My father took me to a football match in Derby in 1970, and I can just about recall going to a two-day conference in Bradford in 1983; I have never set foot in either city since.
Yet at least I have visited these places once, which is more than I can say about Preston or Swansea or Wigan.
These days, I have a job that regularly takes me to various European capitals, parts of the Middle East, and sometimes further afield. Thus it is that I have twice been to Cairo, but never to Carlisle.
This is, I think, indicative of a wider problem. For most of the political, media and business classes of the South East, it is ‘the provinces’ that represent today’s faraway countries of which we know little. And regional policy has long reflected that.
It’s fashionable to talk about ‘Britishness’ these days. Indeed, Gordon Brown is going to write a book about it, apparently. But while the focus is on how better to integrate Scotland and Wales into the United Kingdom, the reality is that England became two nations during the Thatcher period, and has never since cohered.
The Tories of the 1980s gave every impression of not giving a damn about the North; the overweight whippet-breeding bastards tended to vote Labour, anyway.
Exchange rates decisions were taken to suit the City rather than the manufacturing industry. Mining was decimated and then decimated again, not because the destruction of the coal industry was in Britain’s interest, but because putting the National Union of Mineworkers in their place was a key class war priority.
Perhaps the Conservatives thought they could get away with it by cynically lobbing a few tens of millions at Japanese car companies and German companies looking for cheap labour to staff microchip assembly lines, thereby inducing them to set up shop in deindustrialised areas.
But the strategy didn’t work; the call centres did not fill the vacuum left by the shut down steelworks, as can be seen in the social problems these places still face today.
Very sensibly, much of the North learned to reciprocate the loathing. To this day, there remain entire conurbations in which Tories in elected office are rarer than condom vending machines in the Vatican.
As recently as 2004, Old Etonian Boris Johnson – at that time MP for Henley, a town just about as affluent as it is possible to be – merrily attacked Liverpool for ‘wallowing in its victim status’, which he found to be indicative of its ‘deeply unattractive psyche’. There is only one word for an attitude like that, and that is contempt.
But today this process has reached its apogee, with the publication of a Policy Exchange report called Cities Unlimited [pdf] that calls for mass migration from Liverpool, Bradford and Sunderland to the bottom right-hand corner of the country.
Where to begin? I mean, the cost in elocution lessons alone is going to be colossal, for starters. Joking aside, the impossibility of developing the necessary additional housing and attendant infrastructure in a region that cannot keep pace with the needs of its own natural population expansion is enough to relegate this proposal to the whackjob far right stupid idea file.
The reality is, if population transfer were to occur on the sort of scale authors Tim Leunig and James Swaffield envisage, less affluent internal migrants would gravitate towards the parts of the South East where the problems from which they would ostensibly escape are already rife.
They identify real problems, of course. But their own party caused many of them. If the free market economics Leunig and Swaffield espouse was capable of delivering solutions, surely the Invisible Hand would have done the business already.
In reality, the less prosperous parts of the North needs the sort of systematic regional planning that only a government of the left could conceivably deliver.
But just before you write these guys off as hapless wonks, remember this; in less than two years from now, the lads and lasses of Policy Exchange – David Cameron’s fave thinktank, no less – will have a real input into government policy.
This is just a foretaste of what we can expect after the imminent wingnut takeover. Come back IPPE, all is forgiven.
UPDATE: It's been pointed out in the comments box that Leunig is actually a Lib Dem. But given Policy Exchange's ties to such Tory figures as Nick Boles, Michael Gove and Charles Moore, the main thrust of the post still stands. The Orange Book brigade strike me as pretty much part of the hard right.
Posted at 14:20, 13 August 2008
Comments (16)
If I remember correctly, the new "non-racist" Tory argument against immigration is that it puts demands on resources like hospitals, GP's surgeries, dentists, housing etc that local government can't plan for.
I wonder if they can tell us how a few million internal migrants would be different.
