I keep finding myself in the position of defending Boris, which really isn't the intention - I'm as keen to see him go as the next man. And I suppose Rishi is who I'd want to see replace him. And yet - I can't see levelling up going better with anyone but Boris in charge. He's personally invested. Without going into my professional life too much, I know the Boris regime is trying to spend money in the north - ideally before the next election. And it is the treasury which is the biggest obstacle.
I suppose you could argue that a Rishi led government would spend less, but more effectively. Perhaps?
Johnson hasn't spent anything yet. The one major commitment was HS2 and they've cut the budget there. The IRP will never be delivered, because it is literally undeliverable, so that's worthless.
So I'm not quite sure why you think anyone else would 'spend less.'
It takes a bloody age to spend any money in infrastructure. My expectation is that the biggest levelling up spending this parliament will be on buses. Because you can spend on them quickly. There's already quite a lot of bus spending in the pipeline.
Will any of that lead to cheaper fares?
I would expect so. Not least because it's very easy to spend money on fares. Much easier to give public transport authorities to subsidise fares than to reopen a railway line (which in most cases closed for very sound economic reasons). Bus Back Better is worth a look on this. Interesting not least because Boris genuinely seems to have written the introduction in his name. It is written in pure Borisese. The only problem with subsidising fares is that you need to keep spending. It's not capital spend. Though if by doing so you drive up passengers sufficiently it dies start to pay for itself.
For your average Northerner, busses are utterly irrelevant. I'm probably pretty typical of the northern working class type on my street on this - it wouldn't matter to me if they made them completely free and every ten minutes, I'm still going to drive to work. Several major reasons for this: 1) I value my time far too highly to waste an hour a day extra commuting(the "direct" bus from my town to my work takes about an hour vs 25-35mins driving). 2) Buses are inconvenient, they don't go door to door, and leave you standing around in the rain. 3) I work in the middle of nowhere, and use my car at lunchtime to go and get a sandwich from the shop a mile away. Even if busses were free and every ten minutes, I'm going to lose my whole lunch break on this operation, rather than ten minutes of it. 4) My stuff lives in my car. Spare glasses. Socket set. Coat. Headtorch. Pen and notebook. Tape measure. Workboots. Business cards. (and a whole load of other useful stuff!). Can't cart all that with me on the bus every day, and it's a pain having to try and predict what's going to be needed day to day to take it with you. 4) Travelling on busses isn't great anyway - sitting on an uncomfortable seat next to a smelly alcoholic with some screaming kids in the row in front vs rolling smoothly along in effectively a comfy chair with my choice of tunes, my choice of temperature...
The weird thing about the whole leveling up thing is that most of the North is far better for drivers than the South, (not that there isn't room for improvement - you could remove 90% of the congestion in my town with one stretch of road about 1/4 long, following an existing minor road for all but 100 yards) but about the only sort of leveling up that's ever suggested involves hosing odles of tax money at public transport.
I'd suggest that decreasing businesses rates (and or increasing the threshold for the small businesses relief*) in proportion to the distance from Westminster would be a much better use of the cash. Or possibly do the same with income or corp tax, but you'd have to figure out how to prevent people gaiming the system by lying about which property is their main residence/place of business.
*the taper on small business rate relief wins a small prize for the worst thought out taxation system ever, as the taper is so steep as to be more like a cliff edge. My business gets 100% relief. I'd really like to rent another building on the same site to expand, but it would jump me into paying full whack on the lot to the tune of about £9k pa. So instead of expanding into the next building jumping my rent from ~£10k to ~£15k, with the rates added I'll be looking at ~£24k for an increase in usable space of around 50%. So instead I'm not bothering and just struggling on in the space I've got, and everyone loses out.
Totally agree. Buses are not really a thing.
In this part of the Flatlands, the town centre is not where the jobs are, so what's the point of a bus? They take a few non-paying OAPs into town to get harassed by the ne'er do wells but not a lot else. Maybe a few people take the bus in order to get the train out, but not vast numbers.
If I have to go into town I'd rather walk the 2 or so miles anyway. It isn't really any slower. Even those working in the warehouses proliferating everywhere use a car or if they are brave, a bicycle.
What is needed is a better mix of jobs and better roads for both cars and bicycles. Once cars are all electric there really isn't much to be gained by "mass transport", and that time is not far away.
The obsession with public transport is from people who are obsessed with cities.
The realities of towns are deemed to be irrelevant.
There are people in my village who don't own a car. If it wasn't for the bus, they'd have to cycle or walk for 15 miles to do a shop. Don't tell me public transport is only for the cities.
So ?
Compare public transport use in cities to towns to rural areas and you'll see its far more dominant in cities than the others.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up is already dead with Johnson, it’s just that Rishi would smooth the grave over.
I think it would still exist under Rishi, but be much smaller in scope but probably actually happen. We'd dump a lot of the rubbish like freeports and have a more temporary tax incentive based system to lure big businesses with special economic zones, no employer NI for up to 100 employees in the zones, 10 years of low corporation tax rates. That sort of stuff. There won't be any big shiny stuff but a lot of jobs created, perhaps eventually self sustaining industries where nothing existed previously.
You mean we'd basically do exactly what the Germans did in the former GDR, and which basically works really well?
(The Germans also offered massive tax advantages for employing the long-term unemployed, training workers up and apprenticeships.)
Your second sentence is the key issue.
Improve your workforce and you'll improve your economy.
Did they mention that the North South divide has actually got worse and worse, especially since the 1980s?
It’s higher than at any point since 1900. Probably since 1800 actually.
One of the interesting things about levelling up and the North South divide is that it's not about poverty. There are more poor people in London than anywhere else in the UK. The difference is that London is also full of rich people, while the rest of the country isn't (at least not to the same extent). But having loads of rich people can be a double edged sword, for instance when it comes to everyone else being able to afford a house. My sense is that the North of England was destroyed by the Normans. It got a temporary boost from the industrial revolution, although that also left a lot of disadvantages in its wake (eg undiversified economies, low levels of education). It's a long way from the centre of economic gravity in Europe (Germany/the low countries/Northern Italy) and even more cut off now thanks to Brexit. Transport links are crap. In my opinion their best bet is to declare UDI from Westminster. Raise money in the North, control it in the North. Overcome all the stupid local rivalries that stop the North from acting in a unified way. Waiting for HM Treasury to throw them some scraps is going to lead nowhere. Relying on an empty slogan from a man who doesn't give two shits about them ditto.
The inequality you mention is one of the reasons why the 'become more like London' meme isn't as attractive as Londoners think it is.
Other reason also being housing unaffordability, congestion and the way things grind to a halt if something unexpected happens.
Which is why I don't understand the resentment of Londoners. People seem to be capable of a kind of doublethink that says London gets an unfair advantage, that its inhabitants are spoilt, but at the same time "I couldn't think of anything worse than living in that shithole".
If your idea of a nightmare is living in a busy, crowded, noisy, and polluted place, then it's perfectly possible to reconcile those two opinions.
Part of the trouble with our regional situation is that we have two quite distinct types of regional inequality: 2 types of poor region. The post-industrial towns and cities of the Midlands, North, Wales and parts of the central belt, where jobs are low paid and land is cheap; and the deprived rural and coastal areas where jobs are non-existent or seasonal and tourism-dependent, transport infrastructure is appalling and land and property are either dirt cheap or extremely expensive. They present different challenges. Levelling up Cornwall or Anglesey requires a different set of priorities to levelling up Sunderland.
Not sure how best we tackle our own versions of the Mezzogiorno, Andalusia or Massif Central. Do we just let them age and depopulate?
We don’t really have a Andalusia or Massif Central. Most of Britain is densely populated. We’re more like the Netherlands than Spain.
To answer your question, and also the comment from @another_richard, economic growth in 2022 is very very very very very much the product of cities.
We need to do everything to unlock their potential.
Thankfully, that covers the majority of the UK population.
Cornwall etc are likely to remain tourism, agriculture, and retirement focused.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up is already dead with Johnson, it’s just that Rishi would smooth the grave over.
I think it would still exist under Rishi, but be much smaller in scope but probably actually happen. We'd dump a lot of the rubbish like freeports and have a more temporary tax incentive based system to lure big businesses with special economic zones, no employer NI for up to 100 employees in the zones, 10 years of low corporation tax rates. That sort of stuff. There won't be any big shiny stuff but a lot of jobs created, perhaps eventually self sustaining industries where nothing existed previously.
You mean we'd basically do exactly what the Germans did in the former GDR, and which basically works really well?
(The Germans also offered massive tax advantages for employing the long-term unemployed, training workers up and apprenticeships.)
Your second sentence is the key issue.
Improve your workforce and you'll improve your economy.
The perfect argument for abolishing private schooling.
I keep finding myself in the position of defending Boris, which really isn't the intention - I'm as keen to see him go as the next man. And I suppose Rishi is who I'd want to see replace him. And yet - I can't see levelling up going better with anyone but Boris in charge. He's personally invested. Without going into my professional life too much, I know the Boris regime is trying to spend money in the north - ideally before the next election. And it is the treasury which is the biggest obstacle.
I suppose you could argue that a Rishi led government would spend less, but more effectively. Perhaps?
Johnson hasn't spent anything yet. The one major commitment was HS2 and they've cut the budget there. The IRP will never be delivered, because it is literally undeliverable, so that's worthless.
So I'm not quite sure why you think anyone else would 'spend less.'
It takes a bloody age to spend any money in infrastructure. My expectation is that the biggest levelling up spending this parliament will be on buses. Because you can spend on them quickly. There's already quite a lot of bus spending in the pipeline.
Will any of that lead to cheaper fares?
I would expect so. Not least because it's very easy to spend money on fares. Much easier to give public transport authorities to subsidise fares than to reopen a railway line (which in most cases closed for very sound economic reasons). Bus Back Better is worth a look on this. Interesting not least because Boris genuinely seems to have written the introduction in his name. It is written in pure Borisese. The only problem with subsidising fares is that you need to keep spending. It's not capital spend. Though if by doing so you drive up passengers sufficiently it dies start to pay for itself.
For your average Northerner, busses are utterly irrelevant. I'm probably pretty typical of the northern working class type on my street on this - it wouldn't matter to me if they made them completely free and every ten minutes, I'm still going to drive to work. Several major reasons for this: 1) I value my time far too highly to waste an hour a day extra commuting(the "direct" bus from my town to my work takes about an hour vs 25-35mins driving). 2) Buses are inconvenient, they don't go door to door, and leave you standing around in the rain. 3) I work in the middle of nowhere, and use my car at lunchtime to go and get a sandwich from the shop a mile away. Even if busses were free and every ten minutes, I'm going to lose my whole lunch break on this operation, rather than ten minutes of it. 4) My stuff lives in my car. Spare glasses. Socket set. Coat. Headtorch. Pen and notebook. Tape measure. Workboots. Business cards. (and a whole load of other useful stuff!). Can't cart all that with me on the bus every day, and it's a pain having to try and predict what's going to be needed day to day to take it with you. 4) Travelling on busses isn't great anyway - sitting on an uncomfortable seat next to a smelly alcoholic with some screaming kids in the row in front vs rolling smoothly along in effectively a comfy chair with my choice of tunes, my choice of temperature...
The weird thing about the whole leveling up thing is that most of the North is far better for drivers than the South, (not that there isn't room for improvement - you could remove 90% of the congestion in my town with one stretch of road about 1/4 long, following an existing minor road for all but 100 yards) but about the only sort of leveling up that's ever suggested involves hosing odles of tax money at public transport.
I'd suggest that decreasing businesses rates (and or increasing the threshold for the small businesses relief*) in proportion to the distance from Westminster would be a much better use of the cash. Or possibly do the same with income or corp tax, but you'd have to figure out how to prevent people gaiming the system by lying about which property is their main residence/place of business.
*the taper on small business rate relief wins a small prize for the worst thought out taxation system ever, as the taper is so steep as to be more like a cliff edge. My business gets 100% relief. I'd really like to rent another building on the same site to expand, but it would jump me into paying full whack on the lot to the tune of about £9k pa. So instead of expanding into the next building jumping my rent from ~£10k to ~£15k, with the rates added I'll be looking at ~£24k for an increase in usable space of around 50%. So instead I'm not bothering and just struggling on in the space I've got, and everyone loses out.
Totally agree. Buses are not really a thing.
In this part of the Flatlands, the town centre is not where the jobs are, so what's the point of a bus? They take a few non-paying OAPs into town to get harassed by the ne'er do wells but not a lot else. Maybe a few people take the bus in order to get the train out, but not vast numbers.
If I have to go into town I'd rather walk the 2 or so miles anyway. It isn't really any slower. Even those working in the warehouses proliferating everywhere use a car or if they are brave, a bicycle.
What is needed is a better mix of jobs and better roads for both cars and bicycles. Once cars are all electric there really isn't much to be gained by "mass transport", and that time is not far away.
Oh there will be unless the cost of electric cars gets a lot lower.
Most people can’t afford £500+ a month on a lease car
True, although "not far" might be 10-15 years. If electric cars cannot get cheaper (due to battery costs) then there are going to be bigger problems than not having enough buses...
I can see the argument for mass transport in Leeds, where there are thousands of office-based jobs in the centre and a lack of space to put thousands of private cars, but in much of the Red Wall there's lots of small enterprises around the periphery and a hollowed out town centre. I don't think this can be fixed by a better bus service.
I'm not saying buses should be stopped, but improving them massively wouldn't be a good use of money.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up is already dead with Johnson, it’s just that Rishi would smooth the grave over.
I think it would still exist under Rishi, but be much smaller in scope but probably actually happen. We'd dump a lot of the rubbish like freeports and have a more temporary tax incentive based system to lure big businesses with special economic zones, no employer NI for up to 100 employees in the zones, 10 years of low corporation tax rates. That sort of stuff. There won't be any big shiny stuff but a lot of jobs created, perhaps eventually self sustaining industries where nothing existed previously.
You mean we'd basically do exactly what the Germans did in the former GDR, and which basically works really well?
(The Germans also offered massive tax advantages for employing the long-term unemployed, training workers up and apprenticeships.)
Your second sentence is the key issue.
Improve your workforce and you'll improve your economy.
The Germans have spent trillions on GDR, and it has worked well, at least from an economic perspective.
Not sure why @rcs1000 thinks this is because of tax cuts.
Also, some good news for the North, my old employer is opening up a giant office to consolidate and massively expand their presence in Liverpool. I've heard they're looking to hire between 200 and 250 highly paid software developers in the city in addition to the 200 or so they already have.
The policy of moving development to Amsterdam seems to be have been completely reversed, I'm told there were issues with skill levels, unrealistic demands from underskilled people and a general lack of experience. The word is that Liverpool, Cambridge and London will see a big expansion as well as some in Surrey. Two years ago people were wondering whether PlayStation's time in the UK was finished and existing studious wound up once their projects were completed. A real turnaround and win for UK game development.
Great news.
Liverpool could be / should be a real hub for creative development and already has a gaming heritage. It really should have been given Channel 4, too. Leeds should stick to professional services.
Yeah having Manchester Uni just down the road is a huge attraction and the recruitment team all say that hiring in Liverpool is really easy because property prices and rent is so low compared to Manchester while the city is still pretty vibrant in parts and attractive to live in for 20 somethings with ComSci degrees. Property developers should really be buying up the cheaper parts of town and getting ready for a Shoreditch/Hackney style turnaround IMO with nice redeveloped houses and flats being made available.
On your earlier point about the mid-level cities of England being underpowered compared to Europe, I think part of the equation is education. All across Europe average education levels are significantly higher, not just through university but also through vocational schemes. London has got three world class universities (Imperial, UCL and LSE) and two or three more reasonably good ones, there's not many places in the world that can claim that, we can't replicate it in the rest of the UK but we can definitely raise standards with better vocational training and professional development for non-degree based courses.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up never existed beyond a slogan. There is no substance there to die.
That does raise an interesting point, in that either it had no substance, and therefore it being dropped means nothing, or it did and it would, yet I have a suspicion people will argue both.
That’s politics for you: a bunch of idiots arguing about nothing.
1. You unload stuff off a ship. 2. You stick it in a bonded warehouse. 3. You load it onto another ship.
Either it's totally pointless or I'm missing something.
In its reductive form yes, it is fairly pointless as there are customs reliefs available that provide all the benefits of being in a freeport anyway.
As a wrapper, and an umbrella brand, for what are essentially a new version of enterprise zones they make some sense. They can come with add-ons like accelerated tax depreciation, simplified planning rules, payroll tax reliefs and so on. I know that planning is one of the biggest headaches for industrial and commercial developers (rightly so in many cases) and one of the reasons they are hesitant to make big investments in certain countries particularly in Southern Europe.
The accelerated capital allowances plans for the freeports were interesting but rendered somewhat moot when Rishi introduced the country-wide superdeduction last year.
Klaxon!
Freeports for ugly people in ugly places.
Home Counties NIMBY’s (who coincidentally vote Tory) get to keep stringent planning rules.
Phew!
Yes, they are - let's be honest - in places where there's not much natural or architectural beauty to preserve (with one exception) and few NIMBYs to piss off. But then those NIMBYs are not necessarily voting Tory anymore of course. Current list:
East Midlands Airport Felixstowe and Harwich Humber Region Liverpool City Region (the exception) Plymouth Solent Thames Teesside
Note that 3 are in the North, 1 in the Midlands and 4 in the "South" below the Wash-Severn line.
Did they mention that the North South divide has actually got worse and worse, especially since the 1980s?
It’s higher than at any point since 1900. Probably since 1800 actually.
One of the interesting things about levelling up and the North South divide is that it's not about poverty. There are more poor people in London than anywhere else in the UK. The difference is that London is also full of rich people, while the rest of the country isn't (at least not to the same extent). But having loads of rich people can be a double edged sword, for instance when it comes to everyone else being able to afford a house. My sense is that the North of England was destroyed by the Normans. It got a temporary boost from the industrial revolution, although that also left a lot of disadvantages in its wake (eg undiversified economies, low levels of education). It's a long way from the centre of economic gravity in Europe (Germany/the low countries/Northern Italy) and even more cut off now thanks to Brexit. Transport links are crap. In my opinion their best bet is to declare UDI from Westminster. Raise money in the North, control it in the North. Overcome all the stupid local rivalries that stop the North from acting in a unified way. Waiting for HM Treasury to throw them some scraps is going to lead nowhere. Relying on an empty slogan from a man who doesn't give two shits about them ditto.
The inequality you mention is one of the reasons why the 'become more like London' meme isn't as attractive as Londoners think it is.
Other reason also being housing unaffordability, congestion and the way things grind to a halt if something unexpected happens.
One thing about London, that I've noticed over many years having lived several places elsewhere, is that very few parts of it have the culture of Saturday night violence, and drinking menace as routine, that afflict so many areas of Britain large and small, not just England. I'm still not entirely sure why this is.
Did they mention that the North South divide has actually got worse and worse, especially since the 1980s?
It’s higher than at any point since 1900. Probably since 1800 actually.
One of the interesting things about levelling up and the North South divide is that it's not about poverty. There are more poor people in London than anywhere else in the UK. The difference is that London is also full of rich people, while the rest of the country isn't (at least not to the same extent). But having loads of rich people can be a double edged sword, for instance when it comes to everyone else being able to afford a house. My sense is that the North of England was destroyed by the Normans. It got a temporary boost from the industrial revolution, although that also left a lot of disadvantages in its wake (eg undiversified economies, low levels of education). It's a long way from the centre of economic gravity in Europe (Germany/the low countries/Northern Italy) and even more cut off now thanks to Brexit. Transport links are crap. In my opinion their best bet is to declare UDI from Westminster. Raise money in the North, control it in the North. Overcome all the stupid local rivalries that stop the North from acting in a unified way. Waiting for HM Treasury to throw them some scraps is going to lead nowhere. Relying on an empty slogan from a man who doesn't give two shits about them ditto.
The inequality you mention is one of the reasons why the 'become more like London' meme isn't as attractive as Londoners think it is.
Other reason also being housing unaffordability, congestion and the way things grind to a halt if something unexpected happens.
Which is why I don't understand the resentment of Londoners. People seem to be capable of a kind of doublethink that says London gets an unfair advantage, that its inhabitants are spoilt, but at the same time "I couldn't think of anything worse than living in that shithole".
It's because London gets used as a shorthand for the political and media class that are centred in, and commonly viewed as fixated on, it - although in the latter case it's really about a particular world view and set of interests, rather than the wider conurbation (which contains a lot of poor people, and poor areas in which most of the elite class wouldn't be seen dead.)
