it as free at the point of delivery.  Private providers have shareholders to please and profit margins to meet, and this will inevitably get passed on to patients.

4.  George Osborne's management of the economy has led to an uneven recovery which has widened the divide between the haves and the have nots and kept wage levels depressed while the cost of living has increased. The economic statictics may tell a positive story for the Conservatives, but the experiences of people at the sharp end tell another and small business people, public sector workers and anyone living north of Watford Gap have seen very little evidence of recovery at all. For all the Chancellor's talk about creating a 'Northern Powerhouse,' the economic divide between the North and South of the UK has grown over the past five years, with potentially baleful repercussions for the unity of the British state.

5.  The Tories' reckless promise of an in-out referendum on European Union membership in 2017 will create two years of uncertainty in the business community which will further paralyse already sluggish economic growth in the UK.  The Europe question was decisively settled by a previous generation in 1975 and millions of British jobs and livelihoods now depend on EU membership.  The issue does not need to be reopened now just so Mr Cameron can appease his recalcitrant backbenchers or seek to win back a disaffected, xenophobic minority who have temporarily deserted his party for Nigel Farage and UKIP

Tomorrow, I give my five reasons why I'm backing a Labour/Lib Dem coalition as the best election outcome.

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Thatcher: There WAS an alternative

The first thing I need to say about Margaret Thatcher is that when it comes to the former Prime Minister, I can scarcely be regarded as a disinterested or objective observer.

I spent most of my early adulthood wishing she was no longer in Number Ten, and much of my later journalistic career was spent in areas such as South Wales and the North-East where the impact of her policies had been most adversely felt.

As Journal political editor from 1997-2004, much of my work revolved around the question of how the region should tackle the North-South divide which, if not created by her, was certainly sharply exacerbated during her long premiership.

So in the unlikely event that anyone has come here expecting to read another syrupy paean of praise to the Iron Lady following her death this week, it’s probably best to look away now.

Many millions of words have already been written and spoken about the woman who led Britain for 11 tumultuous years, but ultimately the debate seems to come down to the question of whether she saved the nation, or destroyed it.

Probably the answer is a bit of both.  Looked at in the round, the Thatcher legacy suggests a strange ambivalent power for good and bad which seems to run through most of the policies with which she is most closely associated.

Take the iconic right to buy scheme, for instance.  Yes, it enabled council tenants to buy their own homes, and the dramatic increase in social mobility it fostered helped break down the class barriers which held Britain back in the post-war years.

But the downside was that housing policy ceased to be a debate about who could build the most homes, and became instead a question of who could do most to artificially inflate the value of the increasingly limited number of homes available.

Then there were the employment laws.  It is beyond question that prior to 1979 the power of the union barons had got out of hand and that Mrs Thatcher’s changes helped restore a measure of democracy to a nation in danger of becoming ungovernable.

Yet in smashing the unions, she also ushered in an era of job insecurity which has had a baleful effect on the national psyche.

I could go on.   Deregulation of the City of London made it a world financial centre that spawned untold riches for Britain’s financial services industry, but led directly to the banking crisis that caused the 2008 crash and the subsequent recession.

Even the Falklands War, by rolling back the post-Suez defeatism in which British foreign policy had been enmeshed since 1956, paved the way for Tony Blair’s disastrous intervention in Iraq twenty years later.

When assessing the Thatcher legacy, therefore, the key question becomes could we actually have had the good without the bad?  Was there, despite what the Iron Lady herself said, an alternative?

I would like to think so.   While the challenges of globalisation would eventually have forced British industry to become more competitive, the impact of this would have been slower and less brutal than the wholesale destruction of our manufacturing base in the early 1980s.

It has to be remembered that, far from being an historical inevitability, Mrs Thatcher was in fact a very lucky Prime Minister. 

Labour in 1980 put itself out of serious contention for power by choosing the wrong leader and then splitting, while a couple of Exocet missiles in the wrong place in 1982 might have sunk not just the Falklands task force, but her premiership with it.

For me, the most interesting counterfactual question about Mrs Thatcher is what would the country have been like had she never become Prime Minister or, alternatively, been ousted in 1982-83.

