And then your eye is caught by long, disciplined rows of red brick buildings, a little ragged and battered, under Welsh slate and glass roofs looking like some mighty abbey complex lacking only a crenellated and pinnacled tower to complete the subterfuge. This, though, once the most important gathering of buildings in Horwich, is no half-remembered ecclesiastical foundation, but what remains of the partially abandoned and largely uncared for Horwich railway works.

Founded in 1884 and closed a century later, Horwich Works was the pride and joy of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway. This was the “Business Line”, its frequent and tightly timed trains linking an intensity of industrial towns and cities from Liverpool to Manchester and eastwards to Halifax, Bradford, Leeds and Doncaster.

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From 1889, most of the glossy black locomotives sprinting the railway’s trains through chains of Pennine tunnels were built at Horwich. They took shape in the most impressive of all the many buildings at the railway works, the Erecting and Repair Shop. This, until the wreckers went in recently, was Horwich’s holy of holies, a truly magnificent industrial building, 1,520-ft long, 118-ft wide and formed by a top-lit nave separated from a pair of aisles by rows of lofty cast iron piers.

When finally abandoned, the haunting Erecting and Repair shop had the look and numinous air of some ambitious Romanesque abbey church. Of course it should have. In the late 19^th and early 20^th century, Britain’s railways were a religion of sorts. They attracted hundreds of thousands of worshippers. The Great Western Railway, the High Church of Britain’s railways, named one its most famous classes of copper-capped express locomotives after saints and planned to name its proposed Pacific locomotives after cathedrals.

Which unholy owner or authority would even think of demolishing the sanctuary of historic Horwich? On your bended knees, Bolton Council. In 2006, the council gave outline permission for the redevelopment of Horwich Works. The proposal, since given a green signal, was for a 150-acre sprawl of 1,700 new homes. On their way up today, these appear to be standard new housing estate “units”, brick boxes, that is, guaranteed free of architecture and local character. The same type can be seen anywhere in the country whether at Halifax, Harrogate, Horwich or Huyton. And these are just Lancashire and Yorkshire towns that happen to begin with H.

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Because the thousands of people living in coming years at “Rivington Chase” are expected to need access to the M61 motorway, for commuting — once life returns to normal after the pandemic — and to the enormous Middlebrook Retail and Leisure Park, a £12m link road is to be driven through what survives of Horwich Works to reach the new houses. And this has meant — you might have guessed — the demolition of the Erecting and Repair Shop. As to the fate of its attendant buildings, a part of the dilapidated Horwich Loco Industrial Estate for the past thirty years, the ghost of Sir John Aspinall only knows, although there is little cause for optimism.

As a dynamic 35-year old, John Aspinall, the new Chief Mechanical Engineer of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, and later General Manager, took on the task of completing Horwich Works. Here, set across 247-acres, and alongside streets of new terraced housing named after distinguished British railway engineers, among them Stephenson, Gooch, Webb and Brunel, were a wheel shop, bolt shop, spring smithy, boiler shop, foundry and forge and the erecting shop with its overheard travelling cranes. Over there was the railway’s own cottage hospital, gym, 1,100-seat dining room and, all importantly, the Mechanics Institute (since demolished) where skilled working men learned the latest in engineering and technology.

The first handsome red brick building on the way into the works was Rivington House (a survivor), where Aspinall had his drawing office and laboratories. The entire works, powered by gas and electricity of its own making, was threaded through by a 7½ mile narrow-gauge railway, its trains steaming in and out of and in between the regimented rows of hard working sheds fetching and carrying tools, parts and personnel.

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Britain’s brightest young engineering talent made a beeline for Horwich, attracted by Aspinall’s innovative and and purposeful regime. Among them were four future Chief Mechanical Engineers of the Big Four railways that swallowed up companies like the Lancashire and Yorkshire after the 1923 “grouping” of the nation’s mainlines. These were George Hughes and Henry Fowler (both LMS), Richard Maunsell (Southern) and Nigel Gresley (LNER) of Flying Scotsman and Mallard fame.

Like Aspinall, Gresley had been apprenticed to the London and North Western Railway under Francis Webb at Crewe before moving to Horwich. At the 1919 dinner held in Crewe Works for former Webb apprentices, these two huge talents sang the Crewe Works Song together:

Last night I lay a sleeping
There came a dream to me –
I stood within a Steam Shed,
A marvellous shed to see.
The walls were clean and spotless,
And smoke troughs white as snow,
And not a spot of grease was seen
Upon the pits below.

 O Loco Men! O Loco Men!
Shout loud for well ye may –
‘Twas the Blessed Steam Shed of Paradise
We all shall see someday.

