Most of the large departments with huge numbers of administrative staff are already outside of London. What's left is much smaller, and probably involves staff who are far more mobile between the various departments. Or at least have to meet regularly under cross departmental working groups.
It makes sense to have them all in one place, whether it is London or somewhere else. But London is obviously the most logical given the location of Parliament and everything else.
A headline that these will move to "the North" is all very good. But where in "the North". Given the above, it hardly makes sense to base the Treasury in York, the Foreign Office in Leeds, the Home Office in Manchester... It's just sloganising.
Why does it make sense to have them all in one place?
Does anyone imagine that will really happen? That thousands of civil servants are just going to sell up and move north?
Voluntary redundancy and rehiring Northerners. That's usually how it's done.
Of course, it never needs to happen, it just needs to look like it is happening so the fiction of "levelling up the North" can be maintained.
Now, if they announced the permanent move of Parliament to Tamworth (the centroid of Great Britain) and made Westminster a tourist hotel then I might believe them.
Point of order. The centre of the country is near Haltwhistle Northumberland. Not Tamworth.
Don't go there! There literally dozens of ways of measuring the centre of a country, from centre of gravity, to centre of population, on encompassing circles, to mid-point-of-the-extremes, to inscribed circles, and so on. You could lose hours or even days to the problem
And then there's the thistle of which 'country' is being referred to to be grasped...
Speaking of which, if it wasn't for bloody Shetland, a lot of these geographical centres would be a lot closer together.
The inclusion of Rockall presumably puts the centroid of the "country" in the mid-Atlantic.
Somewhat surprisingly, if you try to draw a circle around everything from Kent to Rockall, from the Scilly Isles to Shetland, the centre of your circle is near Cumnock, East Ayrshire. That is further north than all of Northern Ireland, and further west than Swansea.
I think we have found the ideal location for the Houses of Parliament.
Very unlikely you can draw a circle that has four random points on its circumference
He said around, not through
And in truth there was a bit of sea on the Kent corner, less than a third of the width of the Channel. It wasn't a rigorous analysis, just a bit of fun that anyone can take or leave as they see fit.
Sky confirm the English police will stop Welsh cars and if they do not have grounds to have crossed the border they will be reported to the Welsh police for prosecution
This is massive overreaction along with restricting supermarket non essential food sales driving business to Amazon. I can buy most things on Amazon on Prime and they are here the next day
Hope you aren't planning on going anywhere, Big_G. Apart from collecting your government-approved set of groceries, of course (and don't even think about reaching for that magazine by the tills).
Apart from trip to chemist staying at home but will use Amazon as required
The sight of supermarket shelves sealed off is all over social media and of course will be experienced in person by shoppers reminding everyone how petty this all is
Does the chemist not deliver G, up here the chemist delivers the FREE prescriptions FREE of charge.
Same here in Wales. Maybe G. uses a chemist over the border in Cheshire.
That is a can of worms I wouldn't have opened. I doubt every single future off-colour comment from any Conservative MP will elicit an apology from Johnson. The stuff last night from Ben Bradley is really not nice, but it's hardly for the PM to apologise for him. The signatories of that letter haven't thought this through.
Sky confirm the English police will stop Welsh cars and if they do not have grounds to have crossed the border they will be reported to the Welsh police for prosecution
This is massive overreaction along with restricting supermarket non essential food sales driving business to Amazon. I can buy most things on Amazon on Prime and they are here the next day
Tories are well down the road to a police state, they are using Germany in 1930's as their blueprint.
If only the East Germans could have ordered blue jeans, plastic carrier bags and rock and roll cassette tapes online....
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It wasn't a rigorous analysis, just a bit of fun that anyone can take or leave as they see fit.