"Child soldiers, executions, bombs: Deadly gang violence turns Sweden into a ‘war zone’
Sweden is in the grip of a gun crime crisis. In 2022, there were 391 shootings in the county, and escalating gang violence has seen 11 people killed in September alone. ‘It’s like a war zone’, one witness tells Jakob Illeborg, who finds fear and loathing of foreigners rife in the new gun murder capital of Europe"
This is not a new story. Sweden has been clearly fucked by immigration for several years - hence their votes at elex. Maybe the dam on reporting it is now breaking
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Low population density is the best thing about the north - the problem with the south is it's wildly overpopulated. Across the planet, we've about 4 acres per human of land area - packing them together in cities like battery hens is foul madness.
and the north will always struggle economically if no where, not everywhere, has the ability to grow population densities required to have sufficient skilled staff who can work in those top end roles making local knowledge based companies a success.
The investment will just continue to flow to Milan, Munich and Marseille over Manchester for ever more.
Yes, and the madness is that the North has a combined urban population to match London (and anywhere in Europe). Liverpool, Salford, Manc, Leeds, Sheffield. Combine them all into a megacity with densely interlinked transport - and then watch it boom
All the ingredients are there. Great universities, great heritage, great sport, great culture, great concentrations of people. DO IT
But this requires each individual city to get over itself
Also, they need to speak in a more comprehensible way.
"Child soldiers, executions, bombs: Deadly gang violence turns Sweden into a ‘war zone’
Sweden is in the grip of a gun crime crisis. In 2022, there were 391 shootings in the county, and escalating gang violence has seen 11 people killed in September alone. ‘It’s like a war zone’, one witness tells Jakob Illeborg, who finds fear and loathing of foreigners rife in the new gun murder capital of Europe"
This is not a new story. Sweden has been clearly fucked by immigration for several years - hence their votes at elex. Maybe the dam on reporting it is now breaking
I know it's not new, but papers like the Independent didn't use to report it much.
I am here, literally, PRAYING that the 16 year old arrested for felling the Sycamore Gap sycamore is a Somali, dinghy-arriving, what3words using, Liz Truss adoring, Marcus Smith-at-full back-approving lab leak denier, born of Albanian-cab-using aliens coupling with Woke HS2 executives, in a flat so expensive it proves London is BACK
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Low population density is the best thing about the north - the problem with the south is it's wildly overpopulated. Across the planet, we've about 4 acres per human of land area - packing them together in cities like battery hens is foul madness.
and the north will always struggle economically if no where, not everywhere, has the ability to grow population densities required to have sufficient skilled staff who can work in those top end roles making local knowledge based companies a success.
The investment will just continue to flow to Milan, Munich and Marseille over Manchester for ever more.
Yes, and the madness is that the North has a combined urban population to match London (and anywhere in Europe). Liverpool, Salford, Manc, Leeds, Sheffield. Combine them all into a megacity with densely interlinked transport - and then watch it boom
All the ingredients are there. Great universities, great heritage, great sport, great culture, great concentrations of people. DO IT
But this requires each individual city to get over itself
Also, they need to speak in a more comprehensible way.
"Child soldiers, executions, bombs: Deadly gang violence turns Sweden into a ‘war zone’
Sweden is in the grip of a gun crime crisis. In 2022, there were 391 shootings in the county, and escalating gang violence has seen 11 people killed in September alone. ‘It’s like a war zone’, one witness tells Jakob Illeborg, who finds fear and loathing of foreigners rife in the new gun murder capital of Europe"
This is not a new story. Sweden has been clearly fucked by immigration for several years - hence their votes at elex. Maybe the dam on reporting it is now breaking
I know it's not new, but papers like the Independent didn't use to report it much.
I agree. Even the Guardian is forced to report it, with evident and enormous reluctance. I see comments are disabled on every article
"Child soldiers, executions, bombs: Deadly gang violence turns Sweden into a ‘war zone’
Sweden is in the grip of a gun crime crisis. In 2022, there were 391 shootings in the county, and escalating gang violence has seen 11 people killed in September alone. ‘It’s like a war zone’, one witness tells Jakob Illeborg, who finds fear and loathing of foreigners rife in the new gun murder capital of Europe"
This is not a new story. Sweden has been clearly fucked by immigration for several years - hence their votes at elex. Maybe the dam on reporting it is now breaking
I know it's not new, but papers like the Independent didn't use to report it much.
I remember it being discussed a decade ago when I was in Sweden. It's extraordinary how much they've fucked it, especially compared to Norway.
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Low population density is the best thing about the north - the problem with the south is it's wildly overpopulated. Across the planet, we've about 4 acres per human of land area - packing them together in cities like battery hens is foul madness.
and the north will always struggle economically if no where, not everywhere, has the ability to grow population densities required to have sufficient skilled staff who can work in those top end roles making local knowledge based companies a success.
The investment will just continue to flow to Milan, Munich and Marseille over Manchester for ever more.
Yes, and the madness is that the North has a combined urban population to match London (and anywhere in Europe). Liverpool, Salford, Manc, Leeds, Sheffield. Combine them all into a megacity with densely interlinked transport - and then watch it boom
All the ingredients are there. Great universities, great heritage, great sport, great culture, great concentrations of people. DO IT
But this requires each individual city to get over itself
Also, they need to speak in a more comprehensible way.
Wow. What a prick.
FWIW, OGH is from Manchester, and OGH's wife (my mother) is from Newcastle. So I'm the son of Northerners. And it was a joke.
I wonder if Sunak will go for full unitarisation to mitigate the crisis.
It would be political suicide given how parochial his electorate is,* but it would be entirely in keeping with his obsession about cost over political instincts.
*I'm a Welshman from the Forest of Dean. That's practically a professional opinion.
What happens to the places that already are unitaries? Havering isn't at S114 yet, but has just concluded that it's looming.
If a council's income (government grant and capped council tax) and expenditure (statutory services like social care) are both largely out of their hands, what exactly are local councillors meant to do?
Kirklees is battling the possibility of S114.
It's non trivial for the resident, Birmingham I hear is at monthly throwaway waste collection, the dumps barely open and so on.
Is anyone on here in an S114 area. What is it like?
I am here, literally, PRAYING that the 16 year old arrested for felling the Sycamore Gap sycamore is a Somali, dinghy-arriving, what3words using, Liz Truss adoring, Marcus Smith-at-full back-approving lab leak denier, born of Albanian-cab-using aliens coupling with Woke HS2 executives, in a flat so expensive it proves London is BACK
In terms Robin Hood might understand, you want it to be a Sicko Moor?
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Low population density is the best thing about the north - the problem with the south is it's wildly overpopulated. Across the planet, we've about 4 acres per human of land area - packing them together in cities like battery hens is foul madness.
and the north will always struggle economically if no where, not everywhere, has the ability to grow population densities required to have sufficient skilled staff who can work in those top end roles making local knowledge based companies a success.
The investment will just continue to flow to Milan, Munich and Marseille over Manchester for ever more.
Yes, and the madness is that the North has a combined urban population to match London (and anywhere in Europe). Liverpool, Salford, Manc, Leeds, Sheffield. Combine them all into a megacity with densely interlinked transport - and then watch it boom
All the ingredients are there. Great universities, great heritage, great sport, great culture, great concentrations of people. DO IT
But this requires each individual city to get over itself
It doesn't really. Genuinely, we'd rather co-operate. We do co-operate quite well. Of all the things holding the north back, inter-municipal backstabbing isn't really one of them. I mean, there are football rivalries. But football fans are dicks. (I was at an U13 girls' match last weekend, and the absue the other teams' parents were giving our players was gobsmacking.)
Anyway - entertaining match between Samoa and Japan this evening. I said Japan could do it. And I also said Samoa would get a player sent off. If I were Steve Borthwick I might be looking to send out a team based on how little I minded those players getting injured against Samoa.
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Low population density is the best thing about the north - the problem with the south is it's wildly overpopulated. Across the planet, we've about 4 acres per human of land area - packing them together in cities like battery hens is foul madness.
and the north will always struggle economically if no where, not everywhere, has the ability to grow population densities required to have sufficient skilled staff who can work in those top end roles making local knowledge based companies a success.
The investment will just continue to flow to Milan, Munich and Marseille over Manchester for ever more.
If you want overcrowded population densities, get on the M6 and move down South.
Its a terrible, terrible idea. Thank goodness we don't have that crap up here.
What we need is investment, but not density. This is the 2020s, when a significant proportion of people can work from home and where office skyscrapers are increasingly outdated monoliths.
When firms want investment they don't just want people, they also often need space. A place to put any machinery or equipment or infrastructure that they require. Which is not in a city.
Yes we need to update our infrastructure and we should have a network of motorways to get from any town to any other town, rather than forcing everyone onto the M6 if they want to go North/South, but there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to piss away and sacrifice that which makes the North so special.
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Low population density is the best thing about the north - the problem with the south is it's wildly overpopulated. Across the planet, we've about 4 acres per human of land area - packing them together in cities like battery hens is foul madness.
and the north will always struggle economically if no where, not everywhere, has the ability to grow population densities required to have sufficient skilled staff who can work in those top end roles making local knowledge based companies a success.
The investment will just continue to flow to Milan, Munich and Marseille over Manchester for ever more.
Yes, and the madness is that the North has a combined urban population to match London (and anywhere in Europe). Liverpool, Salford, Manc, Leeds, Sheffield. Combine them all into a megacity with densely interlinked transport - and then watch it boom
All the ingredients are there. Great universities, great heritage, great sport, great culture, great concentrations of people. DO IT
But this requires each individual city to get over itself
It doesn't really. Genuinely, we'd rather co-operate. We do co-operate quite well. Of all the things holding the north back, inter-municipal backstabbing isn't really one of them. I mean, there are football rivalries. But football fans are dicks. (I was at an U13 girls' match last weekend, and the absue the other teams' parents were giving our players was gobsmacking.)
Good. This needs to happen
It is one of my forlorn, almost-certain-to-be-disappointed hopes that Starmer's Labour may begin to address this
"Child soldiers, executions, bombs: Deadly gang violence turns Sweden into a ‘war zone’
Sweden is in the grip of a gun crime crisis. In 2022, there were 391 shootings in the county, and escalating gang violence has seen 11 people killed in September alone. ‘It’s like a war zone’, one witness tells Jakob Illeborg, who finds fear and loathing of foreigners rife in the new gun murder capital of Europe"
This is not a new story. Sweden has been clearly fucked by immigration for several years - hence their votes at elex. Maybe the dam on reporting it is now breaking
I know it's not new, but papers like the Independent didn't use to report it much.