1. You unload stuff off a ship. 2. You stick it in a bonded warehouse. 3. You load it onto another ship.
Either it's totally pointless or I'm missing something.
The idea is that people will build factories in the freeports and then work on things. And businesses in the freeport would be exempt from lots of taxes, etc.
But, FWIW, I think they be essentially pointless in the UK.
Surely freeports are only of benefit in a high tariff setting. If no tariff then what is the benefit of a free port?
I keep finding myself in the position of defending Boris, which really isn't the intention - I'm as keen to see him go as the next man. And I suppose Rishi is who I'd want to see replace him. And yet - I can't see levelling up going better with anyone but Boris in charge. He's personally invested. Without going into my professional life too much, I know the Boris regime is trying to spend money in the north - ideally before the next election. And it is the treasury which is the biggest obstacle.
I suppose you could argue that a Rishi led government would spend less, but more effectively. Perhaps?
Johnson hasn't spent anything yet. The one major commitment was HS2 and they've cut the budget there. The IRP will never be delivered, because it is literally undeliverable, so that's worthless.
So I'm not quite sure why you think anyone else would 'spend less.'
It takes a bloody age to spend any money in infrastructure. My expectation is that the biggest levelling up spending this parliament will be on buses. Because you can spend on them quickly. There's already quite a lot of bus spending in the pipeline.
Will any of that lead to cheaper fares?
I would expect so. Not least because it's very easy to spend money on fares. Much easier to give public transport authorities to subsidise fares than to reopen a railway line (which in most cases closed for very sound economic reasons). Bus Back Better is worth a look on this. Interesting not least because Boris genuinely seems to have written the introduction in his name. It is written in pure Borisese. The only problem with subsidising fares is that you need to keep spending. It's not capital spend. Though if by doing so you drive up passengers sufficiently it dies start to pay for itself.
For your average Northerner, busses are utterly irrelevant. I'm probably pretty typical of the northern working class type on my street on this - it wouldn't matter to me if they made them completely free and every ten minutes, I'm still going to drive to work. Several major reasons for this: 1) I value my time far too highly to waste an hour a day extra commuting(the "direct" bus from my town to my work takes about an hour vs 25-35mins driving). 2) Buses are inconvenient, they don't go door to door, and leave you standing around in the rain. 3) I work in the middle of nowhere, and use my car at lunchtime to go and get a sandwich from the shop a mile away. Even if busses were free and every ten minutes, I'm going to lose my whole lunch break on this operation, rather than ten minutes of it. 4) My stuff lives in my car. Spare glasses. Socket set. Coat. Headtorch. Pen and notebook. Tape measure. Workboots. Business cards. (and a whole load of other useful stuff!). Can't cart all that with me on the bus every day, and it's a pain having to try and predict what's going to be needed day to day to take it with you. 4) Travelling on busses isn't great anyway - sitting on an uncomfortable seat next to a smelly alcoholic with some screaming kids in the row in front vs rolling smoothly along in effectively a comfy chair with my choice of tunes, my choice of temperature...
The weird thing about the whole leveling up thing is that most of the North is far better for drivers than the South, (not that there isn't room for improvement - you could remove 90% of the congestion in my town with one stretch of road about 1/4 long, following an existing minor road for all but 100 yards) but about the only sort of leveling up that's ever suggested involves hosing odles of tax money at public transport.
I'd suggest that decreasing businesses rates (and or increasing the threshold for the small businesses relief*) in proportion to the distance from Westminster would be a much better use of the cash. Or possibly do the same with income or corp tax, but you'd have to figure out how to prevent people gaiming the system by lying about which property is their main residence/place of business.
*the taper on small business rate relief wins a small prize for the worst thought out taxation system ever, as the taper is so steep as to be more like a cliff edge. My business gets 100% relief. I'd really like to rent another building on the same site to expand, but it would jump me into paying full whack on the lot to the tune of about £9k pa. So instead of expanding into the next building jumping my rent from ~£10k to ~£15k, with the rates added I'll be looking at ~£24k for an increase in usable space of around 50%. So instead I'm not bothering and just struggling on in the space I've got, and everyone loses out.
Totally agree. Buses are not really a thing.
In this part of the Flatlands, the town centre is not where the jobs are, so what's the point of a bus? They take a few non-paying OAPs into town to get harassed by the ne'er do wells but not a lot else. Maybe a few people take the bus in order to get the train out, but not vast numbers.
If I have to go into town I'd rather walk the 2 or so miles anyway. It isn't really any slower. Even those working in the warehouses proliferating everywhere use a car or if they are brave, a bicycle.
What is needed is a better mix of jobs and better roads for both cars and bicycles. Once cars are all electric there really isn't much to be gained by "mass transport", and that time is not far away.
The obsession with public transport is from people who are obsessed with cities.
The realities of towns are deemed to be irrelevant.
There are people in my village who don't own a car. If it wasn't for the bus, they'd have to cycle or walk for 15 miles to do a shop. Don't tell me public transport is only for the cities.
So ?
Compare public transport use in cities to towns to rural areas and you'll see its far more dominant in cities than the others.
I suspect that's entirely due to space considerations. It's a lot of faff to get parked in some cities. I lived in Edinburgh for a while, and it was far more hassle to drive into the city centre than to just get on the bus.
1. You unload stuff off a ship. 2. You stick it in a bonded warehouse. 3. You load it onto another ship.
Either it's totally pointless or I'm missing something.
The idea is that people will build factories in the freeports and then work on things. And businesses in the freeport would be exempt from lots of taxes, etc.
But, FWIW, I think they be essentially pointless in the UK.
So nothing to do with the 'port' activity then. That's what has got me confused.
I'd break the Met up into more manageable chunks, each headed by a new Chief Constable appointed from one of the better performing county forces, tasked primarily with reform of culture and the sacking or early retirement of dross.
That would have to be a UK government policy, though, who have a sacking of dross problem of their own to sort out first...
Part of the trouble with our regional situation is that we have two quite distinct types of regional inequality: 2 types of poor region. The post-industrial towns and cities of the Midlands, North, Wales and parts of the central belt, where jobs are low paid and land is cheap; and the deprived rural and coastal areas where jobs are non-existent or seasonal and tourism-dependent, transport infrastructure is appalling and land and property are either dirt cheap or extremely expensive. They present different challenges. Levelling up Cornwall or Anglesey requires a different set of priorities to levelling up Sunderland.
Not sure how best we tackle our own versions of the Mezzogiorno, Andalusia or Massif Central. Do we just let them age and depopulate?
We don’t really have a Andalusia or Massif Central. Most of Britain is densely populated. We’re more like the Netherlands than Spain.
To answer your question, and also the comment from @another_richard, economic growth in 2022 is very very very very very much the product of cities.
We need to do everything to unlock their potential.
Thankfully, that covers the majority of the UK population.
Cornwall etc are likely to remain tourism, agriculture, and retirement focused.
I would say large parts of Cumbria, Northumberland, Central Wales and the Scottish Highlands are very inland Andalusia or Massif Central-like. Coastal Andalusia is of course overbuilt with tourist and second home blight like the worst parts of Cornwall or Sussex.
Did they mention that the North South divide has actually got worse and worse, especially since the 1980s?
It’s higher than at any point since 1900. Probably since 1800 actually.
One of the interesting things about levelling up and the North South divide is that it's not about poverty. There are more poor people in London than anywhere else in the UK. The difference is that London is also full of rich people, while the rest of the country isn't (at least not to the same extent). But having loads of rich people can be a double edged sword, for instance when it comes to everyone else being able to afford a house. My sense is that the North of England was destroyed by the Normans. It got a temporary boost from the industrial revolution, although that also left a lot of disadvantages in its wake (eg undiversified economies, low levels of education). It's a long way from the centre of economic gravity in Europe (Germany/the low countries/Northern Italy) and even more cut off now thanks to Brexit. Transport links are crap. In my opinion their best bet is to declare UDI from Westminster. Raise money in the North, control it in the North. Overcome all the stupid local rivalries that stop the North from acting in a unified way. Waiting for HM Treasury to throw them some scraps is going to lead nowhere. Relying on an empty slogan from a man who doesn't give two shits about them ditto.
The inequality you mention is one of the reasons why the 'become more like London' meme isn't as attractive as Londoners think it is.
Other reason also being housing unaffordability, congestion and the way things grind to a halt if something unexpected happens.
I don't think anyone wants the North to become more like London, least of all Londoners! The future of the North is in the hands of Northerners, and always has been.
Also, some good news for the North, my old employer is opening up a giant office to consolidate and massively expand their presence in Liverpool. I've heard they're looking to hire between 200 and 250 highly paid software developers in the city in addition to the 200 or so they already have.
The policy of moving development to Amsterdam seems to be have been completely reversed, I'm told there were issues with skill levels, unrealistic demands from underskilled people and a general lack of experience. The word is that Liverpool, Cambridge and London will see a big expansion as well as some in Surrey. Two years ago people were wondering whether PlayStation's time in the UK was finished and existing studious wound up once their projects were completed. A real turnaround and win for UK game development.
Great news.
Liverpool could be / should be a real hub for creative development and already has a gaming heritage. It really should have been given Channel 4, too. Leeds should stick to professional services.
Yeah having Manchester Uni just down the road is a huge attraction and the recruitment team all say that hiring in Liverpool is really easy because property prices and rent is so low compared to Manchester while the city is still pretty vibrant in parts and attractive to live in for 20 somethings with ComSci degrees. Property developers should really be buying up the cheaper parts of town and getting ready for a Shoreditch/Hackney style turnaround IMO with nice redeveloped houses and flats being made available.
On your earlier point about the mid-level cities of England being underpowered compared to Europe, I think part of the equation is education. All across Europe average education levels are significantly higher, not just through university but also through vocational schemes. London has got three world class universities (Imperial, UCL and LSE) and two or three more reasonably good ones, there's not many places in the world that can claim that, we can't replicate it in the rest of the UK but we can definitely raise standards with better vocational training and professional development for non-degree based courses.
The skills issue is a big deal, yes. It’s the other big problem apart from infrastructure.
Yet, we already have great universities all across the UK, and we already spend a lot on primary education by int’l standards.
The issue seems to be that our primary school spend is very inefficient at least in terms of outputs, and our vocational / professional development is non-existent / appalling.
Did they mention that the North South divide has actually got worse and worse, especially since the 1980s?
It’s higher than at any point since 1900. Probably since 1800 actually.
One of the interesting things about levelling up and the North South divide is that it's not about poverty. There are more poor people in London than anywhere else in the UK. The difference is that London is also full of rich people, while the rest of the country isn't (at least not to the same extent). But having loads of rich people can be a double edged sword, for instance when it comes to everyone else being able to afford a house. My sense is that the North of England was destroyed by the Normans. It got a temporary boost from the industrial revolution, although that also left a lot of disadvantages in its wake (eg undiversified economies, low levels of education). It's a long way from the centre of economic gravity in Europe (Germany/the low countries/Northern Italy) and even more cut off now thanks to Brexit. Transport links are crap. In my opinion their best bet is to declare UDI from Westminster. Raise money in the North, control it in the North. Overcome all the stupid local rivalries that stop the North from acting in a unified way. Waiting for HM Treasury to throw them some scraps is going to lead nowhere. Relying on an empty slogan from a man who doesn't give two shits about them ditto.
The inequality you mention is one of the reasons why the 'become more like London' meme isn't as attractive as Londoners think it is.
Other reason also being housing unaffordability, congestion and the way things grind to a halt if something unexpected happens.
Which is why I don't understand the resentment of Londoners. People seem to be capable of a kind of doublethink that says London gets an unfair advantage, that its inhabitants are spoilt, but at the same time "I couldn't think of anything worse than living in that shithole".
If your idea of a nightmare is living in a busy, crowded, noisy, and polluted place, then it's perfectly possible to reconcile those two opinions.
Then they needn't be envious of Londoners who live in the apparent hellhole of noise, pollution, crime and ridiculous house prices.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up is already dead with Johnson, it’s just that Rishi would smooth the grave over.
I think it would still exist under Rishi, but be much smaller in scope but probably actually happen. We'd dump a lot of the rubbish like freeports and have a more temporary tax incentive based system to lure big businesses with special economic zones, no employer NI for up to 100 employees in the zones, 10 years of low corporation tax rates. That sort of stuff. There won't be any big shiny stuff but a lot of jobs created, perhaps eventually self sustaining industries where nothing existed previously.
You mean we'd basically do exactly what the Germans did in the former GDR, and which basically works really well?
(The Germans also offered massive tax advantages for employing the long-term unemployed, training workers up and apprenticeships.)
Your second sentence is the key issue.
Improve your workforce and you'll improve your economy.
The Germans have spent trillions on GDR, and it has worked well, at least from an economic perspective.
Not sure why @rcs1000 thinks this is because of tax cuts.
They offered massive tax incentives to firms (German and otherwise) to setup plants in East Germany.
1. You unload stuff off a ship. 2. You stick it in a bonded warehouse. 3. You load it onto another ship.
Either it's totally pointless or I'm missing something.
The idea is that people will build factories in the freeports and then work on things. And businesses in the freeport would be exempt from lots of taxes, etc.
But, FWIW, I think they be essentially pointless in the UK.
Which is a great idea, but far too small in scale - we should just have a tax gradient so the further you are from London (possibly measured in travel time by the fastest of train and car, rather than geographical distance) the less you pay in various taxes, both personal and business.
I keep finding myself in the position of defending Boris, which really isn't the intention - I'm as keen to see him go as the next man. And I suppose Rishi is who I'd want to see replace him. And yet - I can't see levelling up going better with anyone but Boris in charge. He's personally invested. Without going into my professional life too much, I know the Boris regime is trying to spend money in the north - ideally before the next election. And it is the treasury which is the biggest obstacle.
I suppose you could argue that a Rishi led government would spend less, but more effectively. Perhaps?
Johnson hasn't spent anything yet. The one major commitment was HS2 and they've cut the budget there. The IRP will never be delivered, because it is literally undeliverable, so that's worthless.
So I'm not quite sure why you think anyone else would 'spend less.'
It takes a bloody age to spend any money in infrastructure. My expectation is that the biggest levelling up spending this parliament will be on buses. Because you can spend on them quickly. There's already quite a lot of bus spending in the pipeline.
Will any of that lead to cheaper fares?
I would expect so. Not least because it's very easy to spend money on fares. Much easier to give public transport authorities to subsidise fares than to reopen a railway line (which in most cases closed for very sound economic reasons). Bus Back Better is worth a look on this. Interesting not least because Boris genuinely seems to have written the introduction in his name. It is written in pure Borisese. The only problem with subsidising fares is that you need to keep spending. It's not capital spend. Though if by doing so you drive up passengers sufficiently it dies start to pay for itself.
For your average Northerner, busses are utterly irrelevant. I'm probably pretty typical of the northern working class type on my street on this - it wouldn't matter to me if they made them completely free and every ten minutes, I'm still going to drive to work. Several major reasons for this: 1) I value my time far too highly to waste an hour a day extra commuting(the "direct" bus from my town to my work takes about an hour vs 25-35mins driving). 2) Buses are inconvenient, they don't go door to door, and leave you standing around in the rain. 3) I work in the middle of nowhere, and use my car at lunchtime to go and get a sandwich from the shop a mile away. Even if busses were free and every ten minutes, I'm going to lose my whole lunch break on this operation, rather than ten minutes of it. 4) My stuff lives in my car. Spare glasses. Socket set. Coat. Headtorch. Pen and notebook. Tape measure. Workboots. Business cards. (and a whole load of other useful stuff!). Can't cart all that with me on the bus every day, and it's a pain having to try and predict what's going to be needed day to day to take it with you. 4) Travelling on busses isn't great anyway - sitting on an uncomfortable seat next to a smelly alcoholic with some screaming kids in the row in front vs rolling smoothly along in effectively a comfy chair with my choice of tunes, my choice of temperature...
The weird thing about the whole leveling up thing is that most of the North is far better for drivers than the South, (not that there isn't room for improvement - you could remove 90% of the congestion in my town with one stretch of road about 1/4 long, following an existing minor road for all but 100 yards) but about the only sort of leveling up that's ever suggested involves hosing odles of tax money at public transport.
I'd suggest that decreasing businesses rates (and or increasing the threshold for the small businesses relief*) in proportion to the distance from Westminster would be a much better use of the cash. Or possibly do the same with income or corp tax, but you'd have to figure out how to prevent people gaiming the system by lying about which property is their main residence/place of business.
*the taper on small business rate relief wins a small prize for the worst thought out taxation system ever, as the taper is so steep as to be more like a cliff edge. My business gets 100% relief. I'd really like to rent another building on the same site to expand, but it would jump me into paying full whack on the lot to the tune of about £9k pa. So instead of expanding into the next building jumping my rent from ~£10k to ~£15k, with the rates added I'll be looking at ~£24k for an increase in usable space of around 50%. So instead I'm not bothering and just struggling on in the space I've got, and everyone loses out.
Totally agree. Buses are not really a thing.
In this part of the Flatlands, the town centre is not where the jobs are, so what's the point of a bus? They take a few non-paying OAPs into town to get harassed by the ne'er do wells but not a lot else. Maybe a few people take the bus in order to get the train out, but not vast numbers.
If I have to go into town I'd rather walk the 2 or so miles anyway. It isn't really any slower. Even those working in the warehouses proliferating everywhere use a car or if they are brave, a bicycle.
What is needed is a better mix of jobs and better roads for both cars and bicycles. Once cars are all electric there really isn't much to be gained by "mass transport", and that time is not far away.
Oh there will be unless the cost of electric cars gets a lot lower.
Most people can’t afford £500+ a month on a lease car
True, although "not far" might be 10-15 years. If electric cars cannot get cheaper (due to battery costs) then there are going to be bigger problems than not having enough buses...
I can see the argument for mass transport in Leeds, where there are thousands of office-based jobs in the centre and a lack of space to put thousands of private cars, but in much of the Red Wall there's lots of small enterprises around the periphery and a hollowed out town centre. I don't think this can be fixed by a better bus service.
I'm not saying buses should be stopped, but improving them massively wouldn't be a good use of money.
Buses and trams get people from the suburbs into the city centre. For people in the surrounding red wall towns they need trains.
Did they mention that the North South divide has actually got worse and worse, especially since the 1980s?
It’s higher than at any point since 1900. Probably since 1800 actually.
One of the interesting things about levelling up and the North South divide is that it's not about poverty. There are more poor people in London than anywhere else in the UK. The difference is that London is also full of rich people, while the rest of the country isn't (at least not to the same extent). But having loads of rich people can be a double edged sword, for instance when it comes to everyone else being able to afford a house. My sense is that the North of England was destroyed by the Normans. It got a temporary boost from the industrial revolution, although that also left a lot of disadvantages in its wake (eg undiversified economies, low levels of education). It's a long way from the centre of economic gravity in Europe (Germany/the low countries/Northern Italy) and even more cut off now thanks to Brexit. Transport links are crap. In my opinion their best bet is to declare UDI from Westminster. Raise money in the North, control it in the North. Overcome all the stupid local rivalries that stop the North from acting in a unified way. Waiting for HM Treasury to throw them some scraps is going to lead nowhere. Relying on an empty slogan from a man who doesn't give two shits about them ditto.
The inequality you mention is one of the reasons why the 'become more like London' meme isn't as attractive as Londoners think it is.
Other reason also being housing unaffordability, congestion and the way things grind to a halt if something unexpected happens.
One thing about London, that I've noticed over many years having lived several places elsewhere, is that very few parts of it have the culture of Saturday night violence, and drinking menace as routine, that afflict so many areas of Britain large and small, not just England. I'm still not entirely sure why this is.
Because we don't have so many bored kids I think. There's more for them to do to pass the time.
I wouldn't be surprised if the 18-24s sit right of the 25-34s in general. The gender splits are likely to be quite stark as well, with men significantly to the right of women, due to the segmentation of online influence.
Did they mention that the North South divide has actually got worse and worse, especially since the 1980s?
It’s higher than at any point since 1900. Probably since 1800 actually.