Had a Tory wet like Jim Prior or a Labour moderate like Denis Healey run Britain in the 1980s, and invested the proceeds of North Sea Oil in social reconstruction rather than tax cuts, would we have ended up with Swedish-style social democracy rather than US-style neo-liberalism?

Since those days, we seem to have become a politically more united country, but a much more economically and socially divided one.

And if forced to make a judgement, I think I like the Britain she created rather less than the one which she destroyed.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Clegg fires welcome warning shot over regional pay

When the history of David Cameron’s government comes to be written, the Budget delivered by Chancellor George Osborne on 21 March may well be seen as a decisive turning point in its fortunes

Whether it was the pasty tax, the granny tax, the tax on charitable giving or the abolition of the 50p rate, those looking for something to criticise in the Chancellor’s package found plenty of things to choose from.

But of all the measures announced by Mr Osborne two months ago, surely the most pernicious as far as the North-East is concerned was the proposal to introduce regional pay rates – paying teachers and other public sector staff in Newcastle less than people doing the same jobs in London.

Far from seeing the prosperity gap between richer and poorer regions as an evil which needs to be addressed, the idea of regional pay takes such inequality as an incontrovertible fact of life and then threatens to institutionalise it throughout the entire British economy.

Despite the efforts of some North-East MPs and union leaders, the proposal has received little national attention up until now, demonstrating once again the London-centricity of our national media.

But that may be about to change.  For the question of regional pay now appears to be playing into the much wider political narrative concerning the longer-term future of the Tory-Lib Dem Coalition.

In what can only be seen as a shot across Mr Osborne’s bows, Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg warned this week that his party could not sign up to a policy that would exacerbate the North-South divide.

It seems that regional pay has now joined the growing list of issues, alongside Europe, House of Lords reform and Rupert Murdoch, where the two parts of the Coalition are singing from increasingly varying hymn sheets.

Speaking to the National Education Trust in London Mr Clegg said: “Nothing has been decided and I feel very, very strongly as an MP in South Yorkshire, with a lot of people in public services, we are not going to be able simply willy-nilly to exacerbate a North-South divide.

“I think people should be reassured we are not going to rush headlong in imposing a system from above which if it was done in the way sometimes described would be totally unjust because it would penalise some of the people working in some of the most difficult areas.”

Perhaps the most heartening aspect of Monday’s speech was simply hearing a senior minister – the Deputy Prime Minister no less – talking about the North-South divide again.

It became practically a banned subject under Tony Blair, who first attempted to dismiss it as a "myth,” then tried to con the region into thinking something was being done about it by inventing a spurious target to narrow the gap between the three richest regions and the six poorest.

In one sense, Mr Clegg’s intervention is not unexpected given his own status as a South Yorkshire MP in what is a genuinely three-way marginal constituency.

Mr Blair’s former spin doctor Alastair Campbell has stated that Mr Clegg's only hope of retaining his Sheffield Hallam seat at the next election is to join the Conservative Party, and even making allowances for Alastair’s obvious partisanship, I’ve a sneaking suspicion he may be right,

But in the meantime, it is clearly in the Lib Dem leader's interests to try to put some clear yellow water between himself and the Tories on issues with a particular relevance to the Northern regions.

In view of the Lib Dems’ dismal performance in local elections in the North since the party joined the Coalition in 2010, it is surely not a moment too soon.

Mr Blair’s indifference to the whole issue of regional disparities was partly responsible for the Lib Dems’ dramatic surge in support in the region between 1999 and 2007, with Labour-held seats like Newcastle Central, Blaydon and Durham City briefly becoming realistic targets.

Meanwhile at local government level, the party took control of Newcastle from Labour, and actually managed to hang on to it for seven years before being swept away in the post-Coalition backwash of May 2011.

It will be a long way back for the party to reach those giddy heights again, still further if it is to mount a serious challenge for additional parliamentary seats in the region.

This week, however, Mr Clegg might just have taken the first step along the road.