 One famous Horwich apprentice took off in another direction. This was Alliot Verdon-Roe, to whose aviation company founded in Manchester in 1910 we owe the RAF’s Second World War four-engine Avro Lancaster bomber and the Cold War Vulcan delta-wing jet. During the two world wars, Horwich Works made, among other materiel, artillery shells, field guns and tanks.

Given this distinguished history, anyone could be forgiven for thinking that Bolton Council would more than cherish the site of Horwich Works. The council did agree to a Conservation Area Management Plan in 2006, yet this seems to have evaporated since then like steam through a safety valve. As local residents have noted, the Loco Works conservation area must be one of the only conservation areas in the country in the throes of demolition.

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Such lack of vision. If the local council and all who work for and with it had only thought of re-using this great building complex imaginatively, it could have been the hub of forward looking industrial enterprise and housing living up to its past. The buildings could have been transformed into workshops, laboratories, test centres, hi-tech offices, spacious and beautiful homes, shops, a clinic, a school, a contemporary technical college. New houses, at all prices, could have been of designs living up to those of Aspinall and Gresley.

People living here might have walked to work, shopped within minutes of their front doors and be proud to live in a place visitors would come to see, a Northern Powerhouse, as exciting and as moving any towns or cities boasting great architecture. Abbeys. Cathedrals. Innovative industrial and scientific complexes.

Instead, they have been given suburban sprawl, what will surely be congested roads and, at Rivington Chase, little more than a folk memory of a Horwich of industrial might, invention and skill.

I don’t mean to be gratuitously contrarian here — Boris’s big victory will change a lot of things. But in one very fundamental respect, British politics is the same today as it was before 10pm, 12 December 2019.

In every election since 1922, the Conservative and Labour Parties have either come first and second — or second and first. Furthermore, some incarnation of the Liberal Party has always come third in terms of vote share (with the sole exception of 2015, when it was UKIP). So assuming a full parliament this time round, that’ll mean more than a hundred years of the same party system.

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This year did not break the pattern. Nor did other era-defining elections like 1945, 1979 and 1997.

Ever since Labour became a major party, a century ago, many other parties have tried to fight their way into the system. Only one has succeeded in achieving significant representation (i.e. 20 or more MPs) across three or more elections, while maintaining its independence from other parties — and that is the SNP. However, as a Scotland-only party, it can’t challenge for 1st or 2nd place in Westminster (or even 3rd place by number of votes).

So, even when the Conservatives or Labour suffer a devastating defeat, they eventually bounce back, because there’s no one who can replace either party as the main opposition to the other.

Not many other nations can match Britain for the stability of its party system. (Not least because depressingly few countries have been democracies over the whole of the last hundred years.)

But is having the same electoral menu to choose from for so long actually good for us? In many contexts, institutional continuity is wonderful thing; but it can really mess up party politics. Here are three reasons why:

Firstly, ideological inertia. After the First World War, Labour ousted the Liberals as main ‘progressive’ party. In doing so, it served an emergent and necessary purpose — to represent the fully enfranchised working class and to champion an idea whose time had come (i.e. socialism). To put it in very unsocialist terms, there was a gap in the market — and Labour filled it. But are we really saying that this was the last gap that needed to be filled? That there hasn’t been a single one since?

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There have been several points at which the popular appetite for a new force in politics has been demonstrated — for instance, the brief surge in support for the SDP in the 1980s and more recently the growth of the environmental and Eurosceptic movements. However, they’ve never been able to take root in Westminster as independent election-fighting organisations. That’s not just because of our electoral system, but because of our stubborn attachments to the traditional first, second and third parties of British politics.

Ah, but do we really need dedicated parties to represent the rise and fall of important ideas and interests? Can’t this battle take place within the established parties? Indeed, if you look back over the decades, haven’t we’ve seen both the blues and the reds undergo dramatic changes in ideological orientation? Thatcherism in the Conservative Party, for instance. Or Blairism and then Corbynism in Labour. But that brings me to the second downside of our static party system, which is that ideological realignments only happen as accidents of history.

Thatcherism, Blairism, Corbynism: All named after unexpected leaders who happened to be in the right place at the right time — Margaret Thatcher because she alone had the guts to challenge Edward Heath for the Conservative Party leadership after he’d lost his third general election; Tony Blair because of his deal with Gordon Brown — and the tragic loss of John Smith; Jeremy Corbyn because of an ill-considered change to the membership rules and because he just squeaked onto the ballot thanks to well-meaning moderate Labour MPs. In each case, they were surrounded by a small band of supporters who, though pretty unrepresentative of their party, proceeded to seize control of it.