One of the interesting things about levelling up and the North South divide is that it's not about poverty. There are more poor people in London than anywhere else in the UK. The difference is that London is also full of rich people, while the rest of the country isn't (at least not to the same extent). But having loads of rich people can be a double edged sword, for instance when it comes to everyone else being able to afford a house. My sense is that the North of England was destroyed by the Normans. It got a temporary boost from the industrial revolution, although that also left a lot of disadvantages in its wake (eg undiversified economies, low levels of education). It's a long way from the centre of economic gravity in Europe (Germany/the low countries/Northern Italy) and even more cut off now thanks to Brexit. Transport links are crap. In my opinion their best bet is to declare UDI from Westminster. Raise money in the North, control it in the North. Overcome all the stupid local rivalries that stop the North from acting in a unified way. Waiting for HM Treasury to throw them some scraps is going to lead nowhere. Relying on an empty slogan from a man who doesn't give two shits about them ditto.
The inequality you mention is one of the reasons why the 'become more like London' meme isn't as attractive as Londoners think it is.
Other reason also being housing unaffordability, congestion and the way things grind to a halt if something unexpected happens.
Which is why I don't understand the resentment of Londoners. People seem to be capable of a kind of doublethink that says London gets an unfair advantage, that its inhabitants are spoilt, but at the same time "I couldn't think of anything worse than living in that shithole".
If your idea of a nightmare is living in a busy, crowded, noisy, and polluted place, then it's perfectly possible to reconcile those two opinions.
Then they needn't be envious of Londoners who live in the apparent hellhole of noise, pollution, crime and ridiculous house prices.
London is pathetically low-rise compared to New York or Paris. I don’t know why people think it’s noisy. It’s not, especially. Crime is fairly low too, albeit rising of late.
I’ll give you high house prices and pollution though.
Part of the trouble with our regional situation is that we have two quite distinct types of regional inequality: 2 types of poor region. The post-industrial towns and cities of the Midlands, North, Wales and parts of the central belt, where jobs are low paid and land is cheap; and the deprived rural and coastal areas where jobs are non-existent or seasonal and tourism-dependent, transport infrastructure is appalling and land and property are either dirt cheap or extremely expensive. They present different challenges. Levelling up Cornwall or Anglesey requires a different set of priorities to levelling up Sunderland.
Not sure how best we tackle our own versions of the Mezzogiorno, Andalusia or Massif Central. Do we just let them age and depopulate?
We don’t really have a Andalusia or Massif Central. Most of Britain is densely populated. We’re more like the Netherlands than Spain.
To answer your question, and also the comment from @another_richard, economic growth in 2022 is very very very very very much the product of cities.
We need to do everything to unlock their potential.
Thankfully, that covers the majority of the UK population.
Cornwall etc are likely to remain tourism, agriculture, and retirement focused.
I would say large parts of Cumbria, Northumberland, Central Wales and the Scottish Highlands are very inland Andalusia or Massif Central-like. Coastal Andalusia is of course overbuilt with tourist and second home blight like the worst parts of Cornwall or Sussex.
Difference of scale. The Massif Central is… massive.
Nowhere you mention is all that “inland”. Nowhere in the archipelago is far from the sea. Ok, Birmingham, at a pinch.
I keep finding myself in the position of defending Boris, which really isn't the intention - I'm as keen to see him go as the next man. And I suppose Rishi is who I'd want to see replace him. And yet - I can't see levelling up going better with anyone but Boris in charge. He's personally invested. Without going into my professional life too much, I know the Boris regime is trying to spend money in the north - ideally before the next election. And it is the treasury which is the biggest obstacle.
I suppose you could argue that a Rishi led government would spend less, but more effectively. Perhaps?
Johnson hasn't spent anything yet. The one major commitment was HS2 and they've cut the budget there. The IRP will never be delivered, because it is literally undeliverable, so that's worthless.
So I'm not quite sure why you think anyone else would 'spend less.'
It takes a bloody age to spend any money in infrastructure. My expectation is that the biggest levelling up spending this parliament will be on buses. Because you can spend on them quickly. There's already quite a lot of bus spending in the pipeline.
Will any of that lead to cheaper fares?
I would expect so. Not least because it's very easy to spend money on fares. Much easier to give public transport authorities to subsidise fares than to reopen a railway line (which in most cases closed for very sound economic reasons). Bus Back Better is worth a look on this. Interesting not least because Boris genuinely seems to have written the introduction in his name. It is written in pure Borisese. The only problem with subsidising fares is that you need to keep spending. It's not capital spend. Though if by doing so you drive up passengers sufficiently it dies start to pay for itself.
For your average Northerner, busses are utterly irrelevant. I'm probably pretty typical of the northern working class type on my street on this - it wouldn't matter to me if they made them completely free and every ten minutes, I'm still going to drive to work. Several major reasons for this: 1) I value my time far too highly to waste an hour a day extra commuting(the "direct" bus from my town to my work takes about an hour vs 25-35mins driving). 2) Buses are inconvenient, they don't go door to door, and leave you standing around in the rain. 3) I work in the middle of nowhere, and use my car at lunchtime to go and get a sandwich from the shop a mile away. Even if busses were free and every ten minutes, I'm going to lose my whole lunch break on this operation, rather than ten minutes of it. 4) My stuff lives in my car. Spare glasses. Socket set. Coat. Headtorch. Pen and notebook. Tape measure. Workboots. Business cards. (and a whole load of other useful stuff!). Can't cart all that with me on the bus every day, and it's a pain having to try and predict what's going to be needed day to day to take it with you. 4) Travelling on busses isn't great anyway - sitting on an uncomfortable seat next to a smelly alcoholic with some screaming kids in the row in front vs rolling smoothly along in effectively a comfy chair with my choice of tunes, my choice of temperature...
The weird thing about the whole leveling up thing is that most of the North is far better for drivers than the South, (not that there isn't room for improvement - you could remove 90% of the congestion in my town with one stretch of road about 1/4 long, following an existing minor road for all but 100 yards) but about the only sort of leveling up that's ever suggested involves hosing odles of tax money at public transport.
I'd suggest that decreasing businesses rates (and or increasing the threshold for the small businesses relief*) in proportion to the distance from Westminster would be a much better use of the cash. Or possibly do the same with income or corp tax, but you'd have to figure out how to prevent people gaiming the system by lying about which property is their main residence/place of business.
*the taper on small business rate relief wins a small prize for the worst thought out taxation system ever, as the taper is so steep as to be more like a cliff edge. My business gets 100% relief. I'd really like to rent another building on the same site to expand, but it would jump me into paying full whack on the lot to the tune of about £9k pa. So instead of expanding into the next building jumping my rent from ~£10k to ~£15k, with the rates added I'll be looking at ~£24k for an increase in usable space of around 50%. So instead I'm not bothering and just struggling on in the space I've got, and everyone loses out.
Totally agree. Buses are not really a thing.
In this part of the Flatlands, the town centre is not where the jobs are, so what's the point of a bus? They take a few non-paying OAPs into town to get harassed by the ne'er do wells but not a lot else. Maybe a few people take the bus in order to get the train out, but not vast numbers.
If I have to go into town I'd rather walk the 2 or so miles anyway. It isn't really any slower. Even those working in the warehouses proliferating everywhere use a car or if they are brave, a bicycle.
What is needed is a better mix of jobs and better roads for both cars and bicycles. Once cars are all electric there really isn't much to be gained by "mass transport", and that time is not far away.
Oh there will be unless the cost of electric cars gets a lot lower.
Most people can’t afford £500+ a month on a lease car
Do not forget to add in the odd, but increasingly common, feature of newer cars were certain features are disabled so that your manufacturer can turn them back on through a subscription model. Want your heated seats to work? That will be £10 a month please! Aircon? £30 per month please...
I have not flown in years. I am seriously wondering if I will ever buy another car.
Did they mention that the North South divide has actually got worse and worse, especially since the 1980s?
It’s higher than at any point since 1900. Probably since 1800 actually.
One of the interesting things about levelling up and the North South divide is that it's not about poverty. There are more poor people in London than anywhere else in the UK. The difference is that London is also full of rich people, while the rest of the country isn't (at least not to the same extent). But having loads of rich people can be a double edged sword, for instance when it comes to everyone else being able to afford a house. My sense is that the North of England was destroyed by the Normans. It got a temporary boost from the industrial revolution, although that also left a lot of disadvantages in its wake (eg undiversified economies, low levels of education). It's a long way from the centre of economic gravity in Europe (Germany/the low countries/Northern Italy) and even more cut off now thanks to Brexit. Transport links are crap. In my opinion their best bet is to declare UDI from Westminster. Raise money in the North, control it in the North. Overcome all the stupid local rivalries that stop the North from acting in a unified way. Waiting for HM Treasury to throw them some scraps is going to lead nowhere. Relying on an empty slogan from a man who doesn't give two shits about them ditto.
The inequality you mention is one of the reasons why the 'become more like London' meme isn't as attractive as Londoners think it is.
Other reason also being housing unaffordability, congestion and the way things grind to a halt if something unexpected happens.
Which is why I don't understand the resentment of Londoners. People seem to be capable of a kind of doublethink that says London gets an unfair advantage, that its inhabitants are spoilt, but at the same time "I couldn't think of anything worse than living in that shithole".
London is different to the average town.
And its a good thing that we have different types of place as it gives people more opportunities depending on their jobs or interests or lifestyles.
But London tends to be a place of extremes which likely makes it unsuitable for those who are more 'average'.
So resenting Londoners is silly but trying to make the rest of the country more like London is equally so.
I keep finding myself in the position of defending Boris, which really isn't the intention - I'm as keen to see him go as the next man. And I suppose Rishi is who I'd want to see replace him. And yet - I can't see levelling up going better with anyone but Boris in charge. He's personally invested. Without going into my professional life too much, I know the Boris regime is trying to spend money in the north - ideally before the next election. And it is the treasury which is the biggest obstacle.
I suppose you could argue that a Rishi led government would spend less, but more effectively. Perhaps?
Johnson hasn't spent anything yet. The one major commitment was HS2 and they've cut the budget there. The IRP will never be delivered, because it is literally undeliverable, so that's worthless.
So I'm not quite sure why you think anyone else would 'spend less.'
It takes a bloody age to spend any money in infrastructure. My expectation is that the biggest levelling up spending this parliament will be on buses. Because you can spend on them quickly. There's already quite a lot of bus spending in the pipeline.
Will any of that lead to cheaper fares?
I would expect so. Not least because it's very easy to spend money on fares. Much easier to give public transport authorities to subsidise fares than to reopen a railway line (which in most cases closed for very sound economic reasons). Bus Back Better is worth a look on this. Interesting not least because Boris genuinely seems to have written the introduction in his name. It is written in pure Borisese. The only problem with subsidising fares is that you need to keep spending. It's not capital spend. Though if by doing so you drive up passengers sufficiently it dies start to pay for itself.
For your average Northerner, busses are utterly irrelevant. I'm probably pretty typical of the northern working class type on my street on this - it wouldn't matter to me if they made them completely free and every ten minutes, I'm still going to drive to work. Several major reasons for this: 1) I value my time far too highly to waste an hour a day extra commuting(the "direct" bus from my town to my work takes about an hour vs 25-35mins driving). 2) Buses are inconvenient, they don't go door to door, and leave you standing around in the rain. 3) I work in the middle of nowhere, and use my car at lunchtime to go and get a sandwich from the shop a mile away. Even if busses were free and every ten minutes, I'm going to lose my whole lunch break on this operation, rather than ten minutes of it. 4) My stuff lives in my car. Spare glasses. Socket set. Coat. Headtorch. Pen and notebook. Tape measure. Workboots. Business cards. (and a whole load of other useful stuff!). Can't cart all that with me on the bus every day, and it's a pain having to try and predict what's going to be needed day to day to take it with you. 4) Travelling on busses isn't great anyway - sitting on an uncomfortable seat next to a smelly alcoholic with some screaming kids in the row in front vs rolling smoothly along in effectively a comfy chair with my choice of tunes, my choice of temperature...
The weird thing about the whole leveling up thing is that most of the North is far better for drivers than the South, (not that there isn't room for improvement - you could remove 90% of the congestion in my town with one stretch of road about 1/4 long, following an existing minor road for all but 100 yards) but about the only sort of leveling up that's ever suggested involves hosing odles of tax money at public transport.
I'd suggest that decreasing businesses rates (and or increasing the threshold for the small businesses relief*) in proportion to the distance from Westminster would be a much better use of the cash. Or possibly do the same with income or corp tax, but you'd have to figure out how to prevent people gaiming the system by lying about which property is their main residence/place of business.
*the taper on small business rate relief wins a small prize for the worst thought out taxation system ever, as the taper is so steep as to be more like a cliff edge. My business gets 100% relief. I'd really like to rent another building on the same site to expand, but it would jump me into paying full whack on the lot to the tune of about £9k pa. So instead of expanding into the next building jumping my rent from ~£10k to ~£15k, with the rates added I'll be looking at ~£24k for an increase in usable space of around 50%. So instead I'm not bothering and just struggling on in the space I've got, and everyone loses out.
Totally agree. Buses are not really a thing.
In this part of the Flatlands, the town centre is not where the jobs are, so what's the point of a bus? They take a few non-paying OAPs into town to get harassed by the ne'er do wells but not a lot else. Maybe a few people take the bus in order to get the train out, but not vast numbers.
If I have to go into town I'd rather walk the 2 or so miles anyway. It isn't really any slower. Even those working in the warehouses proliferating everywhere use a car or if they are brave, a bicycle.
What is needed is a better mix of jobs and better roads for both cars and bicycles. Once cars are all electric there really isn't much to be gained by "mass transport", and that time is not far away.
Oh there will be unless the cost of electric cars gets a lot lower.
Most people can’t afford £500+ a month on a lease car
True, although "not far" might be 10-15 years. If electric cars cannot get cheaper (due to battery costs) then there are going to be bigger problems than not having enough buses...
I can see the argument for mass transport in Leeds, where there are thousands of office-based jobs in the centre and a lack of space to put thousands of private cars, but in much of the Red Wall there's lots of small enterprises around the periphery and a hollowed out town centre. I don't think this can be fixed by a better bus service.
I'm not saying buses should be stopped, but improving them massively wouldn't be a good use of money.
Buses and trams get people from the suburbs into the city centre. For people in the surrounding red wall towns they need trains.
There are parts of the country where there are no train lines. There's not a single metre of track in my constituency.
1. You unload stuff off a ship. 2. You stick it in a bonded warehouse. 3. You load it onto another ship.
Either it's totally pointless or I'm missing something.
The idea is that people will build factories in the freeports and then work on things. And businesses in the freeport would be exempt from lots of taxes, etc.
But, FWIW, I think they be essentially pointless in the UK.
Surely freeports are only of benefit in a high tariff setting. If no tariff then what is the benefit of a free port?
There is no customs benefit even in a high tariff setting. The same reliefs are all available outside Freeports. It's a brand and a wrapper for other stuff, that's all. Sometimes brands can be useful - see the old Shenzhen special economic zone, Dublin docks IFSC etc.
“When it comes to the Conservative Party’s flagship ‘Levelling Up’ programme, UK adults are significantly more likely to think that the Chancellor would do a better job at achieving this if he were Prime Minister.”
The public are deluded.
Levelling up dies with Johnson.
Levelling up is already dead with Johnson, it’s just that Rishi would smooth the grave over.
I think it would still exist under Rishi, but be much smaller in scope but probably actually happen. We'd dump a lot of the rubbish like freeports and have a more temporary tax incentive based system to lure big businesses with special economic zones, no employer NI for up to 100 employees in the zones, 10 years of low corporation tax rates. That sort of stuff. There won't be any big shiny stuff but a lot of jobs created, perhaps eventually self sustaining industries where nothing existed previously.
You mean we'd basically do exactly what the Germans did in the former GDR, and which basically works really well?
(The Germans also offered massive tax advantages for employing the long-term unemployed, training workers up and apprenticeships.)
Your second sentence is the key issue.
Improve your workforce and you'll improve your economy.
The Germans have spent trillions on GDR, and it has worked well, at least from an economic perspective.
Not sure why @rcs1000 thinks this is because of tax cuts.
They offered massive tax incentives to firms (German and otherwise) to setup plants in East Germany.
And I mean really massive...
Ah. You say tax incentives, I say potahto. It’s all money, and it’s why East Germany had now overtaken the North of England in terms of living standards.
Where it’s been less effective is arresting depopulation. The young and talented still tend to move West (or perhaps to Berlin). Not sure there’s any policy to arrest that, however, nor even whether there should be.
Part of the trouble with our regional situation is that we have two quite distinct types of regional inequality: 2 types of poor region. The post-industrial towns and cities of the Midlands, North, Wales and parts of the central belt, where jobs are low paid and land is cheap; and the deprived rural and coastal areas where jobs are non-existent or seasonal and tourism-dependent, transport infrastructure is appalling and land and property are either dirt cheap or extremely expensive. They present different challenges. Levelling up Cornwall or Anglesey requires a different set of priorities to levelling up Sunderland.
Not sure how best we tackle our own versions of the Mezzogiorno, Andalusia or Massif Central. Do we just let them age and depopulate?
We don’t really have a Andalusia or Massif Central. Most of Britain is densely populated. We’re more like the Netherlands than Spain.
To answer your question, and also the comment from @another_richard, economic growth in 2022 is very very very very very much the product of cities.
We need to do everything to unlock their potential.
Thankfully, that covers the majority of the UK population.
Cornwall etc are likely to remain tourism, agriculture, and retirement focused.
Did they mention that the North South divide has actually got worse and worse, especially since the 1980s?
It’s higher than at any point since 1900. Probably since 1800 actually.
One of the interesting things about levelling up and the North South divide is that it's not about poverty. There are more poor people in London than anywhere else in the UK. The difference is that London is also full of rich people, while the rest of the country isn't (at least not to the same extent). But having loads of rich people can be a double edged sword, for instance when it comes to everyone else being able to afford a house. My sense is that the North of England was destroyed by the Normans. It got a temporary boost from the industrial revolution, although that also left a lot of disadvantages in its wake (eg undiversified economies, low levels of education). It's a long way from the centre of economic gravity in Europe (Germany/the low countries/Northern Italy) and even more cut off now thanks to Brexit. Transport links are crap. In my opinion their best bet is to declare UDI from Westminster. Raise money in the North, control it in the North. Overcome all the stupid local rivalries that stop the North from acting in a unified way. Waiting for HM Treasury to throw them some scraps is going to lead nowhere. Relying on an empty slogan from a man who doesn't give two shits about them ditto.
The inequality you mention is one of the reasons why the 'become more like London' meme isn't as attractive as Londoners think it is.
Other reason also being housing unaffordability, congestion and the way things grind to a halt if something unexpected happens.
Which is why I don't understand the resentment of Londoners. People seem to be capable of a kind of doublethink that says London gets an unfair advantage, that its inhabitants are spoilt, but at the same time "I couldn't think of anything worse than living in that shithole".
If your idea of a nightmare is living in a busy, crowded, noisy, and polluted place, then it's perfectly possible to reconcile those two opinions.
Then they needn't be envious of Londoners who live in the apparent hellhole of noise, pollution, crime and ridiculous house prices.
London is pathetically low-rise compared to New York or Paris. I don’t know why people think it’s noisy. It’s not, especially. Crime is fairly low too, albeit rising of late.
I’ll give you high house prices and pollution though.
Yes it really isn't noisy. I live on a fairly typical inner London residential street and our bedroom is at the front of the house. We don't have double glazing. At night I can hear absolutely nothing. No traffic or any other noise at all. In fact it's so quiet that if someone does walk up the road talking on their mobile at 3 in the morning, it'll wake me up.
I keep finding myself in the position of defending Boris, which really isn't the intention - I'm as keen to see him go as the next man. And I suppose Rishi is who I'd want to see replace him. And yet - I can't see levelling up going better with anyone but Boris in charge. He's personally invested. Without going into my professional life too much, I know the Boris regime is trying to spend money in the north - ideally before the next election. And it is the treasury which is the biggest obstacle.
I suppose you could argue that a Rishi led government would spend less, but more effectively. Perhaps?
Johnson hasn't spent anything yet. The one major commitment was HS2 and they've cut the budget there. The IRP will never be delivered, because it is literally undeliverable, so that's worthless.
So I'm not quite sure why you think anyone else would 'spend less.'
It takes a bloody age to spend any money in infrastructure. My expectation is that the biggest levelling up spending this parliament will be on buses. Because you can spend on them quickly. There's already quite a lot of bus spending in the pipeline.
Will any of that lead to cheaper fares?