It is however benevolent of them to tell us they're not intending to force Northerners to move down South. What a generous concession.
one of the two authors of the report is Tim Leunig, who's a LibDem activist.
http://www.libdemvoice.org/author/tim-leunig
Thus it is that I have twice been to Cairo, but never to Carlisle.
I was there yesterday, you're not missing much.
Seriously though, in terms of the Tory emphasis on personal responsibility, this sounds like an argument is being constructed that those who live in crap areas in the North are somehow to blame for their individual circumstances because they haven't moved.
Cameron's response
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7558742.stm
I was there yesterday, you're not missing much.
I was there a fortnight ago - methinks the gentleman is using delicate understatement.
This is very good - I liked this:
the reality is that England became two nations during the Thatcher period, and has never since cohered.
It should be said more often. North of the border the nationalists try to sell, regrettably with some success, the idea that the industrial devastation of the Thatcher era somehow stopped at Carlisle. What I often think many people in the South don't get is what unemployment looks like here. A big business folds in London under the shadow of its rivals next door - but the failure of a big enterprise in the North changes the very landscape.
It really is an astonishingly mental conclusion for a report to come to. Can it really have escaped the attention of its authors that the history of the EU and of 'globalisation' generally is that capital is more mobile than labour?
The Policy Exchange report has a Norman Tebbit stench to it.
Dave.
It was Simon Heffer who wrote the piece about Liverpool wasn't it?
Another fellow-traveller of the Policy Exchange is Martin Bright of the New Statesman who helped them with their campaign for Boris Johnson. Nick Cohen then wrote a puff for Policy Exchange anti-immigration campaigner when Boris gave him a job.
As someone born in the North and who lived about half my childhood there and who has been, I reckon, to just about every medium sized town (and above) in England and Wales several times, I concur with the report.
Liverpool is an interesting place, it looks either interesting or fabulous in parts (from 'Islington' where the grand buildings are, to the offys where the entire stock is walled in behind perspex and you do business through a hatch).
I enjoy travelling around, I postively volunteer for trips to Sunderland or Burnley. But I make no bones about why I do this. It's 'cheap holidays in other people's misery' as the song says.
I moved to London in the 80s through pure Darwinian evolution and anyone who could, still should. The mighty Manchester of my youthful ul imgination looks midget like now, and it's in a lot better condition than it was then.
I like big picture thinking - build a vacuum tunnel between Europe and USA to faciltate 30 min Atlantic crossings, teach the whole world the same second language that will become the default universal tongue.
Can you imagine how big were the ideas of the early railway pioneers - cover the whole of Britain in rail in 30 years, from nothing. When was the last time anyone built a new major railway line?
The North died. It's maybe sad but the Highlands and Islands once did the same. Move the population south and let us all bask in the forthcoming Mediterranean climate. Head south, young man.
North South divide is much older than Margaret Thatcher. There was even an old north south divide a century ago when northwest England was the most prosperous part of the UK. Even then, share ownership was concentrated south of a line from the Severn to The Wash.
If you look at history, there was a big scandal in the 1830's when the workhouses in towns in the south (which were distressed due to the big slump in agriculture) started shipping orphans, waifs and strays and able bodied young men to the mills of Manchester and Oldham as surplus labour. The tories never change their spots.....................
Isn't there a pretty big North-North divide? I mean Chester versus Liverpool?
But re.the North generally:
I have lived in York and know Leeds to an extent. Frankly anyone who would prefer moving to, say, Chelmsford or Harlow New Town over staying put in those two fine cities, is as bonkers as a Liberal Democrat.
Great post, but did you steal that 'vending machine/Vatican' joke from Red Dwarf?
No, I made it up myself. But it only took 30 seconds thought, so either great minds were thinking alike here or I read it somewhere else and it entered my subconscious. Apologies if unintentional plagiarism occured.
'Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan'
Southpawpunch, you're a fucking idiot.