I remember it being discussed a decade ago when I was in Sweden. It's extraordinary how much they've fucked it, especially compared to Norway.
I was amazed that during the migrant crisis of 2015, the Swedish government wanted more migrants to come to Sweden.
Either he accidentally left behind his passport or someone informed. Any other options?
So, was he a pasty Southern Extinction Warrior?
He knew which way up to hold a chainsaw. My money's on 'no.'
Given the nature of a chainsaw, it's not difficult to work out. I was using a chainsaw in my year off earning money for my uni time. Pull thje cord, get the spikes engaged in the bark, and brrrrm down into the wood.
Hang on, I'll just trim this bit off by cutting upwards with the top of the saw.
This branch above my head is a bit annoying, I'll just cut it off so it isn't in the way.
I'll just push the tree over to make sure it falls the right way.
Its a bit annoying I can't use the saw one handed, I'll just tape down the handle so I can.
Who needs furry trousers? PPE is for wimps.
Even 45 years later, that made my blood go cold - especially the first sentence.
I was wearing proper headgear, gloves and boots, though. The mistake I made (Not cutting up!)_ was to keep cutting when the saw stopped cutting ... I still have, somewhere, the stone with a notch cut into it.
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Low population density is the best thing about the north - the problem with the south is it's wildly overpopulated. Across the planet, we've about 4 acres per human of land area - packing them together in cities like battery hens is foul madness.
and the north will always struggle economically if no where, not everywhere, has the ability to grow population densities required to have sufficient skilled staff who can work in those top end roles making local knowledge based companies a success.
The investment will just continue to flow to Milan, Munich and Marseille over Manchester for ever more.
Yes, and the madness is that the North has a combined urban population to match London (and anywhere in Europe). Liverpool, Salford, Manc, Leeds, Sheffield. Combine them all into a megacity with densely interlinked transport - and then watch it boom
All the ingredients are there. Great universities, great heritage, great sport, great culture, great concentrations of people. DO IT
But this requires each individual city to get over itself
It doesn't really. Genuinely, we'd rather co-operate. We do co-operate quite well. Of all the things holding the north back, inter-municipal backstabbing isn't really one of them. I mean, there are football rivalries. But football fans are dicks. (I was at an U13 girls' match last weekend, and the absue the other teams' parents were giving our players was gobsmacking.)
Surely what would make 'the North' great again is more or less the industries that made it great in the first place.
Lots of whataboutery around the Sycamore. "What about Michael Gambon". "There are other trees". Is it a lack of imagination, or just edge-lordism?
A useful lesson for me, I suppose. A significant proportion of the population finds zero value in our heritage, natural environment, or public realm.
Thing is that’s (I assume) Twitter (or bloody x). Same story for years: you read too many of the replies on any topic and you despair if the human race. Then you remember it’s Twitter.
Recently I’ve been despairing of Indian attitudes to the Ukraine war. Then I remember I’m just reading a selective digest of Hindu nationalist trolls and reassure myself. And that’s before mentioning Covid, when the discourse was really fucked up.
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Low population density is the best thing about the north - the problem with the south is it's wildly overpopulated. Across the planet, we've about 4 acres per human of land area - packing them together in cities like battery hens is foul madness.
Naaaah
I've just been to Hatchard's St Pancras to pick up some books for a trip tomorrow
St Pancras is fucking great. It is the only station in the world I would go to JUST for the station. Everything about it is brilliant, uplifting, vaulting, sleek, glamorous - it is one of the great peaks of global urbanity. It tells you why cities are marvellous.
One of the revelations, for me, of the last few remarkable years is that there is no way I want to "retire to the country", nor do I want some fucking stupid chalet in Provence, at least not as a permanent home
I'm gonna do my level best to live me and die me in London (escaping to the country, Bangkok, as and when). THAT is the life
I remember St P from before it was screwed over yuppie fashion. The ticket office a proper ticket office, not a bar. And so on.
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Low population density is the best thing about the north - the problem with the south is it's wildly overpopulated. Across the planet, we've about 4 acres per human of land area - packing them together in cities like battery hens is foul madness.
and the north will always struggle economically if no where, not everywhere, has the ability to grow population densities required to have sufficient skilled staff who can work in those top end roles making local knowledge based companies a success.
The investment will just continue to flow to Milan, Munich and Marseille over Manchester for ever more.
Yes, and the madness is that the North has a combined urban population to match London (and anywhere in Europe). Liverpool, Salford, Manc, Leeds, Sheffield. Combine them all into a megacity with densely interlinked transport - and then watch it boom
All the ingredients are there. Great universities, great heritage, great sport, great culture, great concentrations of people. DO IT
But this requires each individual city to get over itself
Also, they need to speak in a more comprehensible way.
There's nowt bari about a gadgie who disna ken the craic.
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Low population density is the best thing about the north - the problem with the south is it's wildly overpopulated. Across the planet, we've about 4 acres per human of land area - packing them together in cities like battery hens is foul madness.
and the north will always struggle economically if no where, not everywhere, has the ability to grow population densities required to have sufficient skilled staff who can work in those top end roles making local knowledge based companies a success.
The investment will just continue to flow to Milan, Munich and Marseille over Manchester for ever more.
Yes, and the madness is that the North has a combined urban population to match London (and anywhere in Europe). Liverpool, Salford, Manc, Leeds, Sheffield. Combine them all into a megacity with densely interlinked transport - and then watch it boom
All the ingredients are there. Great universities, great heritage, great sport, great culture, great concentrations of people. DO IT
But this requires each individual city to get over itself
An opinion pollster toured the provinces, asking folk "which is England's second city?"
In Brum they all said "Birmingham". In Mancs they all said "Manchester". In Liverpool they all said "London".
Surely it can't be that difficult to keep spending under control.
The squeeze between central government funding and legal commitments comprises the issue, rather. \Particularly social care, dumped on them by central government.
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Low population density is the best thing about the north - the problem with the south is it's wildly overpopulated. Across the planet, we've about 4 acres per human of land area - packing them together in cities like battery hens is foul madness.
and the north will always struggle economically if no where, not everywhere, has the ability to grow population densities required to have sufficient skilled staff who can work in those top end roles making local knowledge based companies a success.
The investment will just continue to flow to Milan, Munich and Marseille over Manchester for ever more.
If you want overcrowded population densities, get on the M6 and move down South.
Its a terrible, terrible idea. Thank goodness we don't have that crap up here.
What we need is investment, but not density. This is the 2020s, when a significant proportion of people can work from home and where office skyscrapers are increasingly outdated monoliths.
When firms want investment they don't just want people, they also often need space. A place to put any machinery or equipment or infrastructure that they require. Which is not in a city.
Yes we need to update our infrastructure and we should have a network of motorways to get from any town to any other town, rather than forcing everyone onto the M6 if they want to go North/South, but there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to piss away and sacrifice that which makes the North so special.
Most growth in the west today is through the knowledge economy.
Knowledge economy the key asset is the skills of the workforce and having enough people with the right skills.
Look around the world at where economic growth takes place, in large populated urban areas which in turn feed satellite towns.
It is a repeated story across China, India, the Middle East and the western world before.
Low density populations, all driving around from town to town is not going to ever lead to the investment and job opportunities the north needs to catch up with the rest of western Europe.
I cannot find the documentary on iPlayer, but this article is 10 years old nearly and just as relevant today as back then...
Jack Surfleet @jacksurfleet · 32m Friday's FINANCIAL TIMES UK EDITION: OpenAI in talks with Ive and and SoftBank to design ChatGPT creator's first device #tomorrowspaperstoday
There’s an interesting germ of an idea here. M cities.
If Manchester could get on board with Marseille, Milan, Munich, (probably not - yet - Moscow), Miami, Melbourne, Malmo and Montreal, you could get quite an interesting BRICS-style grouping of secondary cities with outsized cultural influence.
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Low population density is the best thing about the north - the problem with the south is it's wildly overpopulated. Across the planet, we've about 4 acres per human of land area - packing them together in cities like battery hens is foul madness.
and the north will always struggle economically if no where, not everywhere, has the ability to grow population densities required to have sufficient skilled staff who can work in those top end roles making local knowledge based companies a success.
The investment will just continue to flow to Milan, Munich and Marseille over Manchester for ever more.
Yes, and the madness is that the North has a combined urban population to match London (and anywhere in Europe). Liverpool, Salford, Manc, Leeds, Sheffield. Combine them all into a megacity with densely interlinked transport - and then watch it boom
All the ingredients are there. Great universities, great heritage, great sport, great culture, great concentrations of people. DO IT
But this requires each individual city to get over itself
Also, they need to speak in a more comprehensible way.
There's nowt bari about a gadgie who disna ken the craic.
It was illuminating when one of us - @Cookie ?- wanted recently to know what some Anglo-Saxon/Old English quotation meant. The PB Scots all chorused the correct answer instantly. The silence from the English, enslaved to the idea that there was only one canonical language ...
Jack Surfleet @jacksurfleet · 32m Friday's FINANCIAL TIMES UK EDITION: OpenAI in talks with Ive and and SoftBank to design ChatGPT creator's first device #tomorrowspaperstoday
When they combine GPT with a humanoid robot we’re into scary pant shitting territory. Technically feasible already.
Lots of whataboutery around the Sycamore. "What about Michael Gambon". "There are other trees". Is it a lack of imagination, or just edge-lordism?
A useful lesson for me, I suppose. A significant proportion of the population finds zero value in our heritage, natural environment, or public realm.
I think Leon speaks well of the anger, it is not a person, but it was a thing of great value. I remember the sadness over Dubrovnik triggering the same kind of thing.
I found myself unable to look the act square in the eye and play it straight, so apologies if I've ended up being a bit of a nobhead here.
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Low population density is the best thing about the north - the problem with the south is it's wildly overpopulated. Across the planet, we've about 4 acres per human of land area - packing them together in cities like battery hens is foul madness.
and the north will always struggle economically if no where, not everywhere, has the ability to grow population densities required to have sufficient skilled staff who can work in those top end roles making local knowledge based companies a success.
The investment will just continue to flow to Milan, Munich and Marseille over Manchester for ever more.
If you want overcrowded population densities, get on the M6 and move down South.
Its a terrible, terrible idea. Thank goodness we don't have that crap up here.
What we need is investment, but not density. This is the 2020s, when a significant proportion of people can work from home and where office skyscrapers are increasingly outdated monoliths.
When firms want investment they don't just want people, they also often need space. A place to put any machinery or equipment or infrastructure that they require. Which is not in a city.