I would expect so. Not least because it's very easy to spend money on fares. Much easier to give public transport authorities to subsidise fares than to reopen a railway line (which in most cases closed for very sound economic reasons). Bus Back Better is worth a look on this. Interesting not least because Boris genuinely seems to have written the introduction in his name. It is written in pure Borisese. The only problem with subsidising fares is that you need to keep spending. It's not capital spend. Though if by doing so you drive up passengers sufficiently it dies start to pay for itself.
For your average Northerner, busses are utterly irrelevant. I'm probably pretty typical of the northern working class type on my street on this - it wouldn't matter to me if they made them completely free and every ten minutes, I'm still going to drive to work. Several major reasons for this: 1) I value my time far too highly to waste an hour a day extra commuting(the "direct" bus from my town to my work takes about an hour vs 25-35mins driving). 2) Buses are inconvenient, they don't go door to door, and leave you standing around in the rain. 3) I work in the middle of nowhere, and use my car at lunchtime to go and get a sandwich from the shop a mile away. Even if busses were free and every ten minutes, I'm going to lose my whole lunch break on this operation, rather than ten minutes of it. 4) My stuff lives in my car. Spare glasses. Socket set. Coat. Headtorch. Pen and notebook. Tape measure. Workboots. Business cards. (and a whole load of other useful stuff!). Can't cart all that with me on the bus every day, and it's a pain having to try and predict what's going to be needed day to day to take it with you. 4) Travelling on busses isn't great anyway - sitting on an uncomfortable seat next to a smelly alcoholic with some screaming kids in the row in front vs rolling smoothly along in effectively a comfy chair with my choice of tunes, my choice of temperature...
The weird thing about the whole leveling up thing is that most of the North is far better for drivers than the South, (not that there isn't room for improvement - you could remove 90% of the congestion in my town with one stretch of road about 1/4 long, following an existing minor road for all but 100 yards) but about the only sort of leveling up that's ever suggested involves hosing odles of tax money at public transport.
I'd suggest that decreasing businesses rates (and or increasing the threshold for the small businesses relief*) in proportion to the distance from Westminster would be a much better use of the cash. Or possibly do the same with income or corp tax, but you'd have to figure out how to prevent people gaiming the system by lying about which property is their main residence/place of business.
*the taper on small business rate relief wins a small prize for the worst thought out taxation system ever, as the taper is so steep as to be more like a cliff edge. My business gets 100% relief. I'd really like to rent another building on the same site to expand, but it would jump me into paying full whack on the lot to the tune of about £9k pa. So instead of expanding into the next building jumping my rent from ~£10k to ~£15k, with the rates added I'll be looking at ~£24k for an increase in usable space of around 50%. So instead I'm not bothering and just struggling on in the space I've got, and everyone loses out.
Totally agree. Buses are not really a thing.
In this part of the Flatlands, the town centre is not where the jobs are, so what's the point of a bus? They take a few non-paying OAPs into town to get harassed by the ne'er do wells but not a lot else. Maybe a few people take the bus in order to get the train out, but not vast numbers.
If I have to go into town I'd rather walk the 2 or so miles anyway. It isn't really any slower. Even those working in the warehouses proliferating everywhere use a car or if they are brave, a bicycle.
What is needed is a better mix of jobs and better roads for both cars and bicycles. Once cars are all electric there really isn't much to be gained by "mass transport", and that time is not far away.
The obsession with public transport is from people who are obsessed with cities.
The realities of towns are deemed to be irrelevant.
There is some logic there though. We continue to urbanise, as does the developed world. To urbanise, to age, and ultimately to depopulate. Japan is usually a helpful pointer to our future. Its population is starting to shrink yet the Tokyo metropolitan area continues to grow rapidly, year on year.
Japan's population is shrinking, and there are an increasing number of ghost towns... even as Tokyo itself grows.
To put the Russia - NATO brinksmanship into context, take a step back from the table and look at the strategic overview. On one side of the table we have Russia. Essentially a dictatorship, Putin can do what he wants. On the other side we have Ukraine - not remotely as strong - and the NATO powers who are really not worried about Ukraine but more worried about NATO members in the Baltic.
The advantages for Russia - its in their back yard so aside from the political claims on the area their supply chain to forces is simple, NATO are divided and relatively weak, the US President can huff but will he puff?
A united NATO - pledged to the defence of a non-NATO member in Russia's back yard - could make Putin at least pause for thought. But we don't have unity and resolve and we aren't likely to get it even if the next target is Lithuania.
Because when push comes to shove are the Europeans really going to throw their populations into the fire over that? In the Cold War they would have been fighting for their own survival against invading soviet forces - any breakout of nuclear war would have turned West Germany into molten glass. But here in 2022? They won't. And Putin knows it.
So the solution to this isn't fly a squadron of B52s in and make baseless threats of force. Its go after all the Russian money that's in our territory. You can't invade Ukraine and wherever you like without facing the wrath of the people who own the Russian state. Again, Putin has to pause for thought.
But stop making baseless cold war threats. We aren't going to risk nuclear annihilation over Ukraine and Putin knows it.
What we can do is confiscate all property and assets of anyone with known links to the Russian government or major oil/gas companies. And put a travel ban on their families as well so they can't use our schools.
So we can respond seriously without pretending we will go to war over Ukraine.
Except that sanctions don´t work. So if you actually want to stop Putin, then you have to *actually* stop him: deterrence must be credible. If Lithuania is not defended then NATO is finished, because the Suwalki gap is the Fulda gap now, and Western weakness about recognising this is why Putin may well take the risk. If we cannot deter a direct attack on NATO, then we will be at the mercy of an exceptionally brutal and evil regime that has crushed freedom at home and, as far as it can, abroad. The threat of nuclear attack is already being made by Putin, who has included a mock attack on Stockholm, Warsaw and Bucharest as the finale to each of the Zapad exercises in recent years. Apart from the Kazakh uprising, the only thing that has delayed Putin´s preparation for an unprovoked and indeed a criminal war against Ukraine, is that he is not sure how much help the Ukrainians have been getting and what equipment they now have.
Its eerily like 1938 and the decisions we make now will determine our whole future. We either stop him now or following the effective collapse of NATO and the Russians imposing a sphere of influence up to the Bug, Vistula, or Rhine we will still have to stop him later. Deterrence only works if you are credible and determined, and Macron and Scholz, let alone Johnson, lack this critical factor. Biden has pulled the alliance together somewhat and sent sufficient forces here to keep Putin guessing, but despite NATO´s overwhelming military capability, we are still being led by the nose by a murderer. We could be on the eve of a disaster on the scale of Dunkirk unless we recognise Putin is an vicious and determined enemy who must be contained and limited in every possible way until the Russians can remove their tyrant in their own time. Winning Cold War II requires that we understand this strategic reality before all else.
Did they mention that the North South divide has actually got worse and worse, especially since the 1980s?
It’s higher than at any point since 1900. Probably since 1800 actually.
One of the interesting things about levelling up and the North South divide is that it's not about poverty. There are more poor people in London than anywhere else in the UK. The difference is that London is also full of rich people, while the rest of the country isn't (at least not to the same extent). But having loads of rich people can be a double edged sword, for instance when it comes to everyone else being able to afford a house. My sense is that the North of England was destroyed by the Normans. It got a temporary boost from the industrial revolution, although that also left a lot of disadvantages in its wake (eg undiversified economies, low levels of education). It's a long way from the centre of economic gravity in Europe (Germany/the low countries/Northern Italy) and even more cut off now thanks to Brexit. Transport links are crap. In my opinion their best bet is to declare UDI from Westminster. Raise money in the North, control it in the North. Overcome all the stupid local rivalries that stop the North from acting in a unified way. Waiting for HM Treasury to throw them some scraps is going to lead nowhere. Relying on an empty slogan from a man who doesn't give two shits about them ditto.
The inequality you mention is one of the reasons why the 'become more like London' meme isn't as attractive as Londoners think it is.
Other reason also being housing unaffordability, congestion and the way things grind to a halt if something unexpected happens.
Which is why I don't understand the resentment of Londoners. People seem to be capable of a kind of doublethink that says London gets an unfair advantage, that its inhabitants are spoilt, but at the same time "I couldn't think of anything worse than living in that shithole".
If your idea of a nightmare is living in a busy, crowded, noisy, and polluted place, then it's perfectly possible to reconcile those two opinions.
Then they needn't be envious of Londoners who live in the apparent hellhole of noise, pollution, crime and ridiculous house prices.
London is pathetically low-rise compared to New York or Paris. I don’t know why people think it’s noisy. It’s not, especially. Crime is fairly low too, albeit rising of late.
I’ll give you high house prices and pollution though.
Yes it really isn't noisy. I live on a fairly typical inner London residential street and our bedroom is at the front of the house. We don't have double glazing. At night I can hear absolutely nothing. No traffic or any other noise at all. In fact it's so quiet that if someone does walk up the road talking on their mobile at 3 in the morning, it'll wake me up.
Nobody ever walks up my street at 3am on their mobile!
Part of the trouble with our regional situation is that we have two quite distinct types of regional inequality: 2 types of poor region. The post-industrial towns and cities of the Midlands, North, Wales and parts of the central belt, where jobs are low paid and land is cheap; and the deprived rural and coastal areas where jobs are non-existent or seasonal and tourism-dependent, transport infrastructure is appalling and land and property are either dirt cheap or extremely expensive. They present different challenges. Levelling up Cornwall or Anglesey requires a different set of priorities to levelling up Sunderland.
Not sure how best we tackle our own versions of the Mezzogiorno, Andalusia or Massif Central. Do we just let them age and depopulate?
We don’t really have a Andalusia or Massif Central. Most of Britain is densely populated. We’re more like the Netherlands than Spain.
To answer your question, and also the comment from @another_richard, economic growth in 2022 is very very very very very much the product of cities.
We need to do everything to unlock their potential.
Thankfully, that covers the majority of the UK population.
Cornwall etc are likely to remain tourism, agriculture, and retirement focused.
I would say large parts of Cumbria, Northumberland, Central Wales and the Scottish Highlands are very inland Andalusia or Massif Central-like. Coastal Andalusia is of course overbuilt with tourist and second home blight like the worst parts of Cornwall or Sussex.
Difference of scale. The Massif Central is… massive.
Nowhere you mention is all that “inland”. Nowhere in the archipelago is far from the sea. Ok, Birmingham, at a pinch.
Am heading there tomorrow, Covid-test permitting (Massif Central, not Birmingham).
Anyway, the point is inaccessibility (nowhere to commute to, and a long drive to an airport), rural economy, ageing and depopulation, emptying towns, economic stagnation - but a quiet, genteel stagnation - and tourism. Sure nowhere is quite as cut off as parts of the Auvergne but we share some of those problems.
Did they mention that the North South divide has actually got worse and worse, especially since the 1980s?
It’s higher than at any point since 1900. Probably since 1800 actually.
One of the interesting things about levelling up and the North South divide is that it's not about poverty. There are more poor people in London than anywhere else in the UK. The difference is that London is also full of rich people, while the rest of the country isn't (at least not to the same extent). But having loads of rich people can be a double edged sword, for instance when it comes to everyone else being able to afford a house. My sense is that the North of England was destroyed by the Normans. It got a temporary boost from the industrial revolution, although that also left a lot of disadvantages in its wake (eg undiversified economies, low levels of education). It's a long way from the centre of economic gravity in Europe (Germany/the low countries/Northern Italy) and even more cut off now thanks to Brexit. Transport links are crap. In my opinion their best bet is to declare UDI from Westminster. Raise money in the North, control it in the North. Overcome all the stupid local rivalries that stop the North from acting in a unified way. Waiting for HM Treasury to throw them some scraps is going to lead nowhere. Relying on an empty slogan from a man who doesn't give two shits about them ditto.
The inequality you mention is one of the reasons why the 'become more like London' meme isn't as attractive as Londoners think it is.
Other reason also being housing unaffordability, congestion and the way things grind to a halt if something unexpected happens.
Which is why I don't understand the resentment of Londoners. People seem to be capable of a kind of doublethink that says London gets an unfair advantage, that its inhabitants are spoilt, but at the same time "I couldn't think of anything worse than living in that shithole".
It's because London gets used as a shorthand for the political and media class that are centred in, and commonly viewed as fixated on, it - although in the latter case it's really about a particular world view and set of interests, rather than the wider conurbation (which contains a lot of poor people, and poor areas in which most of the elite class wouldn't be seen dead.)
Yeah I live in a South London borough of >300k people, ie bigger than most British cities. How often do you think we feature on the news? Probably less often than Wigan.
Part of the trouble with our regional situation is that we have two quite distinct types of regional inequality: 2 types of poor region. The post-industrial towns and cities of the Midlands, North, Wales and parts of the central belt, where jobs are low paid and land is cheap; and the deprived rural and coastal areas where jobs are non-existent or seasonal and tourism-dependent, transport infrastructure is appalling and land and property are either dirt cheap or extremely expensive. They present different challenges. Levelling up Cornwall or Anglesey requires a different set of priorities to levelling up Sunderland.
Not sure how best we tackle our own versions of the Mezzogiorno, Andalusia or Massif Central. Do we just let them age and depopulate?
We don’t really have a Andalusia or Massif Central. Most of Britain is densely populated. We’re more like the Netherlands than Spain.
To answer your question, and also the comment from @another_richard, economic growth in 2022 is very very very very very much the product of cities.
We need to do everything to unlock their potential.
Thankfully, that covers the majority of the UK population.
Cornwall etc are likely to remain tourism, agriculture, and retirement focused.
I would say large parts of Cumbria, Northumberland, Central Wales and the Scottish Highlands are very inland Andalusia or Massif Central-like. Coastal Andalusia is of course overbuilt with tourist and second home blight like the worst parts of Cornwall or Sussex.
Difference of scale. The Massif Central is… massive.
Nowhere you mention is all that “inland”. Nowhere in the archipelago is far from the sea. Ok, Birmingham, at a pinch.
Am heading there tomorrow, Covid-test permitting (Massif Central, not Birmingham).
Anyway, the point is inaccessibility (nowhere to commute to, and a long drive to an airport), rural economy, ageing and depopulation, emptying towns, economic stagnation - but a quiet, genteel stagnation - and tourism. Sure nowhere is quite as cut off as parts of the Auvergne but we share some of those problems.
I’m still struggling to think where you are thinking of.
Did they mention that the North South divide has actually got worse and worse, especially since the 1980s?
It’s higher than at any point since 1900. Probably since 1800 actually.
One of the interesting things about levelling up and the North South divide is that it's not about poverty. There are more poor people in London than anywhere else in the UK. The difference is that London is also full of rich people, while the rest of the country isn't (at least not to the same extent). But having loads of rich people can be a double edged sword, for instance when it comes to everyone else being able to afford a house. My sense is that the North of England was destroyed by the Normans. It got a temporary boost from the industrial revolution, although that also left a lot of disadvantages in its wake (eg undiversified economies, low levels of education). It's a long way from the centre of economic gravity in Europe (Germany/the low countries/Northern Italy) and even more cut off now thanks to Brexit. Transport links are crap. In my opinion their best bet is to declare UDI from Westminster. Raise money in the North, control it in the North. Overcome all the stupid local rivalries that stop the North from acting in a unified way. Waiting for HM Treasury to throw them some scraps is going to lead nowhere. Relying on an empty slogan from a man who doesn't give two shits about them ditto.
The inequality you mention is one of the reasons why the 'become more like London' meme isn't as attractive as Londoners think it is.
Other reason also being housing unaffordability, congestion and the way things grind to a halt if something unexpected happens.
Which is why I don't understand the resentment of Londoners. People seem to be capable of a kind of doublethink that says London gets an unfair advantage, that its inhabitants are spoilt, but at the same time "I couldn't think of anything worse than living in that shithole".
If your idea of a nightmare is living in a busy, crowded, noisy, and polluted place, then it's perfectly possible to reconcile those two opinions.
Then they needn't be envious of Londoners who live in the apparent hellhole of noise, pollution, crime and ridiculous house prices.
London is pathetically low-rise compared to New York or Paris. I don’t know why people think it’s noisy. It’s not, especially. Crime is fairly low too, albeit rising of late.
I’ll give you high house prices and pollution though.
Yes it really isn't noisy. I live on a fairly typical inner London residential street and our bedroom is at the front of the house. We don't have double glazing. At night I can hear absolutely nothing. No traffic or any other noise at all. In fact it's so quiet that if someone does walk up the road talking on their mobile at 3 in the morning, it'll wake me up.
I can hear the background roar of the city and the endless sirens from my leafy Brockley street, especially in summer with the windows open. You forget it's there, but it is. The absence of it in the first lockdown was noticeable.
1. You unload stuff off a ship. 2. You stick it in a bonded warehouse. 3. You load it onto another ship.
Either it's totally pointless or I'm missing something.
The idea is that people will build factories in the freeports and then work on things. And businesses in the freeport would be exempt from lots of taxes, etc.
But, FWIW, I think they be essentially pointless in the UK.
Which is a great idea, but far too small in scale - we should just have a tax gradient so the further you are from London (possibly measured in travel time by the fastest of train and car, rather than geographical distance) the less you pay in various taxes, both personal and business.
As a resident of Los Angeles, that sounds very attractive.
About London being noisy. It's the constant low-level roar of traffic and the distant (or sometimes nearby) sirens that I notice. I've heard of people coming to the countryside and getting freaked out by the silence. I think it's likely you're just attuned to the city noises whereas I'm not.
Shami's gone. Paula Vennells has gone. So has Dido. And Robert Jenrick.
Cressida's finally gone.
Who should I have in my sights next?
Boris and Priti are still there, of course. And the ineffably useless Suella.
Anyone else we should looking at with a beady eye?
FWIW I think that, if Boris Johnson ultimately falls before the next election, Priti Patel falls as well. The successor will undertake a major reshuffle; they will want to remove Patel to bring in a new broom at the Home Office (probably in part to have her carry the can for the failure to solve the boat people problem,) she's not going to get a move sideways to the Treasury or Foreign Office, and probably won't accept a demotion.
I keep finding myself in the position of defending Boris, which really isn't the intention - I'm as keen to see him go as the next man. And I suppose Rishi is who I'd want to see replace him. And yet - I can't see levelling up going better with anyone but Boris in charge. He's personally invested. Without going into my professional life too much, I know the Boris regime is trying to spend money in the north - ideally before the next election. And it is the treasury which is the biggest obstacle.
I suppose you could argue that a Rishi led government would spend less, but more effectively. Perhaps?
Johnson hasn't spent anything yet. The one major commitment was HS2 and they've cut the budget there. The IRP will never be delivered, because it is literally undeliverable, so that's worthless.
So I'm not quite sure why you think anyone else would 'spend less.'
It takes a bloody age to spend any money in infrastructure. My expectation is that the biggest levelling up spending this parliament will be on buses. Because you can spend on them quickly. There's already quite a lot of bus spending in the pipeline.
Will any of that lead to cheaper fares?
I would expect so. Not least because it's very easy to spend money on fares. Much easier to give public transport authorities to subsidise fares than to reopen a railway line (which in most cases closed for very sound economic reasons). Bus Back Better is worth a look on this. Interesting not least because Boris genuinely seems to have written the introduction in his name. It is written in pure Borisese. The only problem with subsidising fares is that you need to keep spending. It's not capital spend. Though if by doing so you drive up passengers sufficiently it dies start to pay for itself.
For your average Northerner, busses are utterly irrelevant. I'm probably pretty typical of the northern working class type on my street on this - it wouldn't matter to me if they made them completely free and every ten minutes, I'm still going to drive to work. Several major reasons for this: 1) I value my time far too highly to waste an hour a day extra commuting(the "direct" bus from my town to my work takes about an hour vs 25-35mins driving). 2) Buses are inconvenient, they don't go door to door, and leave you standing around in the rain. 3) I work in the middle of nowhere, and use my car at lunchtime to go and get a sandwich from the shop a mile away. Even if busses were free and every ten minutes, I'm going to lose my whole lunch break on this operation, rather than ten minutes of it. 4) My stuff lives in my car. Spare glasses. Socket set. Coat. Headtorch. Pen and notebook. Tape measure. Workboots. Business cards. (and a whole load of other useful stuff!). Can't cart all that with me on the bus every day, and it's a pain having to try and predict what's going to be needed day to day to take it with you. 4) Travelling on busses isn't great anyway - sitting on an uncomfortable seat next to a smelly alcoholic with some screaming kids in the row in front vs rolling smoothly along in effectively a comfy chair with my choice of tunes, my choice of temperature...
