Why the north-south divide will soon become a chasm
We are not all in this together, whatever the metropolitan elite may say. The cuts will be felt most far beyond the M25
Let us begin by scything through one of the more delusional aspects of the current political conversation. We are not all in this together. In areas of the country light years from the upmarket parts of London, a few cynical attempts at "consultation" and the old Thatcherite mantra about there being no alternative will not cut it. Given that the Lib Dems seem to be confining any progressive pull on the government to issues of crime, punishment and civil liberties, plans for the economic and social fabric represent Conservatism red in tooth and claw – and only 24% of the electorate fancied anything like that. Needless to say, precious few of them lived in the places where the cuts will really bite.
A reminder to anyone still averting their eyes from the coalition's worst aspects: there is a deeply unpleasant noise around this government, founded on an unbelievably haughty view of people who live beyond the affluent south, and an apparent belief that the public sector comes close to being an offence to the human spirit. You hear its polite manifestation in David Cameron's proposed move on the security of council tenants, all those pronouncements on welfare dependency and alleged benefit fraud, and his recent insistence that the cuts will be permanent. For a sharper flavour, sample the output of the Adam Smith Institute, or visit the rightwing corners of the blogosphere – where our northern cities are routinely compared to communist eastern Europe, and people pledge allegiance to a credo that has turned the economist's notion of "crowding out" into an article of faith: that any hacking back of the state will lead to great sunlit uplands of investment, enterprise and initiative.
In the real world, of course, millions of Britons live in places where market forces have never begun to fill the void left by the demise of manufacturing and heavy industry, and the public sector is the chief means via which life can tick over. In these places, chop the state down, and far from boosting private enterprise, you weaken it – a simple truth evident in waning business confidence and the dread possibility of a double-dip recession.
Some numbers. At the last count, public spending accounted for 62.7% of the GDP of Northern Ireland. In Wales, the figure was 57.4%; in Scotland, 50.3%. The north-east of England scored 57.1%; the north-west 50.2%. If you want to understand the essential difference between the south-west and south-east, consider their respective numbers: 42.1%, as against the uncontested national low of 34.1%. When the recession first stirred, there was talk about how it would disproportionately affect London and the home counties. But it didn't work out like that: the jump in unemployment in the north of England was nearly three times bigger than the south-east's, and now austerity will surely deliver an even harder blow. The result: an inflaming of that national scar we know as the north-south divide, as the regional economy focused on London contrasts with virtual deserts elsewhere – on which the crowding-out crowd will presumably dance, willing the arrival of green shoots.
They will not appear, partly because of a particularly baffling aspect of the government's plans. During the election campaign, when he was quizzed about the pain to come in parts of the country that rely on the public sector, David Cameron served notice of a "rebalancing", and said: "We need a bigger private sector … the aim has got to be to get the commercial sector going." So why is he killing off the regional development agencies, which exist to spark just the kind of leaps forward he says he wants?
Last year, a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers found that every £1 the RDAs spent resulted in an average gain of £4.50 for regional economies; they helped over 35,000 businesses, assisted in the creation of 8,500 startups, and played a role in over 400,000 people acquiring new skills. Though Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland – and London! – will keep their equivalents, the English regions will now have to make do with much smaller "local enterprise partnerships", who will bid for money from a centrally administered "regional growth fund", gifted with less than half the current budget for the RDAs. So it is that the cutting of public-sector jobs is accompanied by an attack on the means to generate new private ones, which only underlines an ongoing mystery: if the cuts are for keeps and a watershed "rebalancing" is the guiding idea, has the coalition got anything more convincing up its sleeve? Or is its vision for the state-reliant parts of the UK reducible to a banal faith in the free market?
Naturally enough, government ministers do not tend to voice the more divisive aspects of their politics. But let us not forget the tribe we are largely dealing with: all too often, the metropolitan merchants of a kind of social Darwinism, brimming with the prejudice glimpsed when Boris Johnson's incarnation of the Spectator famously took aim at Liverpool. The then MP for Henley may have travelled north to apologise, but the relevant article is worth revisiting because of its echoes of the winds blowing through Whitehall: "A combination of economic misfortune … and an excessive predilection for welfarism have created a peculiar, and deeply unattractive, psyche among many Liverpudlians. They ... see themselves, whenever possible as victims, and resent their victim status, yet at the same time they wallow in it."
This is not just a north-south thing, as I was recently reminded while picking through a copy of the same magazine, and the musings of the ex-Telegraph editor Charles Moore, who'd visited Trowbridge, seven miles from where I live. I've been to more upmarket places, but its slightly forlorn atmosphere is down to the dominance of low-wage jobs, and simple deprivation. Now, what with it being the HQ of Wiltshire county council, hundreds of its people fear the cuts. Moore, however, bemoaned an absence of "local pride … visible, it seemed to me, in the demeanour of the tattooed people shuffling round, which was the saddest thing." He continued: "This is a place, I felt, which has no excuse – extreme unemployment, sudden mass immigration – for itself. It could be 10 times better if it tried. Why doesn't it?"
That, I suspect, is a portent of the plummy-voiced exhortations to come, as the hammer really falls: Get up! Come on! What's the matter with you?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/08/north-south-divide-soon-become-chasm