Yes we need to update our infrastructure and we should have a network of motorways to get from any town to any other town, rather than forcing everyone onto the M6 if they want to go North/South, but there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to piss away and sacrifice that which makes the North so special.
Most growth in the west today is through the knowledge economy.
Knowledge economy the key asset is the skills of the workforce and having enough people with the right skills.
Look around the world at where economic growth takes place, in large populated urban areas which in turn feed satellite towns.
It is a repeated story across China, India, the Middle East and the western world before.
Low density populations, all driving around from town to town is not going to ever lead to the investment and job opportunities the north needs to catch up with the rest of western Europe.
The knowledge economy can increasingly work from home too. Nice homes in the North West, with bigger buildings and space for a home office, and your own private garden, rather than cramming into a studio flat.
While keeping space available for high value manufacturing etc too
Surely it can't be that difficult to keep spending under control.
Trouble is that council budgets are dominated by social care (70 percent or so for Havering.) Councils can't control the number of people needing it, or the amount it costs per person to provide it. Hence the problems.
John Rentoul @JohnRentoul · 1h Heseltine ended with a rousing call: “Have faith in the Tory party. When we come back, the Tory party will be led by someone who knows that power lies in the centre ground”
Lots of whataboutery around the Sycamore. "What about Michael Gambon". "There are other trees". Is it a lack of imagination, or just edge-lordism?
A useful lesson for me, I suppose. A significant proportion of the population finds zero value in our heritage, natural environment, or public realm.
I think Leon speaks well of the anger, it is not a person, but it was a thing of great value. I remember the sadness over Dubrovnik triggering the same kind of thing.
I found myself unable to look the act square in the eye and play it straight, so apologies if I've ended up being a bit of a nobhead here.
Not to apologise. It's a fair point to make, and ultimately an illuminating one.
There’s an interesting germ of an idea here. M cities.
If Manchester could get on board with Marseille, Milan, Munich, (probably not - yet - Moscow), Miami, Melbourne, Malmo and Montreal, you could get quite an interesting BRICS-style grouping of secondary cities with outsized cultural influence.
And then you can populate them with M People. Who would be Moving On Up.
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Low population density is the best thing about the north - the problem with the south is it's wildly overpopulated. Across the planet, we've about 4 acres per human of land area - packing them together in cities like battery hens is foul madness.
and the north will always struggle economically if no where, not everywhere, has the ability to grow population densities required to have sufficient skilled staff who can work in those top end roles making local knowledge based companies a success.
The investment will just continue to flow to Milan, Munich and Marseille over Manchester for ever more.
If you want overcrowded population densities, get on the M6 and move down South.
Its a terrible, terrible idea. Thank goodness we don't have that crap up here.
What we need is investment, but not density. This is the 2020s, when a significant proportion of people can work from home and where office skyscrapers are increasingly outdated monoliths.
When firms want investment they don't just want people, they also often need space. A place to put any machinery or equipment or infrastructure that they require. Which is not in a city.
Yes we need to update our infrastructure and we should have a network of motorways to get from any town to any other town, rather than forcing everyone onto the M6 if they want to go North/South, but there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to piss away and sacrifice that which makes the North so special.
Most growth in the west today is through the knowledge economy.
Knowledge economy the key asset is the skills of the workforce and having enough people with the right skills.
Look around the world at where economic growth takes place, in large populated urban areas which in turn feed satellite towns.
It is a repeated story across China, India, the Middle East and the western world before.
Low density populations, all driving around from town to town is not going to ever lead to the investment and job opportunities the north needs to catch up with the rest of western Europe.
The knowledge economy can increasingly work from home too. Nice homes in the North West, with bigger buildings and space for a home office, and your own private garden, rather than cramming into a studio flat.
While keeping space available for high value manufacturing etc too
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Why would an international company setup in Manchester when their staff are all going to work from home when they can get higher productivity from office workers in Munich ?
You are living in a world that has moved on since covid, people are back in the office to increase their productivity, the whole wfh fad is fading fast.
John Rentoul @JohnRentoul · 1h Heseltine ended with a rousing call: “Have faith in the Tory party. When we come back, the Tory party will be led by someone who knows that power lies in the centre ground”
Surely it can't be that difficult to keep spending under control.
Trouble is that council budgets are dominated by social care (70 percent or so for Havering.) Councils can't control the number of people needing it, or the amount it costs per person to provide it. Hence the problems.
"Councils can't control the number of people needing it, or the amount it costs per person to provide it."
But they do.
None of them pay what a decent level of care costs.
Everywhere the system is full of 'top-up' fees for those that can afford it and barely functioning care for those who can't.
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Low population density is the best thing about the north - the problem with the south is it's wildly overpopulated. Across the planet, we've about 4 acres per human of land area - packing them together in cities like battery hens is foul madness.
and the north will always struggle economically if no where, not everywhere, has the ability to grow population densities required to have sufficient skilled staff who can work in those top end roles making local knowledge based companies a success.
The investment will just continue to flow to Milan, Munich and Marseille over Manchester for ever more.
Yes, and the madness is that the North has a combined urban population to match London (and anywhere in Europe). Liverpool, Salford, Manc, Leeds, Sheffield. Combine them all into a megacity with densely interlinked transport - and then watch it boom
All the ingredients are there. Great universities, great heritage, great sport, great culture, great concentrations of people. DO IT
But this requires each individual city to get over itself
Also, they need to speak in a more comprehensible way.
There's nowt bari about a gadgie who disna ken the craic.
It was illuminating when one of us - @Cookie ?- wanted recently to know what some Anglo-Saxon/Old English quotation meant. The PB Scots all chorused the correct answer instantly. The silence from the English, enslaved to the idea that there was only one canonical language ...
Yes, that was me - but I don't think my inability in Anglo Saxon is that I'm enslaved to the idea that there is only one canonical language - it's just that I am a monoglot who speaks only modern English. I did find it interesting that the Scots all knew though - though I don't know if we ever settled it whether it was that Lowland Scots is closer to Old English or just that the Scots on here are particularly learned in that field.
Incidentally, the word 'craic' is an interesting one. There are old Lancashire sources which use the word 'crack' in much the same way that we understand 'craic' today. I've heard it argued that its an old Old English word which was imported by Irish then reexported again the late 20th century. Hearing it used in Scots perhaps backs this up.
Had to drive my diesel car to get its MOT done today, but had to pay the £12.50 ULEZ on top of what the MOT cost. Hadn't actually driven it for 4 weeks, mind
There’s an interesting germ of an idea here. M cities.
If Manchester could get on board with Marseille, Milan, Munich, (probably not - yet - Moscow), Miami, Melbourne, Malmo and Montreal, you could get quite an interesting BRICS-style grouping of secondary cities with outsized cultural influence.
And then you can populate them with M People. Who would be Moving On Up.
And there you go. An instant unifying identity. I think this has legs. Sorry Leeds, Liverpool and Ljubljana.
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Don't be miserable, that's what they contribute to the world.
We have relatively affordable homes, more space per home, gardens, usable roads and a better quality of life. And we don't have Essex around the corner.
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Low population density is the best thing about the north - the problem with the south is it's wildly overpopulated. Across the planet, we've about 4 acres per human of land area - packing them together in cities like battery hens is foul madness.
and the north will always struggle economically if no where, not everywhere, has the ability to grow population densities required to have sufficient skilled staff who can work in those top end roles making local knowledge based companies a success.
The investment will just continue to flow to Milan, Munich and Marseille over Manchester for ever more.
If you want overcrowded population densities, get on the M6 and move down South.
Its a terrible, terrible idea. Thank goodness we don't have that crap up here.
What we need is investment, but not density. This is the 2020s, when a significant proportion of people can work from home and where office skyscrapers are increasingly outdated monoliths.
When firms want investment they don't just want people, they also often need space. A place to put any machinery or equipment or infrastructure that they require. Which is not in a city.
Yes we need to update our infrastructure and we should have a network of motorways to get from any town to any other town, rather than forcing everyone onto the M6 if they want to go North/South, but there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to piss away and sacrifice that which makes the North so special.
Most growth in the west today is through the knowledge economy.
Knowledge economy the key asset is the skills of the workforce and having enough people with the right skills.
Look around the world at where economic growth takes place, in large populated urban areas which in turn feed satellite towns.
It is a repeated story across China, India, the Middle East and the western world before.
Low density populations, all driving around from town to town is not going to ever lead to the investment and job opportunities the north needs to catch up with the rest of western Europe.
The knowledge economy can increasingly work from home too. Nice homes in the North West, with bigger buildings and space for a home office, and your own private garden, rather than cramming into a studio flat.
While keeping space available for high value manufacturing etc too
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Why would an international company setup in Manchester when their staff are all going to work from home when they can get higher productivity from office workers in Munich ?
You are living in a world that has moved on since covid, people are back in the office to increase their productivity, the whole wfh fad is fading fast.
Firstly when you say Manchester do you mean actual Manchester alone or Greater Manchester?
The answer is because its got a world class, educated, English speaking workforce. If you expand to mean Greater Manchester you have areas like Wigan etc with plenty of space to build buildings for factories or anything else you require.
Top employers often like to have their own campuses (see Google etc) and you have spaces available across the North West to build one and have people able to drive in from towns around the North West to thrive, just as you do in California.
That's why we get more investment in England than they do in Germany. Its why we've got more Tech Unicorns for the knowledge economy in England than in Germany.
Stop doing us down. This country has problems, a lack of investment being a serious one, but a lack of density in the North? Nah, that's a selling point, not a problem.
John Rentoul @JohnRentoul · 1h Heseltine ended with a rousing call: “Have faith in the Tory party. When we come back, the Tory party will be led by someone who knows that power lies in the centre ground”
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Low population density is the best thing about the north - the problem with the south is it's wildly overpopulated. Across the planet, we've about 4 acres per human of land area - packing them together in cities like battery hens is foul madness.
and the north will always struggle economically if no where, not everywhere, has the ability to grow population densities required to have sufficient skilled staff who can work in those top end roles making local knowledge based companies a success.
The investment will just continue to flow to Milan, Munich and Marseille over Manchester for ever more.
Yes, and the madness is that the North has a combined urban population to match London (and anywhere in Europe). Liverpool, Salford, Manc, Leeds, Sheffield. Combine them all into a megacity with densely interlinked transport - and then watch it boom
All the ingredients are there. Great universities, great heritage, great sport, great culture, great concentrations of people. DO IT
But this requires each individual city to get over itself
Also, they need to speak in a more comprehensible way.