The weird thing about the whole leveling up thing is that most of the North is far better for drivers than the South, (not that there isn't room for improvement - you could remove 90% of the congestion in my town with one stretch of road about 1/4 long, following an existing minor road for all but 100 yards) but about the only sort of leveling up that's ever suggested involves hosing odles of tax money at public transport.
I'd suggest that decreasing businesses rates (and or increasing the threshold for the small businesses relief*) in proportion to the distance from Westminster would be a much better use of the cash. Or possibly do the same with income or corp tax, but you'd have to figure out how to prevent people gaiming the system by lying about which property is their main residence/place of business.
*the taper on small business rate relief wins a small prize for the worst thought out taxation system ever, as the taper is so steep as to be more like a cliff edge. My business gets 100% relief. I'd really like to rent another building on the same site to expand, but it would jump me into paying full whack on the lot to the tune of about £9k pa. So instead of expanding into the next building jumping my rent from ~£10k to ~£15k, with the rates added I'll be looking at ~£24k for an increase in usable space of around 50%. So instead I'm not bothering and just struggling on in the space I've got, and everyone loses out.
Totally agree. Buses are not really a thing.
In this part of the Flatlands, the town centre is not where the jobs are, so what's the point of a bus? They take a few non-paying OAPs into town to get harassed by the ne'er do wells but not a lot else. Maybe a few people take the bus in order to get the train out, but not vast numbers.
If I have to go into town I'd rather walk the 2 or so miles anyway. It isn't really any slower. Even those working in the warehouses proliferating everywhere use a car or if they are brave, a bicycle.
What is needed is a better mix of jobs and better roads for both cars and bicycles. Once cars are all electric there really isn't much to be gained by "mass transport", and that time is not far away.
The obsession with public transport is from people who are obsessed with cities.
The realities of towns are deemed to be irrelevant.
There are people in my village who don't own a car. If it wasn't for the bus, they'd have to cycle or walk for 15 miles to do a shop. Don't tell me public transport is only for the cities.
So ?
Compare public transport use in cities to towns to rural areas and you'll see its far more dominant in cities than the others.
I suspect that's entirely due to space considerations. It's a lot of faff to get parked in some cities. I lived in Edinburgh for a while, and it was far more hassle to drive into the city centre than to just get on the bus.
Indeed so.
Which is why public transport is a big issue in cities.
Elsewhere it isn't as cars are relatively much more important.
I keep finding myself in the position of defending Boris, which really isn't the intention - I'm as keen to see him go as the next man. And I suppose Rishi is who I'd want to see replace him. And yet - I can't see levelling up going better with anyone but Boris in charge. He's personally invested. Without going into my professional life too much, I know the Boris regime is trying to spend money in the north - ideally before the next election. And it is the treasury which is the biggest obstacle.
I suppose you could argue that a Rishi led government would spend less, but more effectively. Perhaps?
Johnson hasn't spent anything yet. The one major commitment was HS2 and they've cut the budget there. The IRP will never be delivered, because it is literally undeliverable, so that's worthless.
So I'm not quite sure why you think anyone else would 'spend less.'
It takes a bloody age to spend any money in infrastructure. My expectation is that the biggest levelling up spending this parliament will be on buses. Because you can spend on them quickly. There's already quite a lot of bus spending in the pipeline.
Will any of that lead to cheaper fares?
I would expect so. Not least because it's very easy to spend money on fares. Much easier to give public transport authorities to subsidise fares than to reopen a railway line (which in most cases closed for very sound economic reasons). Bus Back Better is worth a look on this. Interesting not least because Boris genuinely seems to have written the introduction in his name. It is written in pure Borisese. The only problem with subsidising fares is that you need to keep spending. It's not capital spend. Though if by doing so you drive up passengers sufficiently it dies start to pay for itself.
For your average Northerner, busses are utterly irrelevant. I'm probably pretty typical of the northern working class type on my street on this - it wouldn't matter to me if they made them completely free and every ten minutes, I'm still going to drive to work. Several major reasons for this: 1) I value my time far too highly to waste an hour a day extra commuting(the "direct" bus from my town to my work takes about an hour vs 25-35mins driving). 2) Buses are inconvenient, they don't go door to door, and leave you standing around in the rain. 3) I work in the middle of nowhere, and use my car at lunchtime to go and get a sandwich from the shop a mile away. Even if busses were free and every ten minutes, I'm going to lose my whole lunch break on this operation, rather than ten minutes of it. 4) My stuff lives in my car. Spare glasses. Socket set. Coat. Headtorch. Pen and notebook. Tape measure. Workboots. Business cards. (and a whole load of other useful stuff!). Can't cart all that with me on the bus every day, and it's a pain having to try and predict what's going to be needed day to day to take it with you. 4) Travelling on busses isn't great anyway - sitting on an uncomfortable seat next to a smelly alcoholic with some screaming kids in the row in front vs rolling smoothly along in effectively a comfy chair with my choice of tunes, my choice of temperature...
The weird thing about the whole leveling up thing is that most of the North is far better for drivers than the South, (not that there isn't room for improvement - you could remove 90% of the congestion in my town with one stretch of road about 1/4 long, following an existing minor road for all but 100 yards) but about the only sort of leveling up that's ever suggested involves hosing odles of tax money at public transport.
I'd suggest that decreasing businesses rates (and or increasing the threshold for the small businesses relief*) in proportion to the distance from Westminster would be a much better use of the cash. Or possibly do the same with income or corp tax, but you'd have to figure out how to prevent people gaiming the system by lying about which property is their main residence/place of business.
*the taper on small business rate relief wins a small prize for the worst thought out taxation system ever, as the taper is so steep as to be more like a cliff edge. My business gets 100% relief. I'd really like to rent another building on the same site to expand, but it would jump me into paying full whack on the lot to the tune of about £9k pa. So instead of expanding into the next building jumping my rent from ~£10k to ~£15k, with the rates added I'll be looking at ~£24k for an increase in usable space of around 50%. So instead I'm not bothering and just struggling on in the space I've got, and everyone loses out.
Totally agree. Buses are not really a thing.
In this part of the Flatlands, the town centre is not where the jobs are, so what's the point of a bus? They take a few non-paying OAPs into town to get harassed by the ne'er do wells but not a lot else. Maybe a few people take the bus in order to get the train out, but not vast numbers.
If I have to go into town I'd rather walk the 2 or so miles anyway. It isn't really any slower. Even those working in the warehouses proliferating everywhere use a car or if they are brave, a bicycle.
What is needed is a better mix of jobs and better roads for both cars and bicycles. Once cars are all electric there really isn't much to be gained by "mass transport", and that time is not far away.
The obsession with public transport is from people who are obsessed with cities.
The realities of towns are deemed to be irrelevant.
There are people in my village who don't own a car. If it wasn't for the bus, they'd have to cycle or walk for 15 miles to do a shop. Don't tell me public transport is only for the cities.
So ?
Compare public transport use in cities to towns to rural areas and you'll see its far more dominant in cities than the others.
I suspect that's entirely due to space considerations. It's a lot of faff to get parked in some cities. I lived in Edinburgh for a while, and it was far more hassle to drive into the city centre than to just get on the bus.
Indeed so.
Which is why public transport is a big issue in cities.
Elsewhere it isn't as cars are relatively much more important.
Part of the trouble with our regional situation is that we have two quite distinct types of regional inequality: 2 types of poor region. The post-industrial towns and cities of the Midlands, North, Wales and parts of the central belt, where jobs are low paid and land is cheap; and the deprived rural and coastal areas where jobs are non-existent or seasonal and tourism-dependent, transport infrastructure is appalling and land and property are either dirt cheap or extremely expensive. They present different challenges. Levelling up Cornwall or Anglesey requires a different set of priorities to levelling up Sunderland.
Not sure how best we tackle our own versions of the Mezzogiorno, Andalusia or Massif Central. Do we just let them age and depopulate?
We don’t really have a Andalusia or Massif Central. Most of Britain is densely populated. We’re more like the Netherlands than Spain.
To answer your question, and also the comment from @another_richard, economic growth in 2022 is very very very very very much the product of cities.
We need to do everything to unlock their potential.
Thankfully, that covers the majority of the UK population.
Cornwall etc are likely to remain tourism, agriculture, and retirement focused.
I would say large parts of Cumbria, Northumberland, Central Wales and the Scottish Highlands are very inland Andalusia or Massif Central-like. Coastal Andalusia is of course overbuilt with tourist and second home blight like the worst parts of Cornwall or Sussex.
Difference of scale. The Massif Central is… massive.
Nowhere you mention is all that “inland”. Nowhere in the archipelago is far from the sea. Ok, Birmingham, at a pinch.
Am heading there tomorrow, Covid-test permitting (Massif Central, not Birmingham).
Anyway, the point is inaccessibility (nowhere to commute to, and a long drive to an airport), rural economy, ageing and depopulation, emptying towns, economic stagnation - but a quiet, genteel stagnation - and tourism. Sure nowhere is quite as cut off as parts of the Auvergne but we share some of those problems.
I’m still struggling to think where you are thinking of.
Maybe parts of Lincolnshire? Mid and West Wales?
Mid and West Wales, North Devon, Upland Northumberland, Dumfries and Galloway. I don't know Lincolnshire enough to comment, but that seems more like a Pas de Calais to me.
Also, some good news for the North, my old employer is opening up a giant office to consolidate and massively expand their presence in Liverpool. I've heard they're looking to hire between 200 and 250 highly paid software developers in the city in addition to the 200 or so they already have.
The policy of moving development to Amsterdam seems to be have been completely reversed, I'm told there were issues with skill levels, unrealistic demands from underskilled people and a general lack of experience. The word is that Liverpool, Cambridge and London will see a big expansion as well as some in Surrey. Two years ago people were wondering whether PlayStation's time in the UK was finished and existing studious wound up once their projects were completed. A real turnaround and win for UK game development.
Great news.
Liverpool could be / should be a real hub for creative development and already has a gaming heritage. It really should have been given Channel 4, too. Leeds should stick to professional services.
Yeah having Manchester Uni just down the road is a huge attraction and the recruitment team all say that hiring in Liverpool is really easy because property prices and rent is so low compared to Manchester while the city is still pretty vibrant in parts and attractive to live in for 20 somethings with ComSci degrees. Property developers should really be buying up the cheaper parts of town and getting ready for a Shoreditch/Hackney style turnaround IMO with nice redeveloped houses and flats being made available.
On your earlier point about the mid-level cities of England being underpowered compared to Europe, I think part of the equation is education. All across Europe average education levels are significantly higher, not just through university but also through vocational schemes. London has got three world class universities (Imperial, UCL and LSE) and two or three more reasonably good ones, there's not many places in the world that can claim that, we can't replicate it in the rest of the UK but we can definitely raise standards with better vocational training and professional development for non-degree based courses.
The skills issue is a big deal, yes. It’s the other big problem apart from infrastructure.
Yet, we already have great universities all across the UK, and we already spend a lot on primary education by int’l standards.
The issue seems to be that our primary school spend is very inefficient at least in terms of outputs, and our vocational / professional development is non-existent / appalling.
My wife's brother is the best example of this, she's from a working class family in Switzerland, her dad was an immigrant and her mum didn't work and wasn't allowed to continue her education beyond the the age of 16. My wife is a very driven person, she simply won't take no for an answer and has made a career in being a financial crime and fraud investigator for a big investment fund.
Her brother, on the other hand, is one of life's wasters. He flunked school, didn't bother to learn French or English and his standard German is not very good either, he was generally an idiot whenever I saw him. Yet today he's a fully qualified plumber and apparently very good at it and he's got a long term partner and they're about to get married.
In the north of England my wife would have ended up working a dead end job in Asda and/or got pregnant at 17 because of the lack of other things to do and her brother would be unemployed sitting on benefits living off the state.
In Switzerland they don't give anyone that option.
About London being noisy. It's the constant low-level roar of traffic and the distant (or sometimes nearby) sirens that I notice. I've heard of people coming to the countryside and getting freaked out by the silence. I think it's likely you're just attuned to the city noises whereas I'm not.
If you think the countryside is quiet, then you must not have lived in it
To put the Russia - NATO brinksmanship into context, take a step back from the table and look at the strategic overview. On one side of the table we have Russia. Essentially a dictatorship, Putin can do what he wants. On the other side we have Ukraine - not remotely as strong - and the NATO powers who are really not worried about Ukraine but more worried about NATO members in the Baltic.
The advantages for Russia - its in their back yard so aside from the political claims on the area their supply chain to forces is simple, NATO are divided and relatively weak, the US President can huff but will he puff?
A united NATO - pledged to the defence of a non-NATO member in Russia's back yard - could make Putin at least pause for thought. But we don't have unity and resolve and we aren't likely to get it even if the next target is Lithuania.
Because when push comes to shove are the Europeans really going to throw their populations into the fire over that? In the Cold War they would have been fighting for their own survival against invading soviet forces - any breakout of nuclear war would have turned West Germany into molten glass. But here in 2022? They won't. And Putin knows it.
So the solution to this isn't fly a squadron of B52s in and make baseless threats of force. Its go after all the Russian money that's in our territory. You can't invade Ukraine and wherever you like without facing the wrath of the people who own the Russian state. Again, Putin has to pause for thought.
But stop making baseless cold war threats. We aren't going to risk nuclear annihilation over Ukraine and Putin knows it.
What we can do is confiscate all property and assets of anyone with known links to the Russian government or major oil/gas companies. And put a travel ban on their families as well so they can't use our schools.
So we can respond seriously without pretending we will go to war over Ukraine.
Except that sanctions don´t work. So if you actually want to stop Putin, then you have to *actually* stop him: deterrence must be credible. If Lithuania is not defended then NATO is finished, because the Suwalki gap is the Fulda gap now, and Western weakness about recognising this is why Putin may well take the risk. If we cannot deter a direct attack on NATO, then we will be at the mercy of an exceptionally brutal and evil regime that has crushed freedom at home and, as far as it can, abroad. The threat of nuclear attack is already being made by Putin, who has included a mock attack on Stockholm, Warsaw and Bucharest as the finale to each of the Zapad exercises in recent years. Apart from the Kazakh uprising, the only thing that has delayed Putin´s preparation for an unprovoked and indeed a criminal war against Ukraine, is that he is not sure how much help the Ukrainians have been getting and what equipment they now have.
Its eerily like 1938 and the decisions we make now will determine our whole future. We either stop him now or following the effective collapse of NATO and the Russians imposing a sphere of influence up to the Bug, Vistula, or Rhine we will still have to stop him later. Deterrence only works if you are credible and determined, and Macron and Scholz, let alone Johnson, lack this critical factor. Biden has pulled the alliance together somewhat and sent sufficient forces here to keep Putin guessing, but despite NATO´s overwhelming military capability, we are still being led by the nose by a murderer. We could be on the eve of a disaster on the scale of Dunkirk unless we recognise Putin is an vicious and determined enemy who must be contained and limited in every possible way until the Russians can remove their tyrant in their own time. Winning Cold War II requires that we understand this strategic reality before all else.
Nah. Putin will struggle even in Ukraine. He thought that the Donbass would support him, but they didn't, hence the the need for Russian "volunteers". Putin might try, but will get a very bloody nose in Ukraine, not least because the Ukranians will supply the blood, NATO the intelligence and arms.
Did they mention that the North South divide has actually got worse and worse, especially since the 1980s?
It’s higher than at any point since 1900. Probably since 1800 actually.
One of the interesting things about levelling up and the North South divide is that it's not about poverty. There are more poor people in London than anywhere else in the UK. The difference is that London is also full of rich people, while the rest of the country isn't (at least not to the same extent). But having loads of rich people can be a double edged sword, for instance when it comes to everyone else being able to afford a house. My sense is that the North of England was destroyed by the Normans. It got a temporary boost from the industrial revolution, although that also left a lot of disadvantages in its wake (eg undiversified economies, low levels of education). It's a long way from the centre of economic gravity in Europe (Germany/the low countries/Northern Italy) and even more cut off now thanks to Brexit. Transport links are crap. In my opinion their best bet is to declare UDI from Westminster. Raise money in the North, control it in the North. Overcome all the stupid local rivalries that stop the North from acting in a unified way. Waiting for HM Treasury to throw them some scraps is going to lead nowhere. Relying on an empty slogan from a man who doesn't give two shits about them ditto.
The inequality you mention is one of the reasons why the 'become more like London' meme isn't as attractive as Londoners think it is.
Other reason also being housing unaffordability, congestion and the way things grind to a halt if something unexpected happens.
Which is why I don't understand the resentment of Londoners. People seem to be capable of a kind of doublethink that says London gets an unfair advantage, that its inhabitants are spoilt, but at the same time "I couldn't think of anything worse than living in that shithole".
If your idea of a nightmare is living in a busy, crowded, noisy, and polluted place, then it's perfectly possible to reconcile those two opinions.
Then they needn't be envious of Londoners who live in the apparent hellhole of noise, pollution, crime and ridiculous house prices.
This is one of the weird things about this whole business. I lothe London. Its foul. I wouldn't live there if it was the last bit of earth left not turned to glass the Nuclear armageddon. Its also stupendously expensive, because apparently lots of people like living on top of each other in pokey little house. And, as has been mentioned, it's got loads of poor people, just like everywhere else.
By comparison, the North, as is, presently is great - both far nicer and also more affordable.
So I've never really got why there is such an bizarre obsession with "levelling up". I strongly suspect that I've more disposable income as a Northerner than I would have in the SE, especially once adjusted for the vastly greater cost of just about everything I might spend said disposable income on. What's worse is that because it's London types who wibble on about leveling up, they seem to think it's all about public transport, not realising people use it in London because London is so over-crowded there's little other option, not because it's actually any good.
The problem with the government is that it's become far too used to hosing money at everything and anything. I'm already spending half my life earning money to pay tax so the government can spunk it on stuff I don't want or need. Wasting my money on empty busses and pointless trainsets (if there was an actual business case for HS2/3/NPR etc, it could be done by private companies without subsidy) is utterly counterproductive.
I know lots of you probably hate Sadiq Khan but it's an impressive move.
At least someone of power in London has the courage to punish serial incompetence.
What about the argument, if he has this power where has he been keeping it?
Why now? There is nothing in last few weeks to prompt a sudden change of heart about her?
It has to be linked to party scandal cover up, nothing else. As both Patel and Khan have indicated from nowhere last couple of days they are minded to do this. Both have them have to answer under caution when they first heard of the lockdown parties.
The thing I don't see is: what does Khan get out of protecting Boris?
Deflecting blame from himself. Perhaps something to do with when he knew something, what advice he gave.
Can, at this stage, any of us be completely closed to the idea, Khan, Patel, Johnson have cooked something up between themselves to deflect blame about something to the police?
To answer the previous post, which I can’t be bothered quoting, the obsession with Levelling Up is because the North’s* economic productivity is pathetic compared with the rest of Western Europe/USA etc.
It’s true that your disposable income might be higher - house prices being a whole other fiasco - but to large extent you are living off the money earned by the South.
*North, really meaning the North, Midlands, Wales, & Northern Ireland.
Did they mention that the North South divide has actually got worse and worse, especially since the 1980s?
It’s higher than at any point since 1900. Probably since 1800 actually.
One of the interesting things about levelling up and the North South divide is that it's not about poverty. There are more poor people in London than anywhere else in the UK. The difference is that London is also full of rich people, while the rest of the country isn't (at least not to the same extent). But having loads of rich people can be a double edged sword, for instance when it comes to everyone else being able to afford a house. My sense is that the North of England was destroyed by the Normans. It got a temporary boost from the industrial revolution, although that also left a lot of disadvantages in its wake (eg undiversified economies, low levels of education). It's a long way from the centre of economic gravity in Europe (Germany/the low countries/Northern Italy) and even more cut off now thanks to Brexit. Transport links are crap. In my opinion their best bet is to declare UDI from Westminster. Raise money in the North, control it in the North. Overcome all the stupid local rivalries that stop the North from acting in a unified way. Waiting for HM Treasury to throw them some scraps is going to lead nowhere. Relying on an empty slogan from a man who doesn't give two shits about them ditto.
The inequality you mention is one of the reasons why the 'become more like London' meme isn't as attractive as Londoners think it is.
Other reason also being housing unaffordability, congestion and the way things grind to a halt if something unexpected happens.
I don't think anyone wants the North to become more like London, least of all Londoners! The future of the North is in the hands of Northerners, and always has been.
Yet your fellow Londoner Gardenwalker thinks that the future is cities and more cities.
That may be great for those who want to live in cities - or at least the rich and skilled among them.