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Labour must share blame for region's plight

Over the past few weeks, the domestic political agenda has been dominated by the continuing fallout from what has by now surely become of the most controversial, even reviled Budgets of recent years.

It started within a few minutes of the Chancellor sitting down on 21 March with the revelation that he had performed a stealth tax raid on pensioners' incomes by freezing their personal allowances - the so-called 'granny tax.'

It continued with the belated realisation that, in pursuing the entirely laudable objective of limiting the amount of tax relief that can be claimed by the super-rich, the government had also made life much, much harder for the charitable sector.

And throughout it all there has been the ongoing row over the so-called pasty tax, coupled with increasingly laughable attempts by Old Etonian ministers to get with the workers by claiming to be fans of the hot snacks.

But until this week, no serious consideration had been given to the particular impact of George Osborne's proposals on the North-East.

So first off, congratulations are due to Gateshead MP Ian Mearns, always a doughty campaigner on behalf of the region, for securing a 90-minute debate on that very subject in Westminster Hall on Tuesday.

Having spent quite a lot of my career covering such debates, it would be easy for me to write them off as so much hot air, but that would be an overly-cynical view even for me.

They may not change anything, at least in the very short term, and the ministerial replies may be invariably formulaic. But where they do succeed is in raising consciousness of an issue to the point where it becomes harder to ignore, and that sense they are vital.

It was clear from the start that this was a Budget that was particularly pernicious in its potential impact on the region.

Quite apart from the impact on Tyneside-based pasty-maker Greggs, one of its central recommendations was the introduction of regional pay rates, which would institutionalise regional income disparities in the public sector for no better reason than the fact that they already exist in the private sector.

Mr Mearns chose not to dwell on that particularly in his opening speech to Tuesday's debate, however, choosing to highlight some damning statistics about the effect of Mr Osborne's higher-rate tax cut and the government's spending priorities.

He revealed that, while in London, the South-East and East Anglia, nearly 195,000 taxpayers will reap the benefit of the tax giveaway, in the North-East the figure will be fewer than 5,000.

On transport spending, the disparities are even more alarming. Mr Mearns revealed that more than 160 times as much is being spent on transport infrastructure projects in London than in the North-East.

"Once more, the people of the North East are paying the price for an economic strategy made in and for the wealthier south," he said.

He didn't, as it happens, mention the proposed HS2 high-speed link, but although it has its supporters, my own view is that it is not necessarily the panacea that some say it is.

For one thing, it won't arrive here until 2032 at the earliest. For another, any economic benefits to the wider North are likely to migrate towards Leeds and Manchester, which will be getting the link a good half decade earlier.

But the most fundamental question that has to be asked of any Labour politician when raising the issue of the North-South divide is why the party did not do more to address it during its 13 years in power from 1997.

Ian Mearns at least can point to a consistent track record on that score. As a leading figure in North-East local government during the Tony Blair years, he was one of those who regularly highlighted that administration's failure to address the issue, while the likes of Nick Brown and David Clelland also argued strenuously behind the scenes for a better deal for the region.

But the party as a whole allowed Mr Blair to get away with two particular claims that, taken together, served fatally to undermine the case for a more proactive regional policy.

The first was that the differences within regions were as great as the differences between them. The second was that any attempt to rebalance the economy risked harming the Southern regions which were the main driver for the economy as a whole.

Whatever the merit of these arguments, they became, over time, an excuse for simply doing nothing.

In the words of its response to a 2003 report on the issue: "The government does not accept the proposition that increased public funding to the less prosperous regions is a necessary condition to improve their prosperity."

The sad truth of the matter is that New Labour had an historic opportunity to do something about regional economic disparities at a time when it had a fair political wind behind it and, crucially, public spending as a whole was rising.

For the Coalition to try to tackle the gap in the current economic environment is a much harder task.

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Saturday, April 14, 2012

It's regional devolution, Jim, but not as we knew it

Writing last Saturday, the Newcastle Journal's regional affairs correspondent Adrian Pearson opened his column with the words: "If an elected mayor is the answer, what could possibly have been the question in North Tyneside?"

Well, allow me to have at least a stab at providing an answer.