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It’s not that these new ideas shouldn’t have been heard. Take Corbynism, for instance. Following the global financial crisis of 2008 and its gruelling aftermath, it was entirely reasonable that voters had the opportunity to consider alternatives to the neoliberal order. In other countries, radical Left parties emerged like Syriza, Podemos and La France Insoumise. The voters of Greece, Spain and France were able to assess the anti-capitalist case — or to opt for a different kind of radicalism in the form of Europe’s various Green parties.

But in Britain, the radical option was put before the electorate by means of the institutional capture of a party meant to represent the whole of the democratic Left and centre-Left. A lot of people were rendered politically homeless as a result.

For exiled Remainers, the attempt to find a new home with Change UK collapsed in on itself. Meanwhile the obvious solution — to move-in with the Liberal Democrats — also went awry. All the unimpeachable logic of a centrist Remain alliance couldn’t overcome those stubborn attachments to the Labour name (nor the lack of forgiveness for the Lib Dem dalliance with the Tories). Again, this can’t all be blamed on the electoral system. In seats across the south and especially London, a true Remain alliance could have broken through.

What about the Leave alliance in the shape of Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party? In this case, there was a breakthrough, which turned the ‘Red Wall’ blue. Isn’t this proof that we don’t need a fluid party system, in which major political parties can easily appear and disappear, to achieve political realignment? An experiment, like the Corbynite Labour Party, was given a chance and then given the heave-ho when found wanting. In other words, if the party system won’t realign, then the voters will do so instead. No matter how long the history, the established parties cannot take their traditional supporters for granted.

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But this reveals the third big problem with our indestructible parties: the only way that voters can dump an established party is to embrace another established party. Not only does this present psychological barriers that delay necessary voter realignments, it also results in strange situations like the fact that much of the ex-industrial North is now represented by a party whose heartland is the Tory shires.

It remains to be seen how well this new partnership develops, but at least the North had a choice, albeit a reluctant one. In much of the South West there’s now effectively no choice at all. It’s a region where Labour never replaced the Liberals as the main opposition to the Tories. That’s for deep historical reasons, but with the rise of Europe as a defining issue, the Europhile Lib Dems became the wrong alternative for one of the most Eurosceptic parts of the country. A look at the electoral map of the South West now reveals one small patch of yellow (Bath) and, in Bristol, Exeter and Plymouth, a few small patches of red. The rest is an endless sea of blue.

How can we fix this? Proportional representation may seem to be the obvious answer, but electoral reform was heavily rejected in the AV referendum — especially by non-metropolitan Britain. Besides, the experience of other countries shows that it opens the door to national populist parties of the hard Right.

The real answer (as is so often the case) is the devolution of power from Westminster to every part of the United Kingdom. Scotland shows that this creates conditions under which challenger parties can grow in response to local needs without having to defer to London-based political establishments. Distinctive political cultures will only flourish in places far from London when they become masters of their own fate.

This, of course, presents Boris Johnson’s Conservative Government with major moral test. Having gained an unexpected degree of power last week, does he have the courage and foresight to give it away?

Will he trust the communities who placed their trust in him?

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With the polls narrowing there’s a question as to whether this approach will work any better. But if the current government is returned next week, might we see a more radical agenda emerge into the light?

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By Peter Franklin

If anyone in this administration has big ideas it’s Dominic Cummings. That much is clear from his blog, an in-depth guide to his thinking and influences. He stopped blogging when he followed Boris Johnson into Downing Street.

But last week there was a new post. This was mostly about Brexit and the election campaign, but there was an intriguing post-script:

“If you’re interested in ideas about how the new government could really change our economy for the better, making it more productive and fairer, you’ll find this paper interesting. It has many ideas about long-term productivity, science, technology, how to help regions outside the south-east and so on, by a professor of physics in Sheffield: A Resurgence of the Regions: rebuilding innovation capacity across the whole UK.”

The media love to portray Cummings as some kind of Bond villain, so is this professor — one Richard Jones — his mad scientist?

In a word, no. The media, finding no hint of insanity in Jones’ work, tried to make something of his political differences with Cummings instead. That’s a shame, because the real story is whether the paper, having been endorsed by Boris Johnson’s licenced thinker, represents the Conservatives’ real manifesto.

I’ve read it and agree with the following assessment by Stian Westlake, a Whitehall advisor on innovation policy:

“The mini-storm over Dom Cummings citing @RichardALJones’s recent paper on innovation policy prompted me to re-read it, and *boy* is it good. I agree with more or less everything, and as a bonus it is delightfully written…

“On a couple of occasions I’ve been asked by a new science minister ‘what should I read on innovation?’, and it was always quite a hard question to answer. But now, I’d just say ‘read that’.”