But for the tens of millions who live in towns perhaps they prefer their affordable housing, lower pollution/congestion and easy access to the countryside.
About London being noisy. It's the constant low-level roar of traffic and the distant (or sometimes nearby) sirens that I notice. I've heard of people coming to the countryside and getting freaked out by the silence. I think it's likely you're just attuned to the city noises whereas I'm not.
If you think the countryside is quiet, then you must not have lived in it
The countryside is actually far louder than London, especially at the time of day when it is least welcome!
I keep finding myself in the position of defending Boris, which really isn't the intention - I'm as keen to see him go as the next man. And I suppose Rishi is who I'd want to see replace him. And yet - I can't see levelling up going better with anyone but Boris in charge. He's personally invested. Without going into my professional life too much, I know the Boris regime is trying to spend money in the north - ideally before the next election. And it is the treasury which is the biggest obstacle.
I suppose you could argue that a Rishi led government would spend less, but more effectively. Perhaps?
Johnson hasn't spent anything yet. The one major commitment was HS2 and they've cut the budget there. The IRP will never be delivered, because it is literally undeliverable, so that's worthless.
So I'm not quite sure why you think anyone else would 'spend less.'
It takes a bloody age to spend any money in infrastructure. My expectation is that the biggest levelling up spending this parliament will be on buses. Because you can spend on them quickly. There's already quite a lot of bus spending in the pipeline.
Will any of that lead to cheaper fares?
I would expect so. Not least because it's very easy to spend money on fares. Much easier to give public transport authorities to subsidise fares than to reopen a railway line (which in most cases closed for very sound economic reasons). Bus Back Better is worth a look on this. Interesting not least because Boris genuinely seems to have written the introduction in his name. It is written in pure Borisese. The only problem with subsidising fares is that you need to keep spending. It's not capital spend. Though if by doing so you drive up passengers sufficiently it dies start to pay for itself.
For your average Northerner, busses are utterly irrelevant. I'm probably pretty typical of the northern working class type on my street on this - it wouldn't matter to me if they made them completely free and every ten minutes, I'm still going to drive to work. Several major reasons for this: 1) I value my time far too highly to waste an hour a day extra commuting(the "direct" bus from my town to my work takes about an hour vs 25-35mins driving). 2) Buses are inconvenient, they don't go door to door, and leave you standing around in the rain. 3) I work in the middle of nowhere, and use my car at lunchtime to go and get a sandwich from the shop a mile away. Even if busses were free and every ten minutes, I'm going to lose my whole lunch break on this operation, rather than ten minutes of it. 4) My stuff lives in my car. Spare glasses. Socket set. Coat. Headtorch. Pen and notebook. Tape measure. Workboots. Business cards. (and a whole load of other useful stuff!). Can't cart all that with me on the bus every day, and it's a pain having to try and predict what's going to be needed day to day to take it with you. 4) Travelling on busses isn't great anyway - sitting on an uncomfortable seat next to a smelly alcoholic with some screaming kids in the row in front vs rolling smoothly along in effectively a comfy chair with my choice of tunes, my choice of temperature...
The weird thing about the whole leveling up thing is that most of the North is far better for drivers than the South, (not that there isn't room for improvement - you could remove 90% of the congestion in my town with one stretch of road about 1/4 long, following an existing minor road for all but 100 yards) but about the only sort of leveling up that's ever suggested involves hosing odles of tax money at public transport.
I'd suggest that decreasing businesses rates (and or increasing the threshold for the small businesses relief*) in proportion to the distance from Westminster would be a much better use of the cash. Or possibly do the same with income or corp tax, but you'd have to figure out how to prevent people gaiming the system by lying about which property is their main residence/place of business.
*the taper on small business rate relief wins a small prize for the worst thought out taxation system ever, as the taper is so steep as to be more like a cliff edge. My business gets 100% relief. I'd really like to rent another building on the same site to expand, but it would jump me into paying full whack on the lot to the tune of about £9k pa. So instead of expanding into the next building jumping my rent from ~£10k to ~£15k, with the rates added I'll be looking at ~£24k for an increase in usable space of around 50%. So instead I'm not bothering and just struggling on in the space I've got, and everyone loses out.
Totally agree. Buses are not really a thing.
In this part of the Flatlands, the town centre is not where the jobs are, so what's the point of a bus? They take a few non-paying OAPs into town to get harassed by the ne'er do wells but not a lot else. Maybe a few people take the bus in order to get the train out, but not vast numbers.
If I have to go into town I'd rather walk the 2 or so miles anyway. It isn't really any slower. Even those working in the warehouses proliferating everywhere use a car or if they are brave, a bicycle.
What is needed is a better mix of jobs and better roads for both cars and bicycles. Once cars are all electric there really isn't much to be gained by "mass transport", and that time is not far away.
Oh there will be unless the cost of electric cars gets a lot lower.
Most people can’t afford £500+ a month on a lease car
Do not forget to add in the odd, but increasingly common, feature of newer cars were certain features are disabled so that your manufacturer can turn them back on through a subscription model. Want your heated seats to work? That will be £10 a month please! Aircon? £30 per month please...
I have not flown in years. I am seriously wondering if I will ever buy another car.
I was away to order a Volvo earlier in the year, before spotting that the buggers we’re going to charge me a fortune for… mudflaps! Yes, those stupid wee plastic bits behind the wheel arches. I think it was about £300 for the rear wheels and £100 for the front. Since when we’re mudflaps an optional extra?
MG have got the right idea: virtually no optional extras.
Did they mention that the North South divide has actually got worse and worse, especially since the 1980s?
It’s higher than at any point since 1900. Probably since 1800 actually.
One of the interesting things about levelling up and the North South divide is that it's not about poverty. There are more poor people in London than anywhere else in the UK. The difference is that London is also full of rich people, while the rest of the country isn't (at least not to the same extent). But having loads of rich people can be a double edged sword, for instance when it comes to everyone else being able to afford a house. My sense is that the North of England was destroyed by the Normans. It got a temporary boost from the industrial revolution, although that also left a lot of disadvantages in its wake (eg undiversified economies, low levels of education). It's a long way from the centre of economic gravity in Europe (Germany/the low countries/Northern Italy) and even more cut off now thanks to Brexit. Transport links are crap. In my opinion their best bet is to declare UDI from Westminster. Raise money in the North, control it in the North. Overcome all the stupid local rivalries that stop the North from acting in a unified way. Waiting for HM Treasury to throw them some scraps is going to lead nowhere. Relying on an empty slogan from a man who doesn't give two shits about them ditto.
The inequality you mention is one of the reasons why the 'become more like London' meme isn't as attractive as Londoners think it is.
Other reason also being housing unaffordability, congestion and the way things grind to a halt if something unexpected happens.
Which is why I don't understand the resentment of Londoners. People seem to be capable of a kind of doublethink that says London gets an unfair advantage, that its inhabitants are spoilt, but at the same time "I couldn't think of anything worse than living in that shithole".
If your idea of a nightmare is living in a busy, crowded, noisy, and polluted place, then it's perfectly possible to reconcile those two opinions.
Then they needn't be envious of Londoners who live in the apparent hellhole of noise, pollution, crime and ridiculous house prices.
This is one of the weird things about this whole business. I lothe London. Its foul. I wouldn't live there if it was the last bit of earth left not turned to glass the Nuclear armageddon. Its also stupendously expensive, because apparently lots of people like living on top of each other in pokey little house. And, as has been mentioned, it's got loads of poor people, just like everywhere else.
By comparison, the North, as is, presently is great - both far nicer and also more affordable.
So I've never really got why there is such an bizarre obsession with "levelling up". I strongly suspect that I've more disposable income as a Northerner than I would have in the SE, especially once adjusted for the vastly greater cost of just about everything I might spend said disposable income on. What's worse is that because it's London types who wibble on about leveling up, they seem to think it's all about public transport, not realising people use it in London because London is so over-crowded there's little other option, not because it's actually any good.
The problem with the government is that it's become far too used to hosing money at everything and anything. I'm already spending half my life earning money to pay tax so the government can spunk it on stuff I don't want or need. Wasting my money on empty busses and pointless trainsets (if there was an actual business case for HS2/3/NPR etc, it could be done by private companies without subsidy) is utterly counterproductive.
I agree. Leicester is a cheap place to live, and on a Consultant salary I can live far better than I could afford in London. Living overlooking fields and a 20 minute commute helps too. Life is sweet away from shit city.
I keep finding myself in the position of defending Boris, which really isn't the intention - I'm as keen to see him go as the next man. And I suppose Rishi is who I'd want to see replace him. And yet - I can't see levelling up going better with anyone but Boris in charge. He's personally invested. Without going into my professional life too much, I know the Boris regime is trying to spend money in the north - ideally before the next election. And it is the treasury which is the biggest obstacle.
I suppose you could argue that a Rishi led government would spend less, but more effectively. Perhaps?
Johnson hasn't spent anything yet. The one major commitment was HS2 and they've cut the budget there. The IRP will never be delivered, because it is literally undeliverable, so that's worthless.
So I'm not quite sure why you think anyone else would 'spend less.'
It takes a bloody age to spend any money in infrastructure. My expectation is that the biggest levelling up spending this parliament will be on buses. Because you can spend on them quickly. There's already quite a lot of bus spending in the pipeline.
Will any of that lead to cheaper fares?
I would expect so. Not least because it's very easy to spend money on fares. Much easier to give public transport authorities to subsidise fares than to reopen a railway line (which in most cases closed for very sound economic reasons). Bus Back Better is worth a look on this. Interesting not least because Boris genuinely seems to have written the introduction in his name. It is written in pure Borisese. The only problem with subsidising fares is that you need to keep spending. It's not capital spend. Though if by doing so you drive up passengers sufficiently it dies start to pay for itself.
For your average Northerner, busses are utterly irrelevant. I'm probably pretty typical of the northern working class type on my street on this - it wouldn't matter to me if they made them completely free and every ten minutes, I'm still going to drive to work. Several major reasons for this: 1) I value my time far too highly to waste an hour a day extra commuting(the "direct" bus from my town to my work takes about an hour vs 25-35mins driving). 2) Buses are inconvenient, they don't go door to door, and leave you standing around in the rain. 3) I work in the middle of nowhere, and use my car at lunchtime to go and get a sandwich from the shop a mile away. Even if busses were free and every ten minutes, I'm going to lose my whole lunch break on this operation, rather than ten minutes of it. 4) My stuff lives in my car. Spare glasses. Socket set. Coat. Headtorch. Pen and notebook. Tape measure. Workboots. Business cards. (and a whole load of other useful stuff!). Can't cart all that with me on the bus every day, and it's a pain having to try and predict what's going to be needed day to day to take it with you. 4) Travelling on busses isn't great anyway - sitting on an uncomfortable seat next to a smelly alcoholic with some screaming kids in the row in front vs rolling smoothly along in effectively a comfy chair with my choice of tunes, my choice of temperature...
The weird thing about the whole leveling up thing is that most of the North is far better for drivers than the South, (not that there isn't room for improvement - you could remove 90% of the congestion in my town with one stretch of road about 1/4 long, following an existing minor road for all but 100 yards) but about the only sort of leveling up that's ever suggested involves hosing odles of tax money at public transport.
I'd suggest that decreasing businesses rates (and or increasing the threshold for the small businesses relief*) in proportion to the distance from Westminster would be a much better use of the cash. Or possibly do the same with income or corp tax, but you'd have to figure out how to prevent people gaiming the system by lying about which property is their main residence/place of business.
*the taper on small business rate relief wins a small prize for the worst thought out taxation system ever, as the taper is so steep as to be more like a cliff edge. My business gets 100% relief. I'd really like to rent another building on the same site to expand, but it would jump me into paying full whack on the lot to the tune of about £9k pa. So instead of expanding into the next building jumping my rent from ~£10k to ~£15k, with the rates added I'll be looking at ~£24k for an increase in usable space of around 50%. So instead I'm not bothering and just struggling on in the space I've got, and everyone loses out.
Totally agree. Buses are not really a thing.
In this part of the Flatlands, the town centre is not where the jobs are, so what's the point of a bus? They take a few non-paying OAPs into town to get harassed by the ne'er do wells but not a lot else. Maybe a few people take the bus in order to get the train out, but not vast numbers.
If I have to go into town I'd rather walk the 2 or so miles anyway. It isn't really any slower. Even those working in the warehouses proliferating everywhere use a car or if they are brave, a bicycle.
What is needed is a better mix of jobs and better roads for both cars and bicycles. Once cars are all electric there really isn't much to be gained by "mass transport", and that time is not far away.
The obsession with public transport is from people who are obsessed with cities.
The realities of towns are deemed to be irrelevant.
There are people in my village who don't own a car. If it wasn't for the bus, they'd have to cycle or walk for 15 miles to do a shop. Don't tell me public transport is only for the cities.
So ?
Compare public transport use in cities to towns to rural areas and you'll see its far more dominant in cities than the others.
I suspect that's entirely due to space considerations. It's a lot of faff to get parked in some cities. I lived in Edinburgh for a while, and it was far more hassle to drive into the city centre than to just get on the bus.
Indeed so.
Which is why public transport is a big issue in cities.
Elsewhere it isn't as cars are relatively much more important.
Yup, relatively, I definitely agree with you. I only disagree about buses "not being a thing".
London is pathetically low-rise compared to New York or Paris. I don’t know why people think it’s noisy. It’s not, especially. Crime is fairly low too, albeit rising of late.
I’ll give you high house prices and pollution though.
Yes it really isn't noisy. I live on a fairly typical inner London residential street and our bedroom is at the front of the house. We don't have double glazing. At night I can hear absolutely nothing. No traffic or any other noise at all. In fact it's so quiet that if someone does walk up the road talking on their mobile at 3 in the morning, it'll wake me up.
Nobody ever walks up my street at 3am on their mobile!
Agree with all of that. Also, quiet county towns have their drawbacks. I had to move from a flat in Haslemere because the grumpy bloke on the next floor complained every time I watched TV (quietly) or made a telephone call after 10pm ("I could hear you talking again - don't you have any consideration?"). He was the tenant coordinator for the posh nursing home converted into flats, and saw his function rather like those Soviet floor matrons who used to keep an eye on tenants to make sure they were behaving.
Never had that trouble when I lived in Holloway...
Also, some good news for the North, my old employer is opening up a giant office to consolidate and massively expand their presence in Liverpool. I've heard they're looking to hire between 200 and 250 highly paid software developers in the city in addition to the 200 or so they already have.
The policy of moving development to Amsterdam seems to be have been completely reversed, I'm told there were issues with skill levels, unrealistic demands from underskilled people and a general lack of experience. The word is that Liverpool, Cambridge and London will see a big expansion as well as some in Surrey. Two years ago people were wondering whether PlayStation's time in the UK was finished and existing studious wound up once their projects were completed. A real turnaround and win for UK game development.
Great news.
Liverpool could be / should be a real hub for creative development and already has a gaming heritage. It really should have been given Channel 4, too. Leeds should stick to professional services.
Yeah having Manchester Uni just down the road is a huge attraction and the recruitment team all say that hiring in Liverpool is really easy because property prices and rent is so low compared to Manchester while the city is still pretty vibrant in parts and attractive to live in for 20 somethings with ComSci degrees. Property developers should really be buying up the cheaper parts of town and getting ready for a Shoreditch/Hackney style turnaround IMO with nice redeveloped houses and flats being made available.
On your earlier point about the mid-level cities of England being underpowered compared to Europe, I think part of the equation is education. All across Europe average education levels are significantly higher, not just through university but also through vocational schemes. London has got three world class universities (Imperial, UCL and LSE) and two or three more reasonably good ones, there's not many places in the world that can claim that, we can't replicate it in the rest of the UK but we can definitely raise standards with better vocational training and professional development for non-degree based courses.
Liverpool's big problem is that it is a dead-end. Literally.
Do not get me wrong - it is a lovely city and much nicer than Manchester, but once you reach Liverpool you are snugged in between the Mersey and the Irish Sea. The railway stops at Lime St. The motorway network goes much closer to Manchester than Liverpool.
If you want good motorway access, a large international airport and north/south and east-west railways then you base yourself in Manchester, not Liverpool
1. You unload stuff off a ship. 2. You stick it in a bonded warehouse. 3. You load it onto another ship.
Either it's totally pointless or I'm missing something.
The idea is that people will build factories in the freeports and then work on things. And businesses in the freeport would be exempt from lots of taxes, etc.
But, FWIW, I think they be essentially pointless in the UK.
Which is a great idea, but far too small in scale - we should just have a tax gradient so the further you are from London (possibly measured in travel time by the fastest of train and car, rather than geographical distance) the less you pay in various taxes, both personal and business.
As a resident of Los Angeles, that sounds very attractive.
Not possible at the moment to compute a time by train from LA to London. Even big project BoJo has never proposed an Atlantic tunnel
I keep finding myself in the position of defending Boris, which really isn't the intention - I'm as keen to see him go as the next man. And I suppose Rishi is who I'd want to see replace him. And yet - I can't see levelling up going better with anyone but Boris in charge. He's personally invested. Without going into my professional life too much, I know the Boris regime is trying to spend money in the north - ideally before the next election. And it is the treasury which is the biggest obstacle.
I suppose you could argue that a Rishi led government would spend less, but more effectively. Perhaps?
Johnson hasn't spent anything yet. The one major commitment was HS2 and they've cut the budget there. The IRP will never be delivered, because it is literally undeliverable, so that's worthless.
So I'm not quite sure why you think anyone else would 'spend less.'
It takes a bloody age to spend any money in infrastructure. My expectation is that the biggest levelling up spending this parliament will be on buses. Because you can spend on them quickly. There's already quite a lot of bus spending in the pipeline.
Will any of that lead to cheaper fares?
I would expect so. Not least because it's very easy to spend money on fares. Much easier to give public transport authorities to subsidise fares than to reopen a railway line (which in most cases closed for very sound economic reasons). Bus Back Better is worth a look on this. Interesting not least because Boris genuinely seems to have written the introduction in his name. It is written in pure Borisese. The only problem with subsidising fares is that you need to keep spending. It's not capital spend. Though if by doing so you drive up passengers sufficiently it dies start to pay for itself.
For your average Northerner, busses are utterly irrelevant. I'm probably pretty typical of the northern working class type on my street on this - it wouldn't matter to me if they made them completely free and every ten minutes, I'm still going to drive to work. Several major reasons for this: 1) I value my time far too highly to waste an hour a day extra commuting(the "direct" bus from my town to my work takes about an hour vs 25-35mins driving). 2) Buses are inconvenient, they don't go door to door, and leave you standing around in the rain. 3) I work in the middle of nowhere, and use my car at lunchtime to go and get a sandwich from the shop a mile away. Even if busses were free and every ten minutes, I'm going to lose my whole lunch break on this operation, rather than ten minutes of it. 4) My stuff lives in my car. Spare glasses. Socket set. Coat. Headtorch. Pen and notebook. Tape measure. Workboots. Business cards. (and a whole load of other useful stuff!). Can't cart all that with me on the bus every day, and it's a pain having to try and predict what's going to be needed day to day to take it with you. 4) Travelling on busses isn't great anyway - sitting on an uncomfortable seat next to a smelly alcoholic with some screaming kids in the row in front vs rolling smoothly along in effectively a comfy chair with my choice of tunes, my choice of temperature...
The weird thing about the whole leveling up thing is that most of the North is far better for drivers than the South, (not that there isn't room for improvement - you could remove 90% of the congestion in my town with one stretch of road about 1/4 long, following an existing minor road for all but 100 yards) but about the only sort of leveling up that's ever suggested involves hosing odles of tax money at public transport.
I'd suggest that decreasing businesses rates (and or increasing the threshold for the small businesses relief*) in proportion to the distance from Westminster would be a much better use of the cash. Or possibly do the same with income or corp tax, but you'd have to figure out how to prevent people gaiming the system by lying about which property is their main residence/place of business.
*the taper on small business rate relief wins a small prize for the worst thought out taxation system ever, as the taper is so steep as to be more like a cliff edge. My business gets 100% relief. I'd really like to rent another building on the same site to expand, but it would jump me into paying full whack on the lot to the tune of about £9k pa. So instead of expanding into the next building jumping my rent from ~£10k to ~£15k, with the rates added I'll be looking at ~£24k for an increase in usable space of around 50%. So instead I'm not bothering and just struggling on in the space I've got, and everyone loses out.
Totally agree. Buses are not really a thing.