There are plenty of cynical explanations. Elected mayors were originally the brainchild of the Tory cabinet minister Michael Heseltine in the early 1990s, and were seen by some at the time as an attempt to circumvent the power of high-spending, left-wing Labour councils.

Indeed, as Adrian pointed out in his column, this was precisely what later happened in North Tyneside, where Labour's stranglehold on local politics was finally thwarted by a succession of Conservative mayors in what became a recipe for decade-long infighting.

By the time New Labour came to enact Heseltine's proposed reforms, though, the agenda had changed somewhat. I believe Tony Blair's primary motivation for implementing elected mayors was simply to try to revive flagging voter interest in local government by, well, sexing it up.

In that sense, it was no more than a reflection of the trend towards ‘presidential’ politics that reached its apogee under Mr Blair, and which continues, though to a slightly lesser degree, under David Cameron.

The sorts of arguments that were heard then - "increased accountability through increased visibility" - are still used to promote the elected mayoral idea today - but a decade or more on, the debate has now become much more bound up with economic development and in particular with redressing regional economic disparities.

It is now very much part and parcel of the "city regions" concept that emerged from the wreckage of the regional government debate after the North East Assembly referendum debacle, with elected mayors seen as a way of giving their areas the kind of clout that properly-empowered assemblies might once have exercised.

This argument is already very much to the fore in the debate over whether there should be an elected mayor of Newcastle, for instance.

The city has yet to even make a decision on the issue - but already people such as Lewis Goodall of the regional policy think-tank IPPR North are talking openly about a directly-elected leader or 'metro mayor' not just for Newcastle but for the entire Tyneside conurbation.

"To really counterbalance the power of London, mayors need to have real powers to forge the destiny of their area," he wrote in Good Friday's Journal.

"Over time, this might mean a move towards a metro mayor for the wider city area - not just Newcastle but the surrounding conurbation too, with powers over economic development and transport."

To those of us with long memories, what is particularly interesting about that comment is that it was precisely those powers that the proponents of an elected regional assembly demanded - and failed to get - prior to the 2004 referendum.

I have always believed that had Mr Blair been more inclined to hand such powers to a regional body, the public might well have been more inclined to vote for it.

But regional government was only ever a means towards the greater end of tackling the North-South prosperity divide.

And as Lewis Goodall also pointed out in his piece, this is still very much with us, with the government planning to spend £2,700 per head on infrastructure projects in London compared to £5 a head in the North-East.

Looming over the whole debate over elected mayors is the larger-than-life figure of London Mayor Boris Johnson.

Not only has he enhanced the ‘accountability’ argument in favour of mayors by being a highly visible elected figurehead, he has also enhanced the economic argument by using his undoubted clout to further deepen that imbalance.

Mr Cameron’s own decision to axe regional development agency One NorthEast didn’t help matters either – but a gaggle of elected mayors flying the flag for the region could go some way towards filling that gap.

It isn’t regional devolution as we once knew it, Jim, but it might turn out to be the best form of regional devolution on offer.

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Saturday, November 19, 2011

Lost North jobs still seen as a 'price worth paying'

Youth unemployment topping 1m. An additional 129,000 people out of work in the past month. The overall number of jobless at its highest level since 1994. This week’s unemployment figures told their own story.

If people were not already sufficiently well-appraised of the dire state of the British economy, Wednesday’s figures, coupled with more downbeat forecasts from the governor of the Bank of England, will surely have removed any lingering doubts.

Yet in the North-East, as is customarily the case when the economy as a whole is struggling, the picture is even bleaker still.

As The Journal reported on its front page the Monday before last, this region has seen a staggering 32,000 public sector jobs lost in the past year, while, public spending cuts notwithstanding, the number in London and the South East has actually risen by the same amount.

It is now more than a decade since the launch of The Journal’s original Case for the North campaign aimed at closing the economic divide with the South.

At the time, it was estimated that if economic growth continued at the same rate, it would take around 30 years to bridge the gap – a state of affairs which many of the region’s MPs and other political leaders regarded as intolerable.

