The Tories still hate industrial Britain
Posted on Monday 21 June, 2010
Filed Under Conservative Party, Economics
EVER wonder why there are entire conurbations in which Tories in elected office remain rarer than self-deprecating gangsta rappers? One reason is that Conservative policies are often experienced at their most damaging in working class towns and cities.
We are in for another example of this tendency in Tuesday’s emergency budget. The public spending cuts George Osborne is certain to inflict will be twice as devastating in the north of England than the Home Counties, according to an analysis in the Financial Times this morning.
The newspaper has looked at the official data on regional sources of income and economic output, and concluded that the impact will be proportionately greater in the poorer parts of the country.
Thus a 10% cut in social security payments will mean a 3.6% fall in household disposable income in Merseyside, but only a 2.1% fall in Berkshire and Buckinghamshire. A 20% reduction in spending on public administration, education and defence will see output decline 3.3% in west Wales, but only 1.5% in Osborne’s home turf in affluent Cheshire.
Such an outcome is inevitable in a country that has, ever since the industrial revolution, been characterised by a high degree of regional economic disparity. This idea was popularised in the 1980s under the label ‘the north-south divide’, but the reality long predates recent decades.
Areas that suffered most under Thatcherism were pretty much the very same areas that suffered most under the Tory-led national government before the war. I don’t have the textbooks to hand, but it’s a safe guess that these were the places that came off the worst after previous recessions such as the long downturn after 1873.
So even when it’s economic rock ‘n’ roll time in the overheating-prone south east, the population of the north west, south Wales and Clydeside can often be forgiven for not even noticing the music.
Given the deep-rooted nature of the problem, it is too simplistic to lay the blame for all of this on any one political party. Yet I sometimes suspect the Tories have got a death wish against the former industrial areas of the UK. Where Labour tries to help and invariably fluffs it, time and time again the Conservatives have gone in for the kill.
Under Thatcher, exchange rates decisions were taken to suit the City rather than manufacturing. Mining was decimated and then decimated again, not because the destruction of the coal sector 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 rustbelt 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.
You can also throw in a fair dose of the contempt born of snobbery as well. 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’.
Then there was that 2008 report from the Policy Exchange think tank, which basically argued that Liverpool, Bradford and Sunderland were unviable and should be shut down.
Tomorrow’s spending cuts will mercifully not be accompanied by any attendant verbal jibes. But that, I fear, does not make them any less nasty.
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17 Responses to “The Tories still hate industrial Britain”
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Dave – The DETR Select Committee undertook a major academic study (using most UK leading regional economists) into UK regional disparity and the distortional effect of London/SE and the finance sector in the mid 2000s. Who VERY firmly blocked the report’s recommendations?
GORDON BROWN (“the banker’s best friend”), to preserve the City’s hegemony and competitive status…
Under Thatcher, exchange rates decisions were taken to suit the City rather than manufacturing.
You’ll never see a better one-sentence precis of modern Britain than that.
Pity that the value of manufacturing in the UK increased under Thatcher’s rule and is still higher today than it was in the 70′s.
But yeah, keep on deluding yourselves. Right on! Power to the people. The shirkers united, etc.
Under Thatcher, exchange rates decisions were taken to suit the City rather than manufacturing.
Something I have long suspected but could never prove. Can someone explain to me why the City likes an overvalued or highly valued pound?
And surely it should also read under Blair and Brown.
Obnoxio: Isn’t what yoy wrote paradoxical? On the one hand productivity has never been higher (allowing for some technological innovation)but on the other workers are all workshy and lazy shirkers?
“Can someone explain to me why the City likes an overvalued or highly valued pound?”
With the abandonment of fixed exchange rates, a high rate = global investors. I.e. it levers (and secures) foreign money/funds into the City. It also fk/s up the manufacturing base but hey who cares, that’s SO yesterday. So, “North”.
Gordon’s entire “economic” policy was built on it. Blood on the tracks…
More disingenuous nonsense from Obnoxio. As a share of GDP and employment, manufacturing has been falling in the UK for forty years.
While productivity and efficiency in manufacturing has risen, that’s been the same across most of Europe at the same time, due to improved technologies. No doubt that’s all thanks to Thatcher though.
There was very good article by Larry Elliot in the Guardian about six years ago (back when that was a sort of newspaper and not a Lib-con style comic), comparing the impact of (say) a two percent rise in the exchange rate to suit the City and the impact that would have on a year’s attempted industrial regeneration of say Merthyr.
Obviously not a factor to be taken into consideration Chez Balls et Brown. Let ‘em rot. The Labour Party eh….Oh, give ‘em one more chance…one more big push…
Richard Harris thank you.
I take it then that the high value of the pound is because the City likes higher interest rates than our competitors, thereby hurting export industries.
My dad grew up in one of those classic northern mining towns that lefties get all misty-eyed about – you know the stuff: salt of the earth, honest working folk etc. etc. My grandad actually worked down the pits (although he was an electrician, not a miner).
My dad told me it was a complete shit hole full of the most ignorant wankers on earth, the majority of them alcoholics and wife-beaters. He got out as soon as he could, aged 15, joining the Navy to get away. He tells me it was a dirty, dangerous place and that Britain is a better country since Thatcher crushed the NUM.
Since he was actually there, I tend to believe him rather than all the middle-class pseudo rebel socialist polytechnic lecturers in the Guardian and New Statesman etc.
“My dad told me it was a complete shit hole full of the most ignorant wankers on earth, the majority of them alcoholics and wife-beaters. He got out as soon as he could, aged 15, joining the Navy to get away. He tells me it was a dirty, dangerous place and that Britain is a better country since Thatcher crushed the NUM.”
Come to Nottingham, you think it’s any better now? The main difference is that nowadays rather than “ignorant wife-beaters” you have mass areas of unemployment, drug addiction and gun and knife crime.
I’d take a load of “ignorant” working class folk who spent lots of time in the pub over the crater of drug addled, violent, ultra capitalist “ghetto-culture” that inflicts inner city life today any day of the week.
Does ‘Son of a Worker’ get a special prize for being the first authentic member of the working class to post a comment on the blog?
middle-class pseudo rebel socialist polytechnic lecturers in the Guardian and New Statesman etc.
That’s Tory cliché BINGO!
Of course, nobody in the comments box on this website, nor indeed anybody on the left, has ever been to a northern mining town.
PS it’s a shame your dad didn’t tell all those “alcoholics and wife-beaters” to their faces what he thought of their town and community. He might have never lived to create you, and what a loss that would have been to the world.
I think son of a ‘worker’ was a spelling mistake. Wanker try wanker son.
It’s frustrating how the Tories are a party of blatant class war, always sticking up and looking out for their own class at the expense of the rest of the country. And yet the merest hint of some sort of redistributionist policy from the Labour Party provokes cries of outrage, which is enough to ensure the LP leadership scuttle off, back to the ‘national interest’ and all that guff.
Son of a worker is not really the son of a worker. He is a Daily Mail reading little Tory boy from the home counties. As somone who grew up in a Northern mining village take it from me this guy is a fraud.
I don’t know JOHNNO, I know plenty of people from northern mining towns who hold those opinions – I’m not arguing those opinions are right, just that it is perfectly plausible that someone could hold such an opinion.