In this part of the Flatlands, the town centre is not where the jobs are, so what's the point of a bus? They take a few non-paying OAPs into town to get harassed by the ne'er do wells but not a lot else. Maybe a few people take the bus in order to get the train out, but not vast numbers.
If I have to go into town I'd rather walk the 2 or so miles anyway. It isn't really any slower. Even those working in the warehouses proliferating everywhere use a car or if they are brave, a bicycle.
What is needed is a better mix of jobs and better roads for both cars and bicycles. Once cars are all electric there really isn't much to be gained by "mass transport", and that time is not far away.
The obsession with public transport is from people who are obsessed with cities.
The realities of towns are deemed to be irrelevant.
There is some logic there though. We continue to urbanise, as does the developed world. To urbanise, to age, and ultimately to depopulate. Japan is usually a helpful pointer to our future. Its population is starting to shrink yet the Tokyo metropolitan area continues to grow rapidly, year on year.
We don't need to depopulate. We need to stabilise IMO.
Henry Mance @henrymance · 2h does not seem great that the government will be choosing a new head of the Met police at the same time that the Met police is investigating the government
Did they mention that the North South divide has actually got worse and worse, especially since the 1980s?
It’s higher than at any point since 1900. Probably since 1800 actually.
One of the interesting things about levelling up and the North South divide is that it's not about poverty. There are more poor people in London than anywhere else in the UK. The difference is that London is also full of rich people, while the rest of the country isn't (at least not to the same extent). But having loads of rich people can be a double edged sword, for instance when it comes to everyone else being able to afford a house. My sense is that the North of England was destroyed by the Normans. It got a temporary boost from the industrial revolution, although that also left a lot of disadvantages in its wake (eg undiversified economies, low levels of education). It's a long way from the centre of economic gravity in Europe (Germany/the low countries/Northern Italy) and even more cut off now thanks to Brexit. Transport links are crap. In my opinion their best bet is to declare UDI from Westminster. Raise money in the North, control it in the North. Overcome all the stupid local rivalries that stop the North from acting in a unified way. Waiting for HM Treasury to throw them some scraps is going to lead nowhere. Relying on an empty slogan from a man who doesn't give two shits about them ditto.
The inequality you mention is one of the reasons why the 'become more like London' meme isn't as attractive as Londoners think it is.
Other reason also being housing unaffordability, congestion and the way things grind to a halt if something unexpected happens.
I don't think anyone wants the North to become more like London, least of all Londoners! The future of the North is in the hands of Northerners, and always has been.
Yet your fellow Londoner Gardenwalker thinks that the future is cities and more cities.
That may be great for those who want to live in cities - or at least the rich and skilled among them.
But for the tens of millions who live in towns perhaps they prefer their affordable housing, lower pollution/congestion and easy access to the countryside.
Wealth is created in cities. Jobs are created in cities. That’s why people move to cities.
We need to make cities cheaper to live in, and less polluted. Thankfully, it’s already relatively easy to access the countryside in the UK.
For comparison, these are the IPSOS-Mori estimates for the 2019 election; (https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-2019-election) 18-24 Lab 62 Con 19 25-34 Lab 51 Con 27 35-44 Lab 39 Con 36 45-54 Lab 28 Con 46 55-64 Lab 27 Con 49 65+ Lab 17 Con 64
And here are their graphs going further back;
Eyballing the numbers for 2019 and now, Conservatives are down almost across the board, but they've lost most votes among the oldies. If anything, the age gap is closing back up again.
So Boris has actually got a swing to the Tories amongst 18 to 24s since 2019 after partygate!
Shami's gone. Paula Vennells has gone. So has Dido. And Robert Jenrick.
Cressida's finally gone.
Who should I have in my sights next?
Boris and Priti are still there, of course. And the ineffably useless Suella.
Anyone else we should looking at with a beady eye?
Surely Suella has to be left alone because she is great comedy value?
She said today Boris can in theory commit any crime at all, but because he got an 80 seat majority and delivered Brexit the people wanted, he is now above the law. Surely if chief legal advisor in Russia said that about Putin, it would be hours before we stopped laughing 🙂
Also, some good news for the North, my old employer is opening up a giant office to consolidate and massively expand their presence in Liverpool. I've heard they're looking to hire between 200 and 250 highly paid software developers in the city in addition to the 200 or so they already have.
The policy of moving development to Amsterdam seems to be have been completely reversed, I'm told there were issues with skill levels, unrealistic demands from underskilled people and a general lack of experience. The word is that Liverpool, Cambridge and London will see a big expansion as well as some in Surrey. Two years ago people were wondering whether PlayStation's time in the UK was finished and existing studious wound up once their projects were completed. A real turnaround and win for UK game development.
Great news.
Liverpool could be / should be a real hub for creative development and already has a gaming heritage. It really should have been given Channel 4, too. Leeds should stick to professional services.
Yeah having Manchester Uni just down the road is a huge attraction and the recruitment team all say that hiring in Liverpool is really easy because property prices and rent is so low compared to Manchester while the city is still pretty vibrant in parts and attractive to live in for 20 somethings with ComSci degrees. Property developers should really be buying up the cheaper parts of town and getting ready for a Shoreditch/Hackney style turnaround IMO with nice redeveloped houses and flats being made available.
On your earlier point about the mid-level cities of England being underpowered compared to Europe, I think part of the equation is education. All across Europe average education levels are significantly higher, not just through university but also through vocational schemes. London has got three world class universities (Imperial, UCL and LSE) and two or three more reasonably good ones, there's not many places in the world that can claim that, we can't replicate it in the rest of the UK but we can definitely raise standards with better vocational training and professional development for non-degree based courses.
Liverpool's big problem is that it is a dead-end. Literally.
Do not get me wrong - it is a lovely city and much nicer than Manchester, but once you reach Liverpool you are snugged in between the Mersey and the Irish Sea. The railway stops at Lime St. The motorway network goes much closer to Manchester than Liverpool.
If you want good motorway access, a large international airport and north/south and east-west railways then you base yourself in Manchester, not Liverpool
Presumably, better infrastructure could address much of this.
Did they mention that the North South divide has actually got worse and worse, especially since the 1980s?
It’s higher than at any point since 1900. Probably since 1800 actually.
One of the interesting things about levelling up and the North South divide is that it's not about poverty. There are more poor people in London than anywhere else in the UK. The difference is that London is also full of rich people, while the rest of the country isn't (at least not to the same extent). But having loads of rich people can be a double edged sword, for instance when it comes to everyone else being able to afford a house. My sense is that the North of England was destroyed by the Normans. It got a temporary boost from the industrial revolution, although that also left a lot of disadvantages in its wake (eg undiversified economies, low levels of education). It's a long way from the centre of economic gravity in Europe (Germany/the low countries/Northern Italy) and even more cut off now thanks to Brexit. Transport links are crap. In my opinion their best bet is to declare UDI from Westminster. Raise money in the North, control it in the North. Overcome all the stupid local rivalries that stop the North from acting in a unified way. Waiting for HM Treasury to throw them some scraps is going to lead nowhere. Relying on an empty slogan from a man who doesn't give two shits about them ditto.
The inequality you mention is one of the reasons why the 'become more like London' meme isn't as attractive as Londoners think it is.
Other reason also being housing unaffordability, congestion and the way things grind to a halt if something unexpected happens.
I don't think anyone wants the North to become more like London, least of all Londoners! The future of the North is in the hands of Northerners, and always has been.
Yet your fellow Londoner Gardenwalker thinks that the future is cities and more cities.
That may be great for those who want to live in cities - or at least the rich and skilled among them.
But for the tens of millions who live in towns perhaps they prefer their affordable housing, lower pollution/congestion and easy access to the countryside.
Human history has tended to show that cities are better at generating wealth than other forms of human settlement. So I think cities are good. Personally I love living in a city, and moved here from a town where I grew up and would never want to live in now (even though it is probably one of the nicest towns in the UK). But my dad made the journey in the opposite direction. We are lucky to have so many options of places to live in. FWIW I reckon an important first step for the North realising its potential is to stop whining about London.
About London being noisy. It's the constant low-level roar of traffic and the distant (or sometimes nearby) sirens that I notice. I've heard of people coming to the countryside and getting freaked out by the silence. I think it's likely you're just attuned to the city noises whereas I'm not.
If you think the countryside is quiet, then you must not have lived in it
... umm, I do! Well, I live in a small village. We have a shop! It's hay bales country. The sounds at night are leaves in the trees, foxes (seasonal) and owls. In the autumn, you can almost hear the falling leaves. No barking dogs, no sirens, no dull distant traffic roar. Nobody on their phone at 3am, no beeping taxis or shouting drunks. Just... quiet.
For comparison, these are the IPSOS-Mori estimates for the 2019 election; (https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-2019-election) 18-24 Lab 62 Con 19 25-34 Lab 51 Con 27 35-44 Lab 39 Con 36 45-54 Lab 28 Con 46 55-64 Lab 27 Con 49 65+ Lab 17 Con 64
And here are their graphs going further back;
Eyballing the numbers for 2019 and now, Conservatives are down almost across the board, but they've lost most votes among the oldies. If anything, the age gap is closing back up again.
So Boris has actually got a swing to the Tories amongst 18 to 24s since 2019 after partygate!
Youngster like a party and Boris seems good at holding them.
I keep finding myself in the position of defending Boris, which really isn't the intention - I'm as keen to see him go as the next man. And I suppose Rishi is who I'd want to see replace him. And yet - I can't see levelling up going better with anyone but Boris in charge. He's personally invested. Without going into my professional life too much, I know the Boris regime is trying to spend money in the north - ideally before the next election. And it is the treasury which is the biggest obstacle.
I suppose you could argue that a Rishi led government would spend less, but more effectively. Perhaps?
Johnson hasn't spent anything yet. The one major commitment was HS2 and they've cut the budget there. The IRP will never be delivered, because it is literally undeliverable, so that's worthless.
So I'm not quite sure why you think anyone else would 'spend less.'
It takes a bloody age to spend any money in infrastructure. My expectation is that the biggest levelling up spending this parliament will be on buses. Because you can spend on them quickly. There's already quite a lot of bus spending in the pipeline.
Will any of that lead to cheaper fares?
I would expect so. Not least because it's very easy to spend money on fares. Much easier to give public transport authorities to subsidise fares than to reopen a railway line (which in most cases closed for very sound economic reasons). Bus Back Better is worth a look on this. Interesting not least because Boris genuinely seems to have written the introduction in his name. It is written in pure Borisese. The only problem with subsidising fares is that you need to keep spending. It's not capital spend. Though if by doing so you drive up passengers sufficiently it dies start to pay for itself.
For your average Northerner, busses are utterly irrelevant. I'm probably pretty typical of the northern working class type on my street on this - it wouldn't matter to me if they made them completely free and every ten minutes, I'm still going to drive to work. Several major reasons for this: 1) I value my time far too highly to waste an hour a day extra commuting(the "direct" bus from my town to my work takes about an hour vs 25-35mins driving). 2) Buses are inconvenient, they don't go door to door, and leave you standing around in the rain. 3) I work in the middle of nowhere, and use my car at lunchtime to go and get a sandwich from the shop a mile away. Even if busses were free and every ten minutes, I'm going to lose my whole lunch break on this operation, rather than ten minutes of it. 4) My stuff lives in my car. Spare glasses. Socket set. Coat. Headtorch. Pen and notebook. Tape measure. Workboots. Business cards. (and a whole load of other useful stuff!). Can't cart all that with me on the bus every day, and it's a pain having to try and predict what's going to be needed day to day to take it with you. 4) Travelling on busses isn't great anyway - sitting on an uncomfortable seat next to a smelly alcoholic with some screaming kids in the row in front vs rolling smoothly along in effectively a comfy chair with my choice of tunes, my choice of temperature...
The weird thing about the whole leveling up thing is that most of the North is far better for drivers than the South, (not that there isn't room for improvement - you could remove 90% of the congestion in my town with one stretch of road about 1/4 long, following an existing minor road for all but 100 yards) but about the only sort of leveling up that's ever suggested involves hosing odles of tax money at public transport.
I'd suggest that decreasing businesses rates (and or increasing the threshold for the small businesses relief*) in proportion to the distance from Westminster would be a much better use of the cash. Or possibly do the same with income or corp tax, but you'd have to figure out how to prevent people gaiming the system by lying about which property is their main residence/place of business.
*the taper on small business rate relief wins a small prize for the worst thought out taxation system ever, as the taper is so steep as to be more like a cliff edge. My business gets 100% relief. I'd really like to rent another building on the same site to expand, but it would jump me into paying full whack on the lot to the tune of about £9k pa. So instead of expanding into the next building jumping my rent from ~£10k to ~£15k, with the rates added I'll be looking at ~£24k for an increase in usable space of around 50%. So instead I'm not bothering and just struggling on in the space I've got, and everyone loses out.
Totally agree. Buses are not really a thing.
In this part of the Flatlands, the town centre is not where the jobs are, so what's the point of a bus? They take a few non-paying OAPs into town to get harassed by the ne'er do wells but not a lot else. Maybe a few people take the bus in order to get the train out, but not vast numbers.
If I have to go into town I'd rather walk the 2 or so miles anyway. It isn't really any slower. Even those working in the warehouses proliferating everywhere use a car or if they are brave, a bicycle.
What is needed is a better mix of jobs and better roads for both cars and bicycles. Once cars are all electric there really isn't much to be gained by "mass transport", and that time is not far away.
Oh there will be unless the cost of electric cars gets a lot lower.
Most people can’t afford £500+ a month on a lease car
Do not forget to add in the odd, but increasingly common, feature of newer cars were certain features are disabled so that your manufacturer can turn them back on through a subscription model. Want your heated seats to work? That will be £10 a month please! Aircon? £30 per month please...
I have not flown in years. I am seriously wondering if I will ever buy another car.
I was away to order a Volvo earlier in the year, before spotting that the buggers we’re going to charge me a fortune for… mudflaps! Yes, those stupid wee plastic bits behind the wheel arches. I think it was about £300 for the rear wheels and £100 for the front. Since when we’re mudflaps an optional extra?
MG have got the right idea: virtually no optional extras.
Back in the day, Toyota wanted to charge me an outrageous price for car mats. The local car shop had "compatible" ones for about a tenth the price Toyota wanted.
But it still was not in the league of £300 mudflaps!
To answer the previous post, which I can’t be bothered quoting, the obsession with Levelling Up is because the North’s* economic productivity is pathetic compared with the rest of Western Europe/USA etc.
It’s true that your disposable income might be higher - house prices being a whole other fiasco - but to large extent you are living off the money earned by the South.
*North, really meaning the North, Midlands, Wales, & Northern Ireland.
And some of us are very grateful that Londoners are willing to work harder and pay more taxes and live in smaller homes in order to subsidise the rest of the country.
Not just grateful but rather amused as well - feeling resentment towards London is a mark of a bitter fool.
About London being noisy. It's the constant low-level roar of traffic and the distant (or sometimes nearby) sirens that I notice. I've heard of people coming to the countryside and getting freaked out by the silence. I think it's likely you're just attuned to the city noises whereas I'm not.
If you think the countryside is quiet, then you must not have lived in it
The countryside is actually far louder than London, especially at the time of day when it is least welcome!
There has been more than once I wished I had a shotgun handy for when the bl**dy cockerel gets up!
About London being noisy. It's the constant low-level roar of traffic and the distant (or sometimes nearby) sirens that I notice. I've heard of people coming to the countryside and getting freaked out by the silence. I think it's likely you're just attuned to the city noises whereas I'm not.
If you think the countryside is quiet, then you must not have lived in it
The countryside is actually far louder than London, especially at the time of day when it is least welcome!
To answer the previous post, which I can’t be bothered quoting, the obsession with Levelling Up is because the North’s* economic productivity is pathetic compared with the rest of Western Europe/USA etc.
It’s true that your disposable income might be higher - house prices being a whole other fiasco - but to large extent you are living off the money earned by the South.
*North, really meaning the North, Midlands, Wales, & Northern Ireland.
That's because they stop working every few minutes to whine about London.
1. You unload stuff off a ship. 2. You stick it in a bonded warehouse. 3. You load it onto another ship.
Either it's totally pointless or I'm missing something.
The idea is that people will build factories in the freeports and then work on things. And businesses in the freeport would be exempt from lots of taxes, etc.
But, FWIW, I think they be essentially pointless in the UK.
Which is a great idea, but far too small in scale - we should just have a tax gradient so the further you are from London (possibly measured in travel time by the fastest of train and car, rather than geographical distance) the less you pay in various taxes, both personal and business.
As a resident of Los Angeles, that sounds very attractive.
Not possible at the moment to compute a time by train from LA to London. Even big project BoJo has never proposed an Atlantic tunnel
Google Maps hasn't been the same since they removed this option.
Perhaps we should restrict the vote to people who work? Seems suitably Dickensian to appeal to the most traditional Conservative. Why should a bright 17-year-old on their first job with life ahead of them be denied a say while a 99-year-old gets to determine their future?
I'm not being serious. Though I do know one very pro-Brexit grandmother who voted Remain because her grandkids implored her to - "I suppose they'll have to live with the results more than me".
I keep finding myself in the position of defending Boris, which really isn't the intention - I'm as keen to see him go as the next man. And I suppose Rishi is who I'd want to see replace him. And yet - I can't see levelling up going better with anyone but Boris in charge. He's personally invested. Without going into my professional life too much, I know the Boris regime is trying to spend money in the north - ideally before the next election. And it is the treasury which is the biggest obstacle.
I suppose you could argue that a Rishi led government would spend less, but more effectively. Perhaps?
Johnson hasn't spent anything yet. The one major commitment was HS2 and they've cut the budget there. The IRP will never be delivered, because it is literally undeliverable, so that's worthless.
So I'm not quite sure why you think anyone else would 'spend less.'
It takes a bloody age to spend any money in infrastructure. My expectation is that the biggest levelling up spending this parliament will be on buses. Because you can spend on them quickly. There's already quite a lot of bus spending in the pipeline.
Will any of that lead to cheaper fares?
I would expect so. Not least because it's very easy to spend money on fares. Much easier to give public transport authorities to subsidise fares than to reopen a railway line (which in most cases closed for very sound economic reasons). Bus Back Better is worth a look on this. Interesting not least because Boris genuinely seems to have written the introduction in his name. It is written in pure Borisese. The only problem with subsidising fares is that you need to keep spending. It's not capital spend. Though if by doing so you drive up passengers sufficiently it dies start to pay for itself.
For your average Northerner, busses are utterly irrelevant. I'm probably pretty typical of the northern working class type on my street on this - it wouldn't matter to me if they made them completely free and every ten minutes, I'm still going to drive to work. Several major reasons for this: 1) I value my time far too highly to waste an hour a day extra commuting(the "direct" bus from my town to my work takes about an hour vs 25-35mins driving). 2) Buses are inconvenient, they don't go door to door, and leave you standing around in the rain. 3) I work in the middle of nowhere, and use my car at lunchtime to go and get a sandwich from the shop a mile away. Even if busses were free and every ten minutes, I'm going to lose my whole lunch break on this operation, rather than ten minutes of it. 4) My stuff lives in my car. Spare glasses. Socket set. Coat. Headtorch. Pen and notebook. Tape measure. Workboots. Business cards. (and a whole load of other useful stuff!). Can't cart all that with me on the bus every day, and it's a pain having to try and predict what's going to be needed day to day to take it with you. 4) Travelling on busses isn't great anyway - sitting on an uncomfortable seat next to a smelly alcoholic with some screaming kids in the row in front vs rolling smoothly along in effectively a comfy chair with my choice of tunes, my choice of temperature...
The weird thing about the whole leveling up thing is that most of the North is far better for drivers than the South, (not that there isn't room for improvement - you could remove 90% of the congestion in my town with one stretch of road about 1/4 long, following an existing minor road for all but 100 yards) but about the only sort of leveling up that's ever suggested involves hosing odles of tax money at public transport.
I'd suggest that decreasing businesses rates (and or increasing the threshold for the small businesses relief*) in proportion to the distance from Westminster would be a much better use of the cash. Or possibly do the same with income or corp tax, but you'd have to figure out how to prevent people gaiming the system by lying about which property is their main residence/place of business.