There's nowt bari about a gadgie who disna ken the craic.
It was illuminating when one of us - @Cookie ?- wanted recently to know what some Anglo-Saxon/Old English quotation meant. The PB Scots all chorused the correct answer instantly. The silence from the English, enslaved to the idea that there was only one canonical language ...
Hwæt! Ic swefna cyst secgan wylle, hwæt me gemætte to midre nihte, syðþan reordberend reste wunedon! þuhte me þæt ic gesawe syllicre treow on lyft lædan, leohte bewunden, beama beorhtost.
I would have thought most Northern redwall voters would rather get their potholes mended and better bus routes than HS2 extended to Manchester
This is why I live in London - we get good train services and bus routes and we get our potholes fixed (eventually). Northerners have to pick which one they want - the Tories don't think they deserve to have all of them.
Most Northerners rarely go to London, they don't need a faster train route there and back they need better local bus routes.
Northerners also have cheaper more affordable housing than Londoners and they don't have ULEZ either so can actually drive without being taxed to the hilt by the Labour Mayor of London
I don't think it's a surprise that densely populated parts of the UK tend to have the highest GVA per capita and the best access to public services.
It's also by the far the cheapest way way to provide housing, with less land needed and serious levels of YIMBYism in areas with lots of renters.
That's if you're serious about productivity growth and housing supply, rather than a pathological need to concrete over the country.
Incidentally, long commutes are pretty consistent across England and Wales, including London. The difference is that the population density allows you to shift more people far more efficiently.
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Don't be miserable, that's what they contribute to the world.
We have relatively affordable homes, more space per home, gardens, usable roads and a better quality of life. And we don't have Essex around the corner.
Surely it can't be that difficult to keep spending under control.
Trouble is that council budgets are dominated by social care (70 percent or so for Havering.) Councils can't control the number of people needing it, or the amount it costs per person to provide it. Hence the problems.
"Councils can't control the number of people needing it, or the amount it costs per person to provide it."
But they do.
None of them pay what a decent level of care costs.
Everywhere the system is full of 'top-up' fees for those that can afford it and barely functioning care for those who can't.
Fair point. But despite that, council budgets are still screwed.
We know what needs to be done- we've known for over a decade. We just need to blooming do it, even if it does mean paying more tax one way or another.
Casar: Will members of the oversight committee raise their hands if you believe both Hunter and Trump should be held accountable for any of indictments if convicted?
I don't think it's a surprise that densely populated parts of the UK tend to have the highest GVA per capita and the best access to public services.
It's also by the far the cheapest way way to provide housing, with less land needed and serious levels of YIMBYism in areas with lots of renters.
That's if you're serious about productivity growth and housing supply, rather than a pathological need to concrete over the country.
If you're serious about housing supply, you have no problems with concrete.
Houses are absolutely flying up where I live, its absolutely fantastic. If it were replicated around the country, there'd be no housing crisis.
And if you remove the capital city distortion effect from GVA figures, then no its not correct.
Nonsense
Manchester and Brum massively under perform their peer second tier cities across Europe.
Barcelona, Milan, Lyon, Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg and a shed load more non capital cities right across Europe are far stronger economically than our second tier cities.
No one is saying there cannot be houses and people can choose to live in them, what they are saying is there needs to be an alternative that you oppose for some reason of heavily populated areas driving growth in the knowledge economy going forwards.
Reading is wealthy, Reading is wealthy because here is a huge population with a huge economy very well connected to Reading.
Blackburn could be wealthy if Manchester was more economically successful and Blackburn was much better connected to Manchester.
But we have neither.
Not the infrastructure nor population in Manchester to drive that economic growth, then we do not have the infrastructure to connect to Blackburn to spread that wealth.
John Rentoul @JohnRentoul · 1h Heseltine ended with a rousing call: “Have faith in the Tory party. When we come back, the Tory party will be led by someone who knows that power lies in the centre ground”
I see that Labour want to charge VAT on private school fees. But what about private schools that cater for children eith learning difficulties? We have a child that due to the Covid lockdown has a social communication disorder, and has recently had to move from a mainstream state school to a special state school (we were lucky to get a place).where they are very happy and doing well. But our plan had been to move to a private school near us that specialises in such children if the progress continues, to the great advantage of the state (they have about 1 teacher to 2 children at the current school). Are they going to make an exemption or do they not care?
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Don't be miserable, that's what they contribute to the world.
We have relatively affordable homes, more space per home, gardens, usable roads and a better quality of life. And we don't have Essex around the corner.
No you have Cheshire instead!
A very pleasant county indeed.
Without plans to invade Scotland, or nuke Spain.
Much better.
Cheshire is the Essex of the North, Knutsford is not much different to Chigwell and Alderley Edge is full of footballers. Plenty of farmland like Essex too.
Most in Cheshire or Essex are also not gutless wimps who would hand Gibraltar back to Spain on a plate or roll over to the SNP like you obviously would!
John Rentoul @JohnRentoul · 1h Heseltine ended with a rousing call: “Have faith in the Tory party. When we come back, the Tory party will be led by someone who knows that power lies in the centre ground”
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Low population density is the best thing about the north - the problem with the south is it's wildly overpopulated. Across the planet, we've about 4 acres per human of land area - packing them together in cities like battery hens is foul madness.
and the north will always struggle economically if no where, not everywhere, has the ability to grow population densities required to have sufficient skilled staff who can work in those top end roles making local knowledge based companies a success.
The investment will just continue to flow to Milan, Munich and Marseille over Manchester for ever more.
Yes, and the madness is that the North has a combined urban population to match London (and anywhere in Europe). Liverpool, Salford, Manc, Leeds, Sheffield. Combine them all into a megacity with densely interlinked transport - and then watch it boom
All the ingredients are there. Great universities, great heritage, great sport, great culture, great concentrations of people. DO IT
But this requires each individual city to get over itself
Also, they need to speak in a more comprehensible way.
There's nowt bari about a gadgie who disna ken the craic.
It was illuminating when one of us - @Cookie ?- wanted recently to know what some Anglo-Saxon/Old English quotation meant. The PB Scots all chorused the correct answer instantly. The silence from the English, enslaved to the idea that there was only one canonical language ...
Yes, that was me - but I don't think my inability in Anglo Saxon is that I'm enslaved to the idea that there is only one canonical language - it's just that I am a monoglot who speaks only modern English. I did find it interesting that the Scots all knew though - though I don't know if we ever settled it whether it was that Lowland Scots is closer to Old English or just that the Scots on here are particularly learned in that field.
Incidentally, the word 'craic' is an interesting one. There are old Lancashire sources which use the word 'crack' in much the same way that we understand 'craic' today. I've heard it argued that its an old Old English word which was imported by Irish then reexported again the late 20th century. Hearing it used in Scots perhaps backs this up.
I think it's simply that trhe Scots are more used to the idea that the various English regional forms (think broad Darset, William Barnes, for example) and the regional forms of Scots comprise the equivalent of a zoological species swarm, like Hawaiian fruit flies. So when we hear something that isn't RP/SE we're more used to the notion of rummaging through the mental files to pin it down. A knowledge of German or Dutch helps - 'my dochter milkit ane coo' isn;t far off 'mein Dochter ein Kuh gemilkt',
Friend of mine from the Borders went out to RSA, found he could understand the Boers if he just relaxed and didn't think too hard ... very useful when disucssing business with them and they talked about him privately on the spot.
I see that Labour want to charge VAT on private school fees. But what about private schools that cater for children eith learning difficulties? We have a child that due to the Covid lockdown has a social communication disorder, and has recently had to move from a mainstream state school to a special state school (we were lucky to get a place).where they are very happy and doing well. But our plan had been to move to a private school near us that specialises in such children if the progress continues, to the great advantage of the state (they have about 1 teacher to 2 children at the current school). Are they going to make an exemption or do they not care?
I don't think it's a surprise that densely populated parts of the UK tend to have the highest GVA per capita and the best access to public services.
It's also by the far the cheapest way way to provide housing, with less land needed and serious levels of YIMBYism in areas with lots of renters.
That's if you're serious about productivity growth and housing supply, rather than a pathological need to concrete over the country.
If you're serious about housing supply, you have no problems with concrete.
Houses are absolutely flying up where I live, its absolutely fantastic. If it were replicated around the country, there'd be no housing crisis.
And if you remove the capital city distortion effect from GVA figures, then no its not correct.
Nonsense
Manchester and Brum massively under perform their peer second tier cities across Europe.
Barcelona, Milan, Lyon, Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg and a shed load more non capital cities right across Europe are far stronger economically than our second tier cities.
No one is saying there cannot be houses and people can choose to live in them, what they are saying is there needs to be an alternative that you oppose for some reason of heavily populated areas driving growth in the knowledge economy going forwards.
Reading is wealthy, Reading is wealthy because here is a huge population with a huge economy very well connected to Reading.
Blackburn could be wealthy if Manchester was more economically successful and Blackburn was much better connected to Manchester.
But we have neither.
Not the infrastructure nor population in Manchester to drive that economic growth, then we do not have the infrastructure to connect to Blackburn to spread that wealth.
But its not true either. They're not far stronger per capita.
We absolutely should improve our infrastructure, no questions about that, but we are not some third world impoverished area.
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Low population density is the best thing about the north - the problem with the south is it's wildly overpopulated. Across the planet, we've about 4 acres per human of land area - packing them together in cities like battery hens is foul madness.
and the north will always struggle economically if no where, not everywhere, has the ability to grow population densities required to have sufficient skilled staff who can work in those top end roles making local knowledge based companies a success.
The investment will just continue to flow to Milan, Munich and Marseille over Manchester for ever more.
Yes, and the madness is that the North has a combined urban population to match London (and anywhere in Europe). Liverpool, Salford, Manc, Leeds, Sheffield. Combine them all into a megacity with densely interlinked transport - and then watch it boom
All the ingredients are there. Great universities, great heritage, great sport, great culture, great concentrations of people. DO IT
But this requires each individual city to get over itself
It doesn't really. Genuinely, we'd rather co-operate. We do co-operate quite well. Of all the things holding the north back, inter-municipal backstabbing isn't really one of them. I mean, there are football rivalries. But football fans are dicks. (I was at an U13 girls' match last weekend, and the absue the other teams' parents were giving our players was gobsmacking.)
Surely what would make 'the North' great again is more or less the industries that made it great in the first place.
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Don't be miserable, that's what they contribute to the world.
We have relatively affordable homes, more space per home, gardens, usable roads and a better quality of life. And we don't have Essex around the corner.
No you have Cheshire instead!