*

It begins with an unsparing look at the weaknesses of the British economy. Basically, the UK is two economies: there’s our thriving capital, surrounded by a prosperous hinterland; and then there’s ‘Outer Britain’ (as officialdom once called it), which is stuck in what Jones calls a “low innovation, low skills, low wage equilibrium”.

Outside the orbit of London, neither business nor the state puts enough investment into skills, innovation and infrastructure. That’s because there’s not enough demand for these things. At the same time, the high-productivity enterprises that might supply the necessary demand don’t set up shop here because the necessary skills etc can’t be supplied. It’s a chicken-and-egg situation.

Britain beyond the South East is working hard and creating jobs, but people and communities don’t just need work, but prospects too — a chance to get on, not just get by. For that to happen a ‘jobs miracle’ is not enough, we also need a productivity revolution — a shift to a high innovation, high skills, high wage equilibrium.

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The state can’t achieve this alone, it ultimately depends on private enterprise. However, government can provide the catalyst.

Jones observes that “the industrial strategy of the Conservative administrations between 1979 and 1997 was not to have an industrial strategy”. This continued until the dog-end of the New Labour years. This was deliberate; industrial policy was associated with failures of post-war planning and the strife-torn industrial relations of the Sixties and Seventies.

And yet, it became abundantly clear that the industrial non-strategy of the Eighties and onward was broken too. Not only has the UK’s established economic model not worked for most of the country, it was also implicated in the devastating crash of 2008.

In the course of our current decade, there’s been a big shift in Conservative thought. In 2016, a new Department of Business, Energy and Industrial strategy was created — its name signalling the end of an old taboo. And even though ‘regionalism’ has remained a forbidden term, concepts such as the Northern Powerhouse have been actively promoted as part of a decentralising agenda.

Then there’s the U-turn on research spending. After a long period of decline, the Government wants more public and private sector investment in science and innovation. Its manifesto commits to a “target of 2.4 per cent of GDP being spent on R&D across the economy”.

Furthermore, there’s a new consensus that investment in science and technology can’t just be limited to academic research in Britain’s universities. Our higher education sector is one of strongest in the world, but we are weak in what the paper describes as “translational research” — i.e. turning knowledge into innovation, and innovation into enterprise.

Countries such as Germany have strong translational research institutions, a key component in the ecosystem of universities, leading-edge companies, supply chains, providers of technical education and the networks through which individuals, businesses and organisations cooperate and compete to build local economies. Jones calls this the “industrial commons” — which is intact and flourishing in some parts of the country, but hollowed-out in others by decades of de-industrialisation, political centralisation and under-investment.

*

In this decade, there are signs that Whitehall and Westminster have woken up to this reality. We’ve seen significant decentralisation of power and resources; industrial policy, as mentioned, is firmly back on the agenda; and support for innovation includes funding for a growing network of Catapult centres — institutions which specialise in translational research and the regeneration of our industrial commons.

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So, does that mean that Richard Jones’ programme for regional revival is being implemented?

Yes and no. Some of the elements are definitely in place — but we’ve yet to see a full and conscious commitment to the most revolutionary aspects of his argument.

For instance, he’s not just calling for more funding for research (including translational research) but a sea-change in how it’s allocated. The established approach is “place blind”. This principle is that instead of ensuring a particular geographical spread of resources, the money should go to where the decision-makers think it will be most productively used. That’s sounds fair, but in practice it tends to pile further advantages on those areas that already have the edge on everywhere else. When it comes to R&D that means the so-called ‘golden triangle’ of London, Oxford and Cambridge.

Jones sees this is an example of the Matthew Effect — named after a verse in Saint Matthew’s Gospel:

“For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.”

When it comes to individual funding decisions, choosing a location with top universities, leading-edge companies and a highly skilled workforce maybe entirely rational, but it ignores the bigger picture which is the need to build capacity in more than just one part of the country.

To make that change, geographical neutrality must be abandoned — along with the investment decision models that embed the Matthew Effect in their underlying assumptions. This needs to apply to the funding of skills and infrastructure as well as research. Furthermore all these forms of investment need to be coordinated with one another on the basis of direct knowledge of local economic needs. Thus further decentralisation of decision-making power over these resources is a key test of just how seriously Government takes this agenda. If power-hoarding departments like the Treasury aren’t howling in rage, then we’ll know the reformers aren’t pushing hard enough.