I have to confess I don’t know whether any subsequent analysis has been carried out as to how long it would now take, but I don’t find it easy to hazard a guess as to how many more decades might have been added to that figure.

Back then, I wrote that the North-East cannot be expected to tolerate as a matter of course systemic imbalances in economic growth between regions, but in fact that has since become the unspoken policy of the British Government under both Labour and Tory administrations.

All of which makes the continuing debate over the direction of the economy perhaps more pertinent in this region than in any other.

For months, this debate has been stuck in a kind of stasis in which Labour endlessly and increasingly fatuously calls on the Government to adopt a ‘Plan B’ while the Government equally stubbornly insists it must stick to its course.

But this is now becoming more than just an arid intellectual battle between rival economic theories. People’s jobs, businesses and livelihoods are at stake.

The plaintive tone of Labour leader Ed Miliband’s speech to the Social Market Foundation on Thursday certainly conveyed the sense that a crisis point has been reached.

"Austerity at home, collective austerity abroad is no solution to the problems of jobs, growth or the deficit,” he said.

“Don't believe those who will tell you that any change in course will make us like Greece. The markets are as worried about the lack of growth in the economy as they are about debt levels.

"Knowing what we know now, about our economy, about growth prospects, about unemployment, about higher than expected borrowing, it would be the height of irresponsibility for the government to carry on regardless.

"I urge David Cameron: change course now, change course for the sake of our young people, change course for the sake of the country."

As it is, Mr Miliband is pushing at a partially open door in seeking a shift in the Government’s emphasis from deficit reduction to growth.

Chancellor George Osborne is understood to be working on a package of pro-growth measures to be unveiled in the autumn statement later this month.

They are likely to include a new job-creation initiative for the young unemployed, incentives for private companies to invest in big infrastructure projects, and a scheme to under-write mortgages for first-time buyers.

There may also be a rebate for high-energy using industries to alleviate the impact of green taxes, blamed by RTZ Alcan for Thursday’s decision to close its plant in Northumberland.

Some of that will doubtless help the North-East, as will Thursday’s announcement that Virgin Money, newly-enlarged with the acquisition of Northern Rock, will have its headquarters in Newcastle.

But it scarcely amounts to a regional economic policy, still less a strategy for tackling the enduring North-South divide.

Thirteen years ago, lost North-East jobs were seen by the then governor of the Bank of England as an “acceptable” price to pay for preventing the South-East economy from overheating.

Now it seems they are once again being viewed as a price worth paying.

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Saturday, March 20, 2010

Region's ambitions derailed once more

Among the stories to catch my eye this week was one warning that the £16bn Crossrail scheme to link East and West London may have hit a potentially deadly snag.

An area of the capital destined for tunnelling as part of the scheme may, it turns out, be the site of a missing 16th century burial ground for victims of anthrax.

Since long-dormant anthrax spores can spread through the air and cause fresh infection if disturbed, this doubtless poses something of a dilemma for the engineers working on the project.

Nevertheless, transport secretary Lord Adonis said a compulsory purchase of the affected area, beneath a car park near the old city walls, was still expected to go ahead.

Given recent developments – or rather lack of them – in the North-East transport arena, this episode may well have brought some wry smiles in this part of the world.

While nothing must be allowed to get in the way of Crossrail - be it hell, high water or anthrax - it’s a different story when it comes to the region’s hopes of inclusion in the planned high speed rail network.

Work on the new 250mph line linking London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds is due to begin in 2017 – the year Crossrail is due to be completed.

But it won’t be coming to the North-East any time soon, if at all. Under the current plans, the 21st century will be into its fourth decade before there is the remotest chance of that.

You had to feel for poor old North-East minister Nick Brown, who has lobbied hard for the region to be included in the network, reduced last weekend to a lame pledge to do something about the East Coast Main Line.

The same Lord Adonis has refused to give any commitment to extending the high speed link to Newcastle, saying it was important to concentrate on a “deliverable” project.

This is despite a consultants’ study which found that extending it would create 95,000 jobs by 2040, and the government’s own HS2 team advising that including the North-East in the network made the “best business case.”