A very pleasant county indeed.
Without plans to invade Scotland, or nuke Spain.
Much better.
Cheshire is the Essex of the North, Knutsford is not much different to Chigwell and Alderley Edge is full of footballers. Plenty of farmland like Essex too.
Most in Cheshire or Essex are also not gutless wimps who would hand Gibraltar back to Spain on a plate or roll over to the SNP like you obviously would!
Don’t give Gibraltar back to Spain for heaven’s sake. Keep it. Give the Spanish the Isle of Portland. Win-win. Tapas and Flamenco nights in coastal Dorset.
I think many of the problems we have boil down to the UK having, outside of London, areas with very high population density yet very low density housing.
This means there is little green space and public transport provision compared to equivalent areas in Europe.
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Low population density is the best thing about the north - the problem with the south is it's wildly overpopulated. Across the planet, we've about 4 acres per human of land area - packing them together in cities like battery hens is foul madness.
and the north will always struggle economically if no where, not everywhere, has the ability to grow population densities required to have sufficient skilled staff who can work in those top end roles making local knowledge based companies a success.
The investment will just continue to flow to Milan, Munich and Marseille over Manchester for ever more.
Yes, and the madness is that the North has a combined urban population to match London (and anywhere in Europe). Liverpool, Salford, Manc, Leeds, Sheffield. Combine them all into a megacity with densely interlinked transport - and then watch it boom
All the ingredients are there. Great universities, great heritage, great sport, great culture, great concentrations of people. DO IT
But this requires each individual city to get over itself
Also, they need to speak in a more comprehensible way.
There's nowt bari about a gadgie who disna ken the craic.
It was illuminating when one of us - @Cookie ?- wanted recently to know what some Anglo-Saxon/Old English quotation meant. The PB Scots all chorused the correct answer instantly. The silence from the English, enslaved to the idea that there was only one canonical language ...
Hwæt! Ic swefna cyst secgan wylle, hwæt me gemætte to midre nihte, syðþan reordberend reste wunedon! þuhte me þæt ic gesawe syllicre treow on lyft lædan, leohte bewunden, beama beorhtost.
Nice one! Beyond me - but it is evidently someone who wants to speak of what happened to me in the middle of hte night.
I don't think it's a surprise that densely populated parts of the UK tend to have the highest GVA per capita and the best access to public services.
It's also by the far the cheapest way way to provide housing, with less land needed and serious levels of YIMBYism in areas with lots of renters.
That's if you're serious about productivity growth and housing supply, rather than a pathological need to concrete over the country.
If you're serious about housing supply, you have no problems with concrete.
Houses are absolutely flying up where I live, its absolutely fantastic. If it were replicated around the country, there'd be no housing crisis.
And if you remove the capital city distortion effect from GVA figures, then no its not correct.
Nonsense
Manchester and Brum massively under perform their peer second tier cities across Europe.
Barcelona, Milan, Lyon, Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg and a shed load more non capital cities right across Europe are far stronger economically than our second tier cities.
No one is saying there cannot be houses and people can choose to live in them, what they are saying is there needs to be an alternative that you oppose for some reason of heavily populated areas driving growth in the knowledge economy going forwards.
Reading is wealthy, Reading is wealthy because here is a huge population with a huge economy very well connected to Reading.
Blackburn could be wealthy if Manchester was more economically successful and Blackburn was much better connected to Manchester.
But we have neither.
Not the infrastructure nor population in Manchester to drive that economic growth, then we do not have the infrastructure to connect to Blackburn to spread that wealth.
Lyon is a village. A charming, beautiful village, with (for France) decent food. But nevertheless, a village.
Germany is properly multipolar: Munich, Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt, Dusselfdorf, Dortmand, Stuttgard - all of which are larger and more important than Lyon.
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Low population density is the best thing about the north - the problem with the south is it's wildly overpopulated. Across the planet, we've about 4 acres per human of land area - packing them together in cities like battery hens is foul madness.
and the north will always struggle economically if no where, not everywhere, has the ability to grow population densities required to have sufficient skilled staff who can work in those top end roles making local knowledge based companies a success.
The investment will just continue to flow to Milan, Munich and Marseille over Manchester for ever more.
Yes, and the madness is that the North has a combined urban population to match London (and anywhere in Europe). Liverpool, Salford, Manc, Leeds, Sheffield. Combine them all into a megacity with densely interlinked transport - and then watch it boom
All the ingredients are there. Great universities, great heritage, great sport, great culture, great concentrations of people. DO IT
But this requires each individual city to get over itself
It doesn't really. Genuinely, we'd rather co-operate. We do co-operate quite well. Of all the things holding the north back, inter-municipal backstabbing isn't really one of them. I mean, there are football rivalries. But football fans are dicks. (I was at an U13 girls' match last weekend, and the absue the other teams' parents were giving our players was gobsmacking.)
Surely what would make 'the North' great again is more or less the industries that made it great in the first place.
Slave trading?
That's Whitehaven and Liverpool. Lots more to the North than that, unless there is even more to it than I knew - which would not surprise me.
I think many of the problems we have boil down to the UK having, outside of London, areas with very high population density yet very low density housing.
This means there is little green space and public transport provision compared to equivalent areas in Europe.
I'm going to call this castle-syndrome.
Flats are fine in urban areas but in rural areas and suburbs most want to live in a house. That is not just in the Anglosphere but as that chart shows in France and Poland and Norway and Ireland for example too
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Low population density is the best thing about the north - the problem with the south is it's wildly overpopulated. Across the planet, we've about 4 acres per human of land area - packing them together in cities like battery hens is foul madness.
and the north will always struggle economically if no where, not everywhere, has the ability to grow population densities required to have sufficient skilled staff who can work in those top end roles making local knowledge based companies a success.
The investment will just continue to flow to Milan, Munich and Marseille over Manchester for ever more.
If you want overcrowded population densities, get on the M6 and move down South.
Its a terrible, terrible idea. Thank goodness we don't have that crap up here.
What we need is investment, but not density. This is the 2020s, when a significant proportion of people can work from home and where office skyscrapers are increasingly outdated monoliths.
When firms want investment they don't just want people, they also often need space. A place to put any machinery or equipment or infrastructure that they require. Which is not in a city.
Yes we need to update our infrastructure and we should have a network of motorways to get from any town to any other town, rather than forcing everyone onto the M6 if they want to go North/South, but there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to piss away and sacrifice that which makes the North so special.
I (like @Leon) like living in a crowded bustling city where everything is a walk or a tube or a taxi away.
People are different. Some like steak. Others like sushi.
I think many of the problems we have boil down to the UK having, outside of London, areas with very high population density yet very low density housing.
This means there is little green space and public transport provision compared to equivalent areas in Europe.
I'm going to call this castle-syndrome.
Alternative viewpoint is we have a better quality of life by having our own homes as our castles and thank goodness we aren't all herded like cattle into apartments.
Would I sacrifice my children's garden they can play in, their trampoline they can bounce on, their open space they can ride their bike on, for an apartment and a marginal pay rise? 🤔
I would have thought most Northern redwall voters would rather get their potholes mended and better bus routes than HS2 extended to Manchester
This is why I live in London - we get good train services and bus routes and we get our potholes fixed (eventually). Northerners have to pick which one they want - the Tories don't think they deserve to have all of them.
Most Northerners rarely go to London, they don't need a faster train route there and back they need better local bus routes.
Northerners also have cheaper more affordable housing than Londoners and they don't have ULEZ either so can actually drive without being taxed to the hilt by the Labour Mayor of London
What are you talking about?
P S. Remind me of the name of the London Mayor who invented ULEZ.
I see that Labour want to charge VAT on private school fees. But what about private schools that cater for children eith learning difficulties? We have a child that due to the Covid lockdown has a social communication disorder, and has recently had to move from a mainstream state school to a special state school (we were lucky to get a place).where they are very happy and doing well. But our plan had been to move to a private school near us that specialises in such children if the progress continues, to the great advantage of the state (they have about 1 teacher to 2 children at the current school). Are they going to make an exemption or do they not care?
They've scrapped that as of yesterday afaik.
Something else, actually. Unless I have missed a seciond, VAT announcement?
I don't think it's a surprise that densely populated parts of the UK tend to have the highest GVA per capita and the best access to public services.
It's also by the far the cheapest way way to provide housing, with less land needed and serious levels of YIMBYism in areas with lots of renters.
That's if you're serious about productivity growth and housing supply, rather than a pathological need to concrete over the country.
If you're serious about housing supply, you have no problems with concrete.
Houses are absolutely flying up where I live, its absolutely fantastic. If it were replicated around the country, there'd be no housing crisis.
And if you remove the capital city distortion effect from GVA figures, then no its not correct.
Nonsense
Manchester and Brum massively under perform their peer second tier cities across Europe.
Barcelona, Milan, Lyon, Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg and a shed load more non capital cities right across Europe are far stronger economically than our second tier cities.
No one is saying there cannot be houses and people can choose to live in them, what they are saying is there needs to be an alternative that you oppose for some reason of heavily populated areas driving growth in the knowledge economy going forwards.
Reading is wealthy, Reading is wealthy because here is a huge population with a huge economy very well connected to Reading.
Blackburn could be wealthy if Manchester was more economically successful and Blackburn was much better connected to Manchester.
But we have neither.
Not the infrastructure nor population in Manchester to drive that economic growth, then we do not have the infrastructure to connect to Blackburn to spread that wealth.
But its not true either. They're not far stronger per capita.
We absolutely should improve our infrastructure, no questions about that, but we are not some third world impoverished area.
These data are a decade old, but I don't think the big picture has changed;
City centres seem to be productive in a way business parks aren't; people meet more and can switch jobs more easily. So we come back to the question - how much does Britain want to be rich. How much does it really really want it?
I would have thought most Northern redwall voters would rather get their potholes mended and better bus routes than HS2 extended to Manchester
This is why I live in London - we get good train services and bus routes and we get our potholes fixed (eventually). Northerners have to pick which one they want - the Tories don't think they deserve to have all of them.
Most Northerners rarely go to London, they don't need a faster train route there and back they need better local bus routes.
Northerners also have cheaper more affordable housing than Londoners and they don't have ULEZ either so can actually drive without being taxed to the hilt by the Labour Mayor of London
What are you talking about?
P S. Remind me of the name of the London Mayor who invented ULEZ.
Quite, the later Labour Prime Minister whose downfall HYUFD was denouncing as treasonable.