*the taper on small business rate relief wins a small prize for the worst thought out taxation system ever, as the taper is so steep as to be more like a cliff edge. My business gets 100% relief. I'd really like to rent another building on the same site to expand, but it would jump me into paying full whack on the lot to the tune of about £9k pa. So instead of expanding into the next building jumping my rent from ~£10k to ~£15k, with the rates added I'll be looking at ~£24k for an increase in usable space of around 50%. So instead I'm not bothering and just struggling on in the space I've got, and everyone loses out.
Totally agree. Buses are not really a thing.
In this part of the Flatlands, the town centre is not where the jobs are, so what's the point of a bus? They take a few non-paying OAPs into town to get harassed by the ne'er do wells but not a lot else. Maybe a few people take the bus in order to get the train out, but not vast numbers.
If I have to go into town I'd rather walk the 2 or so miles anyway. It isn't really any slower. Even those working in the warehouses proliferating everywhere use a car or if they are brave, a bicycle.
What is needed is a better mix of jobs and better roads for both cars and bicycles. Once cars are all electric there really isn't much to be gained by "mass transport", and that time is not far away.
The obsession with public transport is from people who are obsessed with cities.
The realities of towns are deemed to be irrelevant.
There is some logic there though. We continue to urbanise, as does the developed world. To urbanise, to age, and ultimately to depopulate. Japan is usually a helpful pointer to our future. Its population is starting to shrink yet the Tokyo metropolitan area continues to grow rapidly, year on year.
We don't need to depopulate. We need to stabilise IMO.
That ship has sailed I think. The youth aren’t breeding. We’ll need to import migrants to keep stable.
I know some people who do that and others who live in a city and work in a town.
They all travel by car.
This is getting into pure anecdata territory. I live in a town with a railway station. If you divide the number of journeys from the railway station by the population of the town, every resident makes 100 train journeys a year.
Ok: it's not that simple. It's a railhead, people come from further afield. Still, the notion that people in "towns" don't use public transport is glib nonsense.
I keep finding myself in the position of defending Boris, which really isn't the intention - I'm as keen to see him go as the next man. And I suppose Rishi is who I'd want to see replace him. And yet - I can't see levelling up going better with anyone but Boris in charge. He's personally invested. Without going into my professional life too much, I know the Boris regime is trying to spend money in the north - ideally before the next election. And it is the treasury which is the biggest obstacle.
I suppose you could argue that a Rishi led government would spend less, but more effectively. Perhaps?
Johnson hasn't spent anything yet. The one major commitment was HS2 and they've cut the budget there. The IRP will never be delivered, because it is literally undeliverable, so that's worthless.
So I'm not quite sure why you think anyone else would 'spend less.'
It takes a bloody age to spend any money in infrastructure. My expectation is that the biggest levelling up spending this parliament will be on buses. Because you can spend on them quickly. There's already quite a lot of bus spending in the pipeline.
Will any of that lead to cheaper fares?
I would expect so. Not least because it's very easy to spend money on fares. Much easier to give public transport authorities to subsidise fares than to reopen a railway line (which in most cases closed for very sound economic reasons). Bus Back Better is worth a look on this. Interesting not least because Boris genuinely seems to have written the introduction in his name. It is written in pure Borisese. The only problem with subsidising fares is that you need to keep spending. It's not capital spend. Though if by doing so you drive up passengers sufficiently it dies start to pay for itself.
For your average Northerner, busses are utterly irrelevant. I'm probably pretty typical of the northern working class type on my street on this - it wouldn't matter to me if they made them completely free and every ten minutes, I'm still going to drive to work. Several major reasons for this: 1) I value my time far too highly to waste an hour a day extra commuting(the "direct" bus from my town to my work takes about an hour vs 25-35mins driving). 2) Buses are inconvenient, they don't go door to door, and leave you standing around in the rain. 3) I work in the middle of nowhere, and use my car at lunchtime to go and get a sandwich from the shop a mile away. Even if busses were free and every ten minutes, I'm going to lose my whole lunch break on this operation, rather than ten minutes of it. 4) My stuff lives in my car. Spare glasses. Socket set. Coat. Headtorch. Pen and notebook. Tape measure. Workboots. Business cards. (and a whole load of other useful stuff!). Can't cart all that with me on the bus every day, and it's a pain having to try and predict what's going to be needed day to day to take it with you. 4) Travelling on busses isn't great anyway - sitting on an uncomfortable seat next to a smelly alcoholic with some screaming kids in the row in front vs rolling smoothly along in effectively a comfy chair with my choice of tunes, my choice of temperature...
The weird thing about the whole leveling up thing is that most of the North is far better for drivers than the South, (not that there isn't room for improvement - you could remove 90% of the congestion in my town with one stretch of road about 1/4 long, following an existing minor road for all but 100 yards) but about the only sort of leveling up that's ever suggested involves hosing odles of tax money at public transport.
I'd suggest that decreasing businesses rates (and or increasing the threshold for the small businesses relief*) in proportion to the distance from Westminster would be a much better use of the cash. Or possibly do the same with income or corp tax, but you'd have to figure out how to prevent people gaiming the system by lying about which property is their main residence/place of business.
*the taper on small business rate relief wins a small prize for the worst thought out taxation system ever, as the taper is so steep as to be more like a cliff edge. My business gets 100% relief. I'd really like to rent another building on the same site to expand, but it would jump me into paying full whack on the lot to the tune of about £9k pa. So instead of expanding into the next building jumping my rent from ~£10k to ~£15k, with the rates added I'll be looking at ~£24k for an increase in usable space of around 50%. So instead I'm not bothering and just struggling on in the space I've got, and everyone loses out.
Totally agree. Buses are not really a thing.
In this part of the Flatlands, the town centre is not where the jobs are, so what's the point of a bus? They take a few non-paying OAPs into town to get harassed by the ne'er do wells but not a lot else. Maybe a few people take the bus in order to get the train out, but not vast numbers.
If I have to go into town I'd rather walk the 2 or so miles anyway. It isn't really any slower. Even those working in the warehouses proliferating everywhere use a car or if they are brave, a bicycle.
What is needed is a better mix of jobs and better roads for both cars and bicycles. Once cars are all electric there really isn't much to be gained by "mass transport", and that time is not far away.
The obsession with public transport is from people who are obsessed with cities.
The realities of towns are deemed to be irrelevant.
There is some logic there though. We continue to urbanise, as does the developed world. To urbanise, to age, and ultimately to depopulate. Japan is usually a helpful pointer to our future. Its population is starting to shrink yet the Tokyo metropolitan area continues to grow rapidly, year on year.
We don't need to depopulate. We need to stabilise IMO.
That ship has sailed I think. The youth aren’t breeding. We’ll need to import migrants to keep stable.
Immigrants? I thought that they were supposed to be turned away?
About London being noisy. It's the constant low-level roar of traffic and the distant (or sometimes nearby) sirens that I notice. I've heard of people coming to the countryside and getting freaked out by the silence. I think it's likely you're just attuned to the city noises whereas I'm not.
If you think the countryside is quiet, then you must not have lived in it
... umm, I do! Well, I live in a small village. We have a shop! It's hay bales country. The sounds at night are leaves in the trees, foxes (seasonal) and owls. In the autumn, you can almost hear the falling leaves. No barking dogs, no sirens, no dull distant traffic roar. Nobody on their phone at 3am, no beeping taxis or shouting drunks. Just... quiet.
No tractors, farm equipment, chainsaws or pre-dawn cockerels?
And that is before I get started on mooing cows wanting their morning milking as soon as the sun is on the horizon
Did they mention that the North South divide has actually got worse and worse, especially since the 1980s?
It’s higher than at any point since 1900. Probably since 1800 actually.
One of the interesting things about levelling up and the North South divide is that it's not about poverty. There are more poor people in London than anywhere else in the UK. The difference is that London is also full of rich people, while the rest of the country isn't (at least not to the same extent). But having loads of rich people can be a double edged sword, for instance when it comes to everyone else being able to afford a house. My sense is that the North of England was destroyed by the Normans. It got a temporary boost from the industrial revolution, although that also left a lot of disadvantages in its wake (eg undiversified economies, low levels of education). It's a long way from the centre of economic gravity in Europe (Germany/the low countries/Northern Italy) and even more cut off now thanks to Brexit. Transport links are crap. In my opinion their best bet is to declare UDI from Westminster. Raise money in the North, control it in the North. Overcome all the stupid local rivalries that stop the North from acting in a unified way. Waiting for HM Treasury to throw them some scraps is going to lead nowhere. Relying on an empty slogan from a man who doesn't give two shits about them ditto.
The inequality you mention is one of the reasons why the 'become more like London' meme isn't as attractive as Londoners think it is.
Other reason also being housing unaffordability, congestion and the way things grind to a halt if something unexpected happens.
I don't think anyone wants the North to become more like London, least of all Londoners! The future of the North is in the hands of Northerners, and always has been.
Yet your fellow Londoner Gardenwalker thinks that the future is cities and more cities.
That may be great for those who want to live in cities - or at least the rich and skilled among them.
But for the tens of millions who live in towns perhaps they prefer their affordable housing, lower pollution/congestion and easy access to the countryside.
Human history has tended to show that cities are better at generating wealth than other forms of human settlement. So I think cities are good. Personally I love living in a city, and moved here from a town where I grew up and would never want to live in now (even though it is probably one of the nicest towns in the UK). But my dad made the journey in the opposite direction. We are lucky to have so many options of places to live in. FWIW I reckon an important first step for the North realising its potential is to stop whining about London.
2 years in a row we held our annual corporate shindig in cities outside London (Manchester and Bristol) and were treated to speeches by the (Labour) mayors of those cities.
Both very impressive and compelling speakers. Both spoke about the problems of their cities and their hopes for the future. But Andy Burnham’s speech was peppered with grievances at London and the South. It was all our fault. Marvin Rees didn’t mention London once.
Perhaps we should restrict the vote to people who work? Seems suitably Dickensian to appeal to the most traditional Conservative. Why should a bright 17-year-old on their first job with life ahead of them be denied a say while a 99-year-old gets to determine their future?
I'm not being serious. Though I do know one very pro-Brexit grandmother who voted Remain because her grandkids implored her to - "I suppose they'll have to live with the results more than me".
The Tories are traditionally more the party of those who inherit and farmers and the landed gentry than just workers and are now the party of pensioners.
Labour used to be the party of the working class but are now the party of the public sector and students.
The Liberals are actually the party which has generally always been the party whose core is based on middle class workers
1. You unload stuff off a ship. 2. You stick it in a bonded warehouse. 3. You load it onto another ship.
Either it's totally pointless or I'm missing something.
The idea is that people will build factories in the freeports and then work on things. And businesses in the freeport would be exempt from lots of taxes, etc.
But, FWIW, I think they be essentially pointless in the UK.
Which is a great idea, but far too small in scale - we should just have a tax gradient so the further you are from London (possibly measured in travel time by the fastest of train and car, rather than geographical distance) the less you pay in various taxes, both personal and business.
As a resident of Los Angeles, that sounds very attractive.
Not possible at the moment to compute a time by train from LA to London. Even big project BoJo has never proposed an Atlantic tunnel
Stewart Wood @StewartWood · 2h Somewhere inside No.10 this evening, there is a small group working out whether they could make Paul Dacre the next Metropolitan Police Commissioner.
Astonishing that Lavrov has been there as Russian foreign sec for 18 years.
I wonder how many others have been at the heart of things with Putin for such a consistent period? Medvedev is another, and is a good 15 years or so younger than Lavrov and Putin.
Perhaps we should restrict the vote to people who work? Seems suitably Dickensian to appeal to the most traditional Conservative. Why should a bright 17-year-old on their first job with life ahead of them be denied a say while a 99-year-old gets to determine their future?
I'm not being serious. Though I do know one very pro-Brexit grandmother who voted Remain because her grandkids implored her to - "I suppose they'll have to live with the results more than me".
You are always being serious, Nick, and what you are always serious about is what Beijing wants you to be serious about. Your claim that Taiwan is crying wolf about China's intentions blew your cover so badly that probably even Cressida Dick would have spotted you as batting for the other side.
ETA you are quite right though, I voted in EU ref as instructed by my 17 yo at the time son, on the grounds it was his problem more than mine.
Comments
Compare public transport use in cities to towns to rural areas and you'll see its far more dominant in cities than the others.
Improve your workforce and you'll improve your economy.
To answer your question, and also the comment from @another_richard, economic growth in 2022 is very very very very very much the product of cities.
We need to do everything to unlock their potential.
Thankfully, that covers the majority of the UK population.
Cornwall etc are likely to remain tourism, agriculture, and retirement focused.
I can see the argument for mass transport in Leeds, where there are thousands of office-based jobs in the centre and a lack of space to put thousands of private cars, but in much of the Red Wall there's lots of small enterprises around the periphery and a hollowed out town centre. I don't think this can be fixed by a better bus service.
I'm not saying buses should be stopped, but improving them massively wouldn't be a good use of money.
Not sure why @rcs1000 thinks this is because of tax cuts.
On your earlier point about the mid-level cities of England being underpowered compared to Europe, I think part of the equation is education. All across Europe average education levels are significantly higher, not just through university but also through vocational schemes. London has got three world class universities (Imperial, UCL and LSE) and two or three more reasonably good ones, there's not many places in the world that can claim that, we can't replicate it in the rest of the UK but we can definitely raise standards with better vocational training and professional development for non-degree based courses.
East Midlands Airport
Felixstowe and Harwich
Humber Region
Liverpool City Region (the exception)
Plymouth
Solent
Thames
Teesside
Note that 3 are in the North, 1 in the Midlands and 4 in the "South" below the Wash-Severn line.
I lived in Edinburgh for a while, and it was far more hassle to drive into the city centre than to just get on the bus.
Cressida's finally gone.
Who should I have in my sights next?
Boris and Priti are still there, of course. And the ineffably useless Suella.
Anyone else we should looking at with a beady eye?
The future of the North is in the hands of Northerners, and always has been.
It’s the other big problem apart from infrastructure.
Yet, we already have great universities all across the UK, and we already spend a lot on primary education by int’l standards.
The issue seems to be that our primary school spend is very inefficient at least in terms of outputs, and our vocational / professional development is non-existent / appalling.
And I mean really massive...
I’ll give you high house prices and pollution though.
Nowhere you mention is all that “inland”. Nowhere in the archipelago is far from the sea. Ok, Birmingham, at a pinch.
I have not flown in years. I am seriously wondering if I will ever buy another car.
And its a good thing that we have different types of place as it gives people more opportunities depending on their jobs or interests or lifestyles.
But London tends to be a place of extremes which likely makes it unsuitable for those who are more 'average'.
So resenting Londoners is silly but trying to make the rest of the country more like London is equally so.
It’s all money, and it’s why East Germany had now overtaken the North of England in terms of living standards.
Where it’s been less effective is arresting depopulation. The young and talented still tend to move West (or perhaps to Berlin). Not sure there’s any policy to arrest that, however, nor even whether there should be.
It's kind of odd.
Its eerily like 1938 and the decisions we make now will determine our whole future. We either stop him now or following the effective collapse of NATO and the Russians imposing a sphere of influence up to the Bug, Vistula, or Rhine we will still have to stop him later. Deterrence only works if you are credible and determined, and Macron and Scholz, let alone Johnson, lack this critical factor. Biden has pulled the alliance together somewhat and sent sufficient forces here to keep Putin guessing, but despite NATO´s overwhelming military capability, we are still being led by the nose by a murderer. We could be on the eve of a disaster on the scale of Dunkirk unless we recognise Putin is an vicious and determined enemy who must be contained and limited in every possible way until the Russians can remove their tyrant in their own time. Winning Cold War II requires that we understand this strategic reality before all else.
Nobody ever walks up my street at 3am on their mobile!
Anyway, the point is inaccessibility (nowhere to commute to, and a long drive to an airport), rural economy, ageing and depopulation, emptying towns, economic stagnation - but a quiet, genteel stagnation - and tourism. Sure nowhere is quite as cut off as parts of the Auvergne but we share some of those problems.
Maybe parts of Lincolnshire? Mid and West Wales?
But I agree, it's hardly like midtown Manhattan.
I've heard of people coming to the countryside and getting freaked out by the silence. I think it's likely you're just attuned to the city noises whereas I'm not.
Which is why public transport is a big issue in cities.
Elsewhere it isn't as cars are relatively much more important.
Her brother, on the other hand, is one of life's wasters. He flunked school, didn't bother to learn French or English and his standard German is not very good either, he was generally an idiot whenever I saw him. Yet today he's a fully qualified plumber and apparently very good at it and he's got a long term partner and they're about to get married.
In the north of England my wife would have ended up working a dead end job in Asda and/or got pregnant at 17 because of the lack of other things to do and her brother would be unemployed sitting on benefits living off the state.
In Switzerland they don't give anyone that option.
By comparison, the North, as is, presently is great - both far nicer and also more affordable.
So I've never really got why there is such an bizarre obsession with "levelling up". I strongly suspect that I've more disposable income as a Northerner than I would have in the SE, especially once adjusted for the vastly greater cost of just about everything I might spend said disposable income on.
What's worse is that because it's London types who wibble on about leveling up, they seem to think it's all about public transport, not realising people use it in London because London is so over-crowded there's little other option, not because it's actually any good.
The problem with the government is that it's become far too used to hosing money at everything and anything. I'm already spending half my life earning money to pay tax so the government can spunk it on stuff I don't want or need. Wasting my money on empty busses and pointless trainsets (if there was an actual business case for HS2/3/NPR etc, it could be done by private companies without subsidy) is utterly counterproductive.
Can, at this stage, any of us be completely closed to the idea, Khan, Patel, Johnson have cooked something up between themselves to deflect blame about something to the police?
It’s true that your disposable income might be higher - house prices being a whole other fiasco - but to large extent you are living off the money earned by the South.
*North, really meaning the North, Midlands, Wales, & Northern Ireland.
That may be great for those who want to live in cities - or at least the rich and skilled among them.
But for the tens of millions who live in towns perhaps they prefer their affordable housing, lower pollution/congestion and easy access to the countryside.
MG have got the right idea: virtually no optional extras.
Never had that trouble when I lived in Holloway...
Do not get me wrong - it is a lovely city and much nicer than Manchester, but once you reach Liverpool you are snugged in between the Mersey and the Irish Sea. The railway stops at Lime St. The motorway network goes much closer to Manchester than Liverpool.
If you want good motorway access, a large international airport and north/south and east-west railways then you base yourself in Manchester, not Liverpool
Henry Mance
@henrymance
·
2h
does not seem great that the government will be choosing a new head of the Met police at the same time that the Met police is investigating the government
Jobs are created in cities.
That’s why people move to cities.
We need to make cities cheaper to live in, and less polluted. Thankfully, it’s already relatively easy to access the countryside in the UK.
She said today Boris can in theory commit any crime at all, but because he got an 80 seat majority and delivered Brexit the people wanted, he is now above the law. Surely if chief legal advisor in Russia said that about Putin, it would be hours before we stopped laughing 🙂
FWIW I reckon an important first step for the North realising its potential is to stop whining about London.
Well, I live in a small village. We have a shop! It's hay bales country. The sounds at night are leaves in the trees, foxes (seasonal) and owls. In the autumn, you can almost hear the falling leaves.
No barking dogs, no sirens, no dull distant traffic roar. Nobody on their phone at 3am, no beeping taxis or shouting drunks. Just... quiet.
But it still was not in the league of £300 mudflaps!
Not just grateful but rather amused as well - feeling resentment towards London is a mark of a bitter fool.
Though there is the issue of how London generally and the City crowds out other economic sectors - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
I'm not being serious. Though I do know one very pro-Brexit grandmother who voted Remain because her grandkids implored her to - "I suppose they'll have to live with the results more than me".
Ok: it's not that simple. It's a railhead, people come from further afield. Still, the notion that people in "towns" don't use public transport is glib nonsense.
And that is before I get started on mooing cows wanting their morning milking as soon as the sun is on the horizon
Not one that No 10 had anything to do with.
Both very impressive and compelling speakers. Both spoke about the problems of their cities and their hopes for the future. But Andy Burnham’s speech was peppered with grievances at London and the South. It was all our fault. Marvin Rees didn’t mention London once.
Labour used to be the party of the working class but are now the party of the public sector and students.
The Liberals are actually the party which has generally always been the party whose core is based on middle class workers
Khan Gets Dick Out ?
@StewartWood
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2h
Somewhere inside No.10 this evening, there is a small group working out whether they could make Paul Dacre the next Metropolitan Police Commissioner.
ETA you are quite right though, I voted in EU ref as instructed by my 17 yo at the time son, on the grounds it was his problem more than mine.