Neither should we supposed things would be any better with the Tories, who want a cheaper link from London to Leeds that would leave out the East Midlands as well as this region.

For those of us who have followed the debate about regional spending over a number of years, it’s a depressingly familiar picture.

It has long been clear that the North-East’s relative lack of good transport links are the biggest single obstacle to its competitiveness, and the biggest single reason for the endurance of the North-South divide.

Sadly, the die was cast on this years ago when the government declared, around the same time as it gave the original go-ahead to Crossrail, that there was no relationship between regional spending and regional economic prosperity.

It was, of course, a lie, but it was a lie that enabled ministers to claim that spending £16bn improving London’s transport system would have absolutely no adverse impact on poorer regions.

That, of course, is a nonsense. Between them, Crossrail and the new high speed link will dramatically widen the prosperity gap between those regions that already have good transport connections and those that have never had them.

Of all the many reactions to the high speed decision, perhaps the quaintest came from the chief executive of One North East, Alan Clarke.

“The phasing of the development of a high speed network is important and must not lead to areas of economic disadvantage,” he said.

“Lead to?” Wake up and smell the coffee Alan. Economic disadvantage has been here for decades – and it’s about to get worse.

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Saturday, January 17, 2009

Heathrow: the regional angle

Much of the criticism of the Heathrow decision has centred on what it says about the government's environmental credentials, but there is another angle worth exploring. Here's today's Journal column.



If the old saying is true that the first casualty of war is truth, so it is probably also the case that the first casualty of a recession is usually the environment.

The last time there was a serious upsurge of interest in environmentalism in Britain was in the late 1980s, when the Green Party looked briefly like it could replace the Liberal Democrats as the country’s “third force.”

It reached its apogee in the 1989 euro-elections, when the Lib Dems finished a distant fourth in terms of share of the popular vote behind the Greens.

Then came the recession of the early 1990s, and interest in green politics faded. It took years - and the prospect of runaway, irreversible man-made climate change - before it assumed the same kind of prominence on the political agenda.

Now, as Britain and the world once more face the certainty of tough economic times ahead, the environmental lobby is again struggling to make its voice heard.

Against the backdrop on the economic downturn, there was never any real doubt that Gordon Brown's Labour government would give the go-ahead to the £9bn scheme for a third runway at London's Heathrow Airport this week.

New Labour's three top priorities used to be education, education, education - but it is clear from what the Prime Minister has been saying over the past fortnight that they are now jobs, jobs, jobs.

And with unemployment set to head towards the 3m mark by the end of this year on some projections, most would say quite rightly so.

The government points out that construction work on the new runway could create 65,000 new jobs alone, in addition to the 100,000 existing jobs in the aviation industry that would be safeguarded by the project.

The additional tonnes of CO2 that will be belched into the atmosphere as a result are seen as a very secondary consideration, despite the government's pledge to reduce such emissions by 80pc by 2050.

In an effort to appease critics, Transport Secretary Geoff Hoon said airlines using the new runway would be required to use the newest, least-polluting aircraft.

Few will be convinced by that though. In reality, the Heathrow decision drives a coach-and-horses through any pretensions that Mr Brown may have had to “going green.”

But if the decision is hard to defend on environmental grounds, so too is it when seen from the perspective of regional policy.

In pure cash terms, it is another £9bn of public expenditure being channelled into the London and South-East economy on top of the £16bn already committed to the Crossrail deep tube link and heaven-knows-what for the 2012 Olympics – also hailed by Mr Brown this week as an important job-creator in the face of the downturn.

Vague talk of a more high-speed rail links between East and West and North and South to complement the runway project sounds suspiciously like political window-dressing designed to keep Northern Labour MPs quiet.

I recall that similar things were said by the Tories when the Channel Tunnel was given the go-ahead. Yet the "regional eurostars" that were supposed to link Newcastle to Paris were never used and were eventually sold-off for use elsewhere on the rail network.

Throughout the lifetime of the Blair-Brown government, it has taken the view that the prosperity of UK plc depends vitally on the economic health of London and the South-East and its ability to act as a "driver" for the economy as a whole.