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Low population density is the best thing about the north - the problem with the south is it's wildly overpopulated. Across the planet, we've about 4 acres per human of land area - packing them together in cities like battery hens is foul madness.
and the north will always struggle economically if no where, not everywhere, has the ability to grow population densities required to have sufficient skilled staff who can work in those top end roles making local knowledge based companies a success.
The investment will just continue to flow to Milan, Munich and Marseille over Manchester for ever more.
If you want overcrowded population densities, get on the M6 and move down South.
Its a terrible, terrible idea. Thank goodness we don't have that crap up here.
What we need is investment, but not density. This is the 2020s, when a significant proportion of people can work from home and where office skyscrapers are increasingly outdated monoliths.
When firms want investment they don't just want people, they also often need space. A place to put any machinery or equipment or infrastructure that they require. Which is not in a city.
Yes we need to update our infrastructure and we should have a network of motorways to get from any town to any other town, rather than forcing everyone onto the M6 if they want to go North/South, but there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to piss away and sacrifice that which makes the North so special.
I (like @Leon) like living in a crowded bustling city where everything is a walk or a tube or a taxi away.
People are different. Some like steak. Others like sushi.
Absolutely, horses for courses. If you love it, great, its an option. And people can and do move about.
I lived in a city when I was younger. It suited me then.
Would I do it again? No. My children come first and I am happy with what they have.
Which is not to say if you want to bring your children up in an apartment that you're a bad parent of course, horses for courses again. Its just not my preference.
And trying to force people who've made one choice into another is not appropriate. Enable all options, then let people decide, that's a free society.
John Rentoul @JohnRentoul · 1h Heseltine ended with a rousing call: “Have faith in the Tory party. When we come back, the Tory party will be led by someone who knows that power lies in the centre ground”
I think many of the problems we have boil down to the UK having, outside of London, areas with very high population density yet very low density housing.
This means there is little green space and public transport provision compared to equivalent areas in Europe.
I'm going to call this castle-syndrome.
Flats are fine in urban areas but in rural areas and suburbs most want to live in a house. That is not just in the Anglosphere but as that chart shows in France and Poland and Norway and Ireland for example too
You can't simultaneously recognise that there is a major housing crisis and claim that people won't live in flats.
The demand is in cities, and they are full of YIMBYies like me. Build!
There’s an interesting germ of an idea here. M cities.
If Manchester could get on board with Marseille, Milan, Munich, (probably not - yet - Moscow), Miami, Melbourne, Malmo and Montreal, you could get quite an interesting BRICS-style grouping of secondary cities with outsized cultural influence.
Jesus: don't tell people in Melbourne that they're in a second city.
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Low population density is the best thing about the north - the problem with the south is it's wildly overpopulated. Across the planet, we've about 4 acres per human of land area - packing them together in cities like battery hens is foul madness.
and the north will always struggle economically if no where, not everywhere, has the ability to grow population densities required to have sufficient skilled staff who can work in those top end roles making local knowledge based companies a success.
The investment will just continue to flow to Milan, Munich and Marseille over Manchester for ever more.
If you want overcrowded population densities, get on the M6 and move down South.
Its a terrible, terrible idea. Thank goodness we don't have that crap up here.
What we need is investment, but not density. This is the 2020s, when a significant proportion of people can work from home and where office skyscrapers are increasingly outdated monoliths.
When firms want investment they don't just want people, they also often need space. A place to put any machinery or equipment or infrastructure that they require. Which is not in a city.
Yes we need to update our infrastructure and we should have a network of motorways to get from any town to any other town, rather than forcing everyone onto the M6 if they want to go North/South, but there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to piss away and sacrifice that which makes the North so special.
I (like @Leon) like living in a crowded bustling city where everything is a walk or a tube or a taxi away.
People are different. Some like steak. Others like sushi.
Absolutely, horses for courses. If you love it, great, its an option. And people can and do move about.
I lived in a city when I was younger. It suited me then.
Would I do it again? No. My children come first and I am happy with what they have.
Which is not to say if you want to bring your children up in an apartment that you're a bad parent of course, horses for courses again. Its just not my preference.
And trying to force people who've made one choice into another is not appropriate. Enable all options, then let people decide, that's a free society.
I don't think it's a surprise that densely populated parts of the UK tend to have the highest GVA per capita and the best access to public services.
It's also by the far the cheapest way way to provide housing, with less land needed and serious levels of YIMBYism in areas with lots of renters.
That's if you're serious about productivity growth and housing supply, rather than a pathological need to concrete over the country.
If you're serious about housing supply, you have no problems with concrete.
Houses are absolutely flying up where I live, its absolutely fantastic. If it were replicated around the country, there'd be no housing crisis.
And if you remove the capital city distortion effect from GVA figures, then no its not correct.
Nonsense
Manchester and Brum massively under perform their peer second tier cities across Europe.
Barcelona, Milan, Lyon, Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg and a shed load more non capital cities right across Europe are far stronger economically than our second tier cities.
No one is saying there cannot be houses and people can choose to live in them, what they are saying is there needs to be an alternative that you oppose for some reason of heavily populated areas driving growth in the knowledge economy going forwards.
Reading is wealthy, Reading is wealthy because here is a huge population with a huge economy very well connected to Reading.
Blackburn could be wealthy if Manchester was more economically successful and Blackburn was much better connected to Manchester.
But we have neither.
Not the infrastructure nor population in Manchester to drive that economic growth, then we do not have the infrastructure to connect to Blackburn to spread that wealth.
But its not true either. They're not far stronger per capita.
We absolutely should improve our infrastructure, no questions about that, but we are not some third world impoverished area.
These data are a decade old, but I don't think the big picture has changed;
City centres seem to be productive in a way business parks aren't; people meet more and can switch jobs more easily. So we come back to the question - how much does Britain want to be rich. How much does it really really want it?
I dispute that data, there's a chicken and egg situation there, and correlation does not equal causation.
Are rich cities rich because they're big? Or are they big because they're rich?
Its a tale as old as time, people are attracted to rich cities in order to try to get a slice of that wealth, though of course most never get it.
In London you've got vast amounts of wealth generated, but equally millions of poor people who can't afford their own home and spend all their income on rent.
There’s an interesting germ of an idea here. M cities.
If Manchester could get on board with Marseille, Milan, Munich, (probably not - yet - Moscow), Miami, Melbourne, Malmo and Montreal, you could get quite an interesting BRICS-style grouping of secondary cities with outsized cultural influence.
Jesus: don't tell people in Melbourne that they're in a second city.
The crazy thing here is that the housing density is so low yet they have excellent public transport provision.
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Low population density is the best thing about the north - the problem with the south is it's wildly overpopulated. Across the planet, we've about 4 acres per human of land area - packing them together in cities like battery hens is foul madness.
and the north will always struggle economically if no where, not everywhere, has the ability to grow population densities required to have sufficient skilled staff who can work in those top end roles making local knowledge based companies a success.
The investment will just continue to flow to Milan, Munich and Marseille over Manchester for ever more.
Yes, and the madness is that the North has a combined urban population to match London (and anywhere in Europe). Liverpool, Salford, Manc, Leeds, Sheffield. Combine them all into a megacity with densely interlinked transport - and then watch it boom
All the ingredients are there. Great universities, great heritage, great sport, great culture, great concentrations of people. DO IT
But this requires each individual city to get over itself
Also, they need to speak in a more comprehensible way.
There's nowt bari about a gadgie who disna ken the craic.
It was illuminating when one of us - @Cookie ?- wanted recently to know what some Anglo-Saxon/Old English quotation meant. The PB Scots all chorused the correct answer instantly. The silence from the English, enslaved to the idea that there was only one canonical language ...
Yes, that was me - but I don't think my inability in Anglo Saxon is that I'm enslaved to the idea that there is only one canonical language - it's just that I am a monoglot who speaks only modern English. I did find it interesting that the Scots all knew though - though I don't know if we ever settled it whether it was that Lowland Scots is closer to Old English or just that the Scots on here are particularly learned in that field.
Incidentally, the word 'craic' is an interesting one. There are old Lancashire sources which use the word 'crack' in much the same way that we understand 'craic' today. I've heard it argued that its an old Old English word which was imported by Irish then reexported again the late 20th century. Hearing it used in Scots perhaps backs this up.
There’s an interesting germ of an idea here. M cities.
If Manchester could get on board with Marseille, Milan, Munich, (probably not - yet - Moscow), Miami, Melbourne, Malmo and Montreal, you could get quite an interesting BRICS-style grouping of secondary cities with outsized cultural influence.
Jesus: don't tell people in Melbourne that they're in a second city.
The crazy thing here is that the housing density is so low yet they have excellent public transport provision.
Because they've sprawled out, not crammed everyone into limited space, and invested in roads with cycle paths and trams. And encouraged underground parking in the CBD.
Gee - who here might have thought that might be a good idea?
I guess it never occurred to Sunak that one of the reasons so many people in the North use their cars to get around is because public transport in most places is so shite. Still, Get Potholes Done.
You've cause and effect the entirely the wrong way round here. Up north the road system mostly works, so almost everybody just drives, because it's the most convenient option. They could build a high speed rail line from next doors garden to outside the gate of work with trains every ten minutes and give me the tickets for free, and I'd probably still mostly drive to work - the train won't be much faster, the car is better for carrying luggage (I've a lot of tools in the boot that come in handy now and again), and crucially I'm not at the mercy of the rail network if something goes wrong and there's no train home for whatever reason. Because there's little demand, such public transport service as there is tends to be grim. There's no easy cure for this - we could spray subsidies everywhere (bearing in mind it's most quite heavily subsidised anyway), but then we'd have lots of shinny new public transport that nobody uses either.
Down in the SE the road network doesn't really work because there are too many people and not enough roads for them, so they are forced onto public transport. This isn't a sign that the public transport network of the south is a success story to be imposed on the north. It's more another sign that the south is a stinking dump.
I commuted in from Selby to Halifax by car for seven years in the 2000s and I can tell you the the road system mostly just did not work then. I am not sure what has been done to improve it since.
You make my point for me. That's a 40 mile commute each way across one of the busiest bits of the north and you did it regularly for 7 years, so it clearly did work.
Doing a 40 mile commute by road in the south east is almost impossible.
Southerners look at me like I've two heads when I explain I drive 23 miles each way work every day. Then I tell them it's a been a slow run if it took 30 minutes and their heads explode.
If I drive daytime my first mile is normally 10-15 minutes.....
No doubt because you have excellent public transport which enables the area to be heavily populated, trains & tube carry far greater volumes of people than roads ever could.
That heavily populated area enables high levels of economic activity which would otherwise be impossible as the agglomeration effect would not be remotely as strong.