*

Increasing the supply of productivity boosting inputs is only half the battle. Professor Jones emphasises the other half which is all about stimulating demand. As well as the usual ways in which government encourages companies to move to priority areas there is something that it can do directly, which is use its vast power as a policy maker, regulator and purchaser to make markets in leading edge products and services.

That’s exactly what happened with success stories such as offshore wind power. As well as investing in relevant skills, infrastructure and technology development, the government has mandated the purchase of renewable energy at a guaranteed price — thus enabling private-sector investment. With the industry established, competitive auctions for the right to build new wind farms then put pressure on developers and manufacturers to cut their costs. Today, the industry is close to being subsidy free.

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The public sector spends vast sums of money with external suppliers every year — Jones quotes a figure of £255 billion. Government also influences procurement in regulated industries such as energy. Last week, Boris Johnson said that public procurement should be used to support British industry. But it’s important that this isn’t a matter of mere ‘propping-up’ — both central and local government must use its economic clout strategically to nurture clusters of innovation throughout the country.

*

But isn’t this all a tad protectionist? In fact, isn’t it downright statist?

Well, yes, it is protectionist up to a point, but no more so than what our competitors, the Americans, Germans and Chinese, have been doing for decades. The UK, having suffered persistently high trade deficits and multiple currency devaluations, needs to worry less about free trade purity and more about how we’re going to earn our living as a country.

As for the charge of statism, the fact is that the state is, and always will be, the biggest customer in the economy. Big private companies don’t just purchase goods and services on short-term cost calculations alone, they use their clout to influence and develop supply chains that meet their long-term strategic needs. So why on Earth wouldn’t HMG want to do the same?

That’s especially true given the enormous challenges facing us as a nation. Professor Jones mentions the challenge of decarbonising the economy without bankrupting it and also the urgent need for productivity breakthroughs in health and social care. I’d add three further challenges to the list: the controversial goal of building millions of new homes over the next twenty years; the public transport solutions desperately needed to rescue our traffic-choked towns and cities; and the ecological revolution required to restore life to our degraded landscapes and seascapes. 

The idea that the state shouldn’t use its purchasing power to encourage the innovation upon which all this depends is frankly insane.

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Often, I got the wrong end of the stick. For instance, I thought that the “Government” and the “Opposition” were the names of the main political parties. I guess that means I must have understood the concept of a political party, but that’s not so surprising: at school, where our playground was basically a field, we literally built rival camps in it.

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By Peter Hitchens

By the time I went to secondary school, the details of Westminster’s rival camps became clearer to me — as did which side I “belonged” to.

Everything counts in large amounts, but few things were big in the world I grew up in. It was a small town life of little platoons. Its people stood on their own two feet, without rising to any great height.

We liked it that way and Margaret Thatcher gave the impression that she liked us. Whether or not we liked her — and feelings were mixed — she communicated a value system that made sense. Even the leftiest of our teachers espoused the virtues of hard work and personal responsibility, thus inadvertently echoing the Thatcherite message.

*

And then I went to university, in Sheffield: the naïve Kentish lad transplanted to a big northern city. It didn’t take me long to realise that Thatcherism wasn’t working for everyone. Back home, “de-industrialisation” was a word in a textbook (or at least would have been had our textbooks been remotely up-to-date). Now I saw it with my own eyes.

Not that Sheffield has ever conformed to the stereotypes. Standard depictions of the city, in films like The Full Monty, only tell part of the story. Yes, there was (and is) real deprivation, but also neighbourhoods that put the leafiest of southern suburbs to shame.

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The fall of the Wall powered up my politics

By Ruth Davidson

Of course, nothing in life is ever simple — including my “political awakening”. I’m not about to recount a tale of dramatic transformation. I didn’t abandon my shire conservatism and become a doctrinaire socialist.

Rather, it gradually dawned on me that the mantra of “market good, state bad” was just as absurd as its opposite. When I arrived in Sheffield, the buses had just been deregulated and privatised. For the sake of creating competition (on the most profitable routes, of course), the overall system was mucked up (with consequences across the North that last to this day). Local people were furious, not just because of the degraded services, but also because they’d been disrespected — the changes having been imposed by an ideologically-blinkered government.

From my first week as a student, I was put off Left-wing politics by the newspaper-selling Trotskyites on campus. How could these fanatics be so committed to their inhumanly abstract, utterly impractical theories? Couldn’t they see how their ideas would blow up on contact with the real world? Then again, was the Conservative government (busily rolling-out the Poll Tax at the time) so very different? 

The doubts grew in my mind; and yet I was still captive to the binary politics of the era. Yes, Thatcher was fallible