Rather than seek to create a more balanced economy, it has sought to make a virtue out of the current very unbalanced one by pumping more and more resources into the capital.

However much the government may talk about regional policy, this is in fact no such thing. It is, rather, a national economic policy in which, in effect, one region is expected to deliver prosperity for all the rest.

The Heathrow decision takes this logic to a further level. If Heathrow is vital to the economy of London and the South East, which in turn is vital to the UK as a whole, then it follows that Heathrow is vital to the whole of the UK.

After 12 years in power, this particular leopard is unlikely to change its spots now, particularly as the financial centre of London and the South East is now as much in the eye of the economic storm as any other region.

Yet there was surely an opportunity here to address some of the regional economic imbalances that continue to bedevil the UK and its most outlying regions in particular.

Building a third runway with the possibility of a new North-South rail link as an afterthought was surely a reversal of what should have been the government’s priorities.

It was nice to hear the Tories talking in such terms this week, although it’s a shame they couldn’t have thought of that while they were busy creating the North-South divide in the 1980s.

The other point to be made about Heathrow is that it is on the wrong side of London. If you were building a new airport from scratch today, there is no way you would put it there.

The city's mayor, Boris Johnson, at least recognises this. His long-term dream is to move London's main airport to the Thames Estuary and retire Heathrow, enabling European flights to arrive without having to cross the city to land.

Since the outer reaches of the estuary are currently largely uninhabited, this would have had the additional merit of causing the least amount of disruption to people.

Instead, the third runway project threatens to make the communities of Sibson and Harmondsworth the modern-day equivalents of Dunwich, the lost village which fell into the sea in mediaeval times.

The political battle lines over the runway project are now clear, with Labour playing the jobs card and the Tories taking up the cause of the “little people,” threatened by noise, pollution and ultimately the loss of their homes.

But it would be naive to assume that the question of whether or not the runway will go ahead will depend entirely on the outcome of the next election.

Even if the Tories were to win, the future of the project would surely depend on what sort of state they find the economy in, and specifically what the jobless figures are looking like.

For all his supposed green credentials, it would be a brave Prime Minister Cameron who put the environment ahead of 165,000 jobs.

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Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Doctors of nonsense

I'm not going to accuse the Tory Party of being about to abandon the North of England on the back of today's report by the right-leaning think-tank Policy Exchange. David Cameron has, after all, made clear his view that the report is "insane rubbish."

But you have to question the report's basic assumption that people should move out of the North to avoid becoming trapped there by low house prices and finding themselves unable to move to more prosperous areas.

Have the report's authors actually been to Newcastle recently? If so, they would realise that those aspiring to live in the more desirable parts of the city are already paying London prices, and have been for several years.

I may return to this subject shortly, but all in all, this report strikes me as a rather ignorant contribution to the great North-South debate.

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Sunday, November 18, 2007

Eurostar launch highlights transport divide

For this weekend's column, I returned to an old hobby-horse - regional transport funding. The launch of the new Eurostar terminal at St Pancras is a reminder that, when the Channel Tunnel was first built, the whole of the country was meant to benefit from the project, not just the South. Yet if the North is to gain anything from the new improved link to the continent, it will require the construction of a new high-speed route linking into the St Pancras terminal, a project which the Brown government has put off for at least a decade. More for those who are interested in this sort of thing on the companion blog HERE.

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Thursday, June 28, 2007

At last, a Minister for the North

I thought Nick Brown would get his old job of Chief Whip back in today's reshuffle. It would have been no less than he deserved for his years of loyalty to Gordon Brown and also for his less-than-gracious treatment at the hands of Tony Blair when he was made the scapegoat for the foot-and-mouth debacle in 2001 and then sacked from the government by phone the following year.

As it turns out, he has been appointed Deputy Chief Whip with a separate brief as Minister for the North, one of a series of ministers for the English regions appointed today. No doubt this will be like red rag to a bull to the conspiracy theorists who think regions are a sinister EU plot to break up the UK, but there has long been a Minister for London and the appointment of dedicated champions for other less favoured parts of the country is long overdue.

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