We're stuck with low growth, low population density, poor transport and no hope of greatly improving any of it in the north.
Low population density is the best thing about the north - the problem with the south is it's wildly overpopulated. Across the planet, we've about 4 acres per human of land area - packing them together in cities like battery hens is foul madness.
and the north will always struggle economically if no where, not everywhere, has the ability to grow population densities required to have sufficient skilled staff who can work in those top end roles making local knowledge based companies a success.
The investment will just continue to flow to Milan, Munich and Marseille over Manchester for ever more.
If you want overcrowded population densities, get on the M6 and move down South.
Its a terrible, terrible idea. Thank goodness we don't have that crap up here.
What we need is investment, but not density. This is the 2020s, when a significant proportion of people can work from home and where office skyscrapers are increasingly outdated monoliths.
When firms want investment they don't just want people, they also often need space. A place to put any machinery or equipment or infrastructure that they require. Which is not in a city.
Yes we need to update our infrastructure and we should have a network of motorways to get from any town to any other town, rather than forcing everyone onto the M6 if they want to go North/South, but there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to piss away and sacrifice that which makes the North so special.
I (like @Leon) like living in a crowded bustling city where everything is a walk or a tube or a taxi away.
People are different. Some like steak. Others like sushi.
Absolutely, horses for courses. If you love it, great, its an option. And people can and do move about.
I lived in a city when I was younger. It suited me then.
Would I do it again? No. My children come first and I am happy with what they have.
Which is not to say if you want to bring your children up in an apartment that you're a bad parent of course, horses for courses again. Its just not my preference.
And trying to force people who've made one choice into another is not appropriate. Enable all options, then let people decide, that's a free society.
Force?
There is a housing crisis. The demand is there.
So quit your whining about concrete and lets build some fucking houses!
Build in towns, build in suburbs, build in cities - and let people make a free choice.
There’s an interesting germ of an idea here. M cities.
If Manchester could get on board with Marseille, Milan, Munich, (probably not - yet - Moscow), Miami, Melbourne, Malmo and Montreal, you could get quite an interesting BRICS-style grouping of secondary cities with outsized cultural influence.
Jesus: don't tell people in Melbourne that they're in a second city.
The crazy thing here is that the housing density is so low yet they have excellent public transport provision.
Because they've sprawled out, not crammed everyone into limited space, and invested in roads with cycle paths and trams. And encouraged underground parking in the CBD.
Gee - who here might have thought that might be a good idea?
Major programs here to increase density and remove space for drivers and replace with cycle lanes and more tram and train lines.
I don't think it's a surprise that densely populated parts of the UK tend to have the highest GVA per capita and the best access to public services.
It's also by the far the cheapest way way to provide housing, with less land needed and serious levels of YIMBYism in areas with lots of renters.
That's if you're serious about productivity growth and housing supply, rather than a pathological need to concrete over the country.
If you're serious about housing supply, you have no problems with concrete.
Houses are absolutely flying up where I live, its absolutely fantastic. If it were replicated around the country, there'd be no housing crisis.
And if you remove the capital city distortion effect from GVA figures, then no its not correct.
Nonsense
Manchester and Brum massively under perform their peer second tier cities across Europe.
Barcelona, Milan, Lyon, Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg and a shed load more non capital cities right across Europe are far stronger economically than our second tier cities.
No one is saying there cannot be houses and people can choose to live in them, what they are saying is there needs to be an alternative that you oppose for some reason of heavily populated areas driving growth in the knowledge economy going forwards.
Reading is wealthy, Reading is wealthy because here is a huge population with a huge economy very well connected to Reading.
Blackburn could be wealthy if Manchester was more economically successful and Blackburn was much better connected to Manchester.
But we have neither.
Not the infrastructure nor population in Manchester to drive that economic growth, then we do not have the infrastructure to connect to Blackburn to spread that wealth.
But its not true either. They're not far stronger per capita.
We absolutely should improve our infrastructure, no questions about that, but we are not some third world impoverished area.
These data are a decade old, but I don't think the big picture has changed;
City centres seem to be productive in a way business parks aren't; people meet more and can switch jobs more easily. So we come back to the question - how much does Britain want to be rich. How much does it really really want it?
I dispute that data, there's a chicken and egg situation there, and correlation does not equal causation.
Are rich cities rich because they're big? Or are they big because they're rich?
Its a tale as old as time, people are attracted to rich cities in order to try to get a slice of that wealth, though of course most never get it.
In London you've got vast amounts of wealth generated, but equally millions of poor people who can't afford their own home and spend all their income on rent.
There’s an interesting germ of an idea here. M cities.
If Manchester could get on board with Marseille, Milan, Munich, (probably not - yet - Moscow), Miami, Melbourne, Malmo and Montreal, you could get quite an interesting BRICS-style grouping of secondary cities with outsized cultural influence.
Jesus: don't tell people in Melbourne that they're in a second city.
The crazy thing here is that the housing density is so low yet they have excellent public transport provision.
Because they've sprawled out, not crammed everyone into limited space, and invested in roads with cycle paths and trams. And encouraged underground parking in the CBD.
Gee - who here might have thought that might be a good idea?
Major programs here to increase density and remove space for drivers and replace with cycle lanes and more tram and train lines.
I have no idea what that's about - but I do wish our politicians had nails that fabulous. I'd even consider voting for Rishi if he had that much shellac.
John Rentoul @JohnRentoul · 1h Heseltine ended with a rousing call: “Have faith in the Tory party. When we come back, the Tory party will be led by someone who knows that power lies in the centre ground”
I think many of the problems we have boil down to the UK having, outside of London, areas with very high population density yet very low density housing.
This means there is little green space and public transport provision compared to equivalent areas in Europe.
I'm going to call this castle-syndrome.
Flats are fine in urban areas but in rural areas and suburbs most want to live in a house. That is not just in the Anglosphere but as that chart shows in France and Poland and Norway and Ireland for example too
You can't simultaneously recognise that there is a major housing crisis and claim that people won't live in flats.
The demand is in cities, and they are full of YIMBYies like me. Build!
There is demand for flats in city centres and near stations, however most, especially with families, want homes with gardens
There’s an interesting germ of an idea here. M cities.
If Manchester could get on board with Marseille, Milan, Munich, (probably not - yet - Moscow), Miami, Melbourne, Malmo and Montreal, you could get quite an interesting BRICS-style grouping of secondary cities with outsized cultural influence.
Jesus: don't tell people in Melbourne that they're in a second city.
The crazy thing here is that the housing density is so low yet they have excellent public transport provision.
Because they've sprawled out, not crammed everyone into limited space, and invested in roads with cycle paths and trams. And encouraged underground parking in the CBD.
Gee - who here might have thought that might be a good idea?
Major programs here to increase density and remove space for drivers and replace with cycle lanes and more tram and train lines.
Ooh. Want.
They've done the cheap, simple option of removing a car lane or on-street parking and popping down some bollards. Instant high quality bike lane.
I would have thought most Northern redwall voters would rather get their potholes mended and better bus routes than HS2 extended to Manchester
This is why I live in London - we get good train services and bus routes and we get our potholes fixed (eventually). Northerners have to pick which one they want - the Tories don't think they deserve to have all of them.
Most Northerners rarely go to London, they don't need a faster train route there and back they need better local bus routes.
Northerners also have cheaper more affordable housing than Londoners and they don't have ULEZ either so can actually drive without being taxed to the hilt by the Labour Mayor of London
What are you talking about?
P S. Remind me of the name of the London Mayor who invented ULEZ.
Even then for a few boroughs in inner London not right out to the Outer suburbs like Khan
There’s an interesting germ of an idea here. M cities.
If Manchester could get on board with Marseille, Milan, Munich, (probably not - yet - Moscow), Miami, Melbourne, Malmo and Montreal, you could get quite an interesting BRICS-style grouping of secondary cities with outsized cultural influence.
Jesus: don't tell people in Melbourne that they're in a second city.
The crazy thing here is that the housing density is so low yet they have excellent public transport provision.
Because they've sprawled out, not crammed everyone into limited space, and invested in roads with cycle paths and trams. And encouraged underground parking in the CBD.
Gee - who here might have thought that might be a good idea?
Major programs here to increase density and remove space for drivers and replace with cycle lanes and more tram and train lines.
What a bad idea.
Decrease density and increase space for drivers, cycle, trams etc
I don't think it's a surprise that densely populated parts of the UK tend to have the highest GVA per capita and the best access to public services.
It's also by the far the cheapest way way to provide housing, with less land needed and serious levels of YIMBYism in areas with lots of renters.
That's if you're serious about productivity growth and housing supply, rather than a pathological need to concrete over the country.
If you're serious about housing supply, you have no problems with concrete.
Houses are absolutely flying up where I live, its absolutely fantastic. If it were replicated around the country, there'd be no housing crisis.
And if you remove the capital city distortion effect from GVA figures, then no its not correct.
Nonsense
Manchester and Brum massively under perform their peer second tier cities across Europe.
Barcelona, Milan, Lyon, Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg and a shed load more non capital cities right across Europe are far stronger economically than our second tier cities.
No one is saying there cannot be houses and people can choose to live in them, what they are saying is there needs to be an alternative that you oppose for some reason of heavily populated areas driving growth in the knowledge economy going forwards.
Reading is wealthy, Reading is wealthy because here is a huge population with a huge economy very well connected to Reading.
Blackburn could be wealthy if Manchester was more economically successful and Blackburn was much better connected to Manchester.
But we have neither.
Not the infrastructure nor population in Manchester to drive that economic growth, then we do not have the infrastructure to connect to Blackburn to spread that wealth.
But its not true either. They're not far stronger per capita.
We absolutely should improve our infrastructure, no questions about that, but we are not some third world impoverished area.
These data are a decade old, but I don't think the big picture has changed;
City centres seem to be productive in a way business parks aren't; people meet more and can switch jobs more easily. So we come back to the question - how much does Britain want to be rich. How much does it really really want it?
I dispute that data, there's a chicken and egg situation there, and correlation does not equal causation.
Are rich cities rich because they're big? Or are they big because they're rich?
Its a tale as old as time, people are attracted to rich cities in order to try to get a slice of that wealth, though of course most never get it.
In London you've got vast amounts of wealth generated, but equally millions of poor people who can't afford their own home and spend all their income on rent.
"Fake data"
Correlation != Causation. Do you deny that?
And want some real data.
London has the lowest rate of home ownership, 46.8%, that's a dismal failure.
Manchester is better but not that much better, 58%, down from 72% in 2003. Another dismal failure but not quite as bad.
By contrast 69% of Warrington for example owns their own home. Also not as good as it was in 2003, but nowhere near as bad. Wigan is nearly as good as Warrington at 66%
I see that Labour want to charge VAT on private school fees. But what about private schools that cater for children eith learning difficulties? We have a child that due to the Covid lockdown has a social communication disorder, and has recently had to move from a mainstream state school to a special state school (we were lucky to get a place).where they are very happy and doing well. But our plan had been to move to a private school near us that specialises in such children if the progress continues, to the great advantage of the state (they have about 1 teacher to 2 children at the current school). Are they going to make an exemption or do they not care?
They've scrapped that as of yesterday afaik.
No. They’ve scrapped plans to strip private schools of charitable status, but will still apply VAT to fees. This means private schools will retain some tax advantages.
I still can't believe they didn't join HS1 and HS2 up at St Pancras so that you could get on a train in Manchester and go all the way through to Paris or Amsterdam, just in order not to inconvenience the likes of Leon in Camden Town.
Perusing the data it seems the city with the highest home ownership rate in the North West is actually Preston. Which may also be the least dense city in the North West and have the highest rate of driving. Its also rather divorced from Liverpool-Manchester contiguous region which towns like Warrington and Wigan are in.
Piling serfs up high in order to be 'productive' to pay rent to their betters might appeal to people like HYUFD, I'm not sure why it appeals to left wingers here.
Comments
It's non trivial for the resident, Birmingham I hear is at monthly throwaway waste collection, the dumps barely open and so on.
Is anyone on here in an S114 area. What is it like?
I mean, there are football rivalries. But football fans are dicks. (I was at an U13 girls' match last weekend, and the absue the other teams' parents were giving our players was gobsmacking.)
A useful lesson for me, I suppose. A significant proportion of the population finds zero value in our heritage, natural environment, or public realm.
If I were Steve Borthwick I might be looking to send out a team based on how little I minded those players getting injured against Samoa.
Its a terrible, terrible idea. Thank goodness we don't have that crap up here.
What we need is investment, but not density. This is the 2020s, when a significant proportion of people can work from home and where office skyscrapers are increasingly outdated monoliths.
When firms want investment they don't just want people, they also often need space. A place to put any machinery or equipment or infrastructure that they require. Which is not in a city.
Yes we need to update our infrastructure and we should have a network of motorways to get from any town to any other town, rather than forcing everyone onto the M6 if they want to go North/South, but there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to piss away and sacrifice that which makes the North so special.
It is one of my forlorn, almost-certain-to-be-disappointed hopes that Starmer's Labour may begin to address this
Coz the Tories talk about it, and do fuck all
I was wearing proper headgear, gloves and boots, though. The mistake I made (Not cutting up!)_ was to keep cutting when the saw stopped cutting ... I still have, somewhere, the stone with a notch cut into it.
Recently I’ve been despairing of Indian attitudes to the Ukraine war. Then I remember I’m just reading a selective digest of Hindu nationalist trolls and reassure myself. And that’s before mentioning Covid, when the discourse was really fucked up.
Mind, its current incarnation isn't bad at all.
In Brum they all said "Birmingham".
In Mancs they all said "Manchester".
In Liverpool they all said "London".
Knowledge economy the key asset is the skills of the workforce and having enough people with the right skills.
Look around the world at where economic growth takes place, in large populated urban areas which in turn feed satellite towns.
It is a repeated story across China, India, the Middle East and the western world before.
Low density populations, all driving around from town to town is not going to ever lead to the investment and job opportunities the north needs to catch up with the rest of western Europe.
I cannot find the documentary on iPlayer, but this article is 10 years old nearly and just as relevant today as back then...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/the-northerner/2014/mar/04/evan-davis-mind-the-gap-review
Jack Surfleet
@jacksurfleet
·
32m
Friday's FINANCIAL TIMES UK EDITION: OpenAI in talks with Ive and and SoftBank to design ChatGPT creator's first device
#tomorrowspaperstoday
If Manchester could get on board with Marseille, Milan, Munich, (probably not - yet - Moscow), Miami, Melbourne, Malmo and Montreal, you could get quite an interesting BRICS-style grouping of secondary cities with outsized cultural influence.
I found myself unable to look the act square in the eye and play it straight, so apologies if I've ended up being a bit of a nobhead here.
While keeping space available for high value manufacturing etc too
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
It's also by the far the cheapest way way to provide housing, with less land needed and serious levels of YIMBYism in areas with lots of renters.
That's if you're serious about productivity growth and housing supply, rather than a pathological need to concrete over the country.
John Rentoul
@JohnRentoul
·
1h
Heseltine ended with a rousing call: “Have faith in the Tory party. When we come back, the Tory party will be led by someone who knows that power lies in the centre ground”
https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/1707485782921838855
You are living in a world that has moved on since covid, people are back in the office to increase their productivity, the whole wfh fad is fading fast.
Houses are absolutely flying up where I live, its absolutely fantastic. If it were replicated around the country, there'd be no housing crisis.
And if you remove the capital city distortion effect from GVA figures, then no its not correct.
But they do.
None of them pay what a decent level of care costs.
Everywhere the system is full of 'top-up' fees for those that can afford it and barely functioning care for those who can't.
I did find it interesting that the Scots all knew though - though I don't know if we ever settled it whether it was that Lowland Scots is closer to Old English or just that the Scots on here are particularly learned in that field.
Incidentally, the word 'craic' is an interesting one. There are old Lancashire sources which use the word 'crack' in much the same way that we understand 'craic' today. I've heard it argued that its an old Old English word which was imported by Irish then reexported again the late 20th century. Hearing it used in Scots perhaps backs this up.
The answer is because its got a world class, educated, English speaking workforce. If you expand to mean Greater Manchester you have areas like Wigan etc with plenty of space to build buildings for factories or anything else you require.
Top employers often like to have their own campuses (see Google etc) and you have spaces available across the North West to build one and have people able to drive in from towns around the North West to thrive, just as you do in California.
That's why we get more investment in England than they do in Germany. Its why we've got more Tech Unicorns for the knowledge economy in England than in Germany.
Stop doing us down. This country has problems, a lack of investment being a serious one, but a lack of density in the North? Nah, that's a selling point, not a problem.
"The common ground, not the centre ground" (N. Tebbit?)
hwæt me gemætte to midre nihte,
syðþan reordberend reste wunedon!
þuhte me þæt ic gesawe syllicre treow
on lyft lædan, leohte bewunden,
beama beorhtost.
Northerners also have cheaper more affordable housing than Londoners and they don't have ULEZ either so can actually drive without being taxed to the hilt by the Labour Mayor of London
#productivity
Without plans to invade Scotland, or nuke Spain.
Much better.
We know what needs to be done- we've known for over a decade. We just need to blooming do it, even if it does mean paying more tax one way or another.
Democrats: *raises hands*
Republicans:
https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1707461196247425294
Manchester and Brum massively under perform their peer second tier cities across Europe.
Barcelona, Milan, Lyon, Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg and a shed load more non capital cities right across Europe are far stronger economically than our second tier cities.
No one is saying there cannot be houses and people can choose to live in them, what they are saying is there needs to be an alternative that you oppose for some reason of heavily populated areas driving growth in the knowledge economy going forwards.
Reading is wealthy, Reading is wealthy because here is a huge population with a huge economy very well connected to Reading.
Blackburn could be wealthy if Manchester was more economically successful and Blackburn was much better connected to Manchester.
But we have neither.
Not the infrastructure nor population in Manchester to drive that economic growth, then we do not have the infrastructure to connect to Blackburn to spread that wealth.
Most in Cheshire or Essex are also not gutless wimps who would hand Gibraltar back to Spain on a plate or roll over to the SNP like you obviously would!
Friend of mine from the Borders went out to RSA, found he could understand the Boers if he just relaxed and didn't think too hard ... very useful when disucssing business with them and they talked about him privately on the spot.
We absolutely should improve our infrastructure, no questions about that, but we are not some third world impoverished area.
This means there is little green space and public transport provision compared to equivalent areas in Europe.
I'm going to call this castle-syndrome.
Germany is properly multipolar: Munich, Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt, Dusselfdorf, Dortmand, Stuttgard - all of which are larger and more important than Lyon.
People are different. Some like steak. Others like sushi.
Would I sacrifice my children's garden they can play in, their trampoline they can bounce on, their open space they can ride their bike on, for an apartment and a marginal pay rise? 🤔
Hell no!
P S. Remind me of the name of the London Mayor who invented ULEZ.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/sep/27/labour-backs-down-from-plan-to-strip-private-schools-of-charitable-status
https://www.tomforth.co.uk/birminghamisasmallcity/
For example, here's a more recent report;
https://www.centreforcities.org/story/mapping-the-30-minute-city/
City centres seem to be productive in a way business parks aren't; people meet more and can switch jobs more easily. So we come back to the question - how much does Britain want to be rich. How much does it really really want it?
I lived in a city when I was younger. It suited me then.
Would I do it again? No. My children come first and I am happy with what they have.
Which is not to say if you want to bring your children up in an apartment that you're a bad parent of course, horses for courses again. Its just not my preference.
And trying to force people who've made one choice into another is not appropriate. Enable all options, then let people decide, that's a free society.
The demand is in cities, and they are full of YIMBYies like me. Build!
There is a housing crisis. The demand is there.
Are rich cities rich because they're big? Or are they big because they're rich?
Its a tale as old as time, people are attracted to rich cities in order to try to get a slice of that wealth, though of course most never get it.
In London you've got vast amounts of wealth generated, but equally millions of poor people who can't afford their own home and spend all their income on rent.
https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/crack_n1
Robert J. DeNault
@robertjdenault
This is the greatest moment of advocacy in the modern Congress that I have ever seen.
https://twitter.com/robertjdenault/status/1707470631174844622
Gee - who here might have thought that might be a good idea?
Build in towns, build in suburbs, build in cities - and let people make a free choice.
Decrease density and increase space for drivers, cycle, trams etc Correlation != Causation. Do you deny that?
And want some real data.
London has the lowest rate of home ownership, 46.8%, that's a dismal failure.
Manchester is better but not that much better, 58%, down from 72% in 2003. Another dismal failure but not quite as bad.
By contrast 69% of Warrington for example owns their own home. Also not as good as it was in 2003, but nowhere near as bad. Wigan is nearly as good as Warrington at 66%
Piling serfs up high in order to be 'productive' to pay rent to their betters might appeal to people like HYUFD, I'm not sure why it appeals to left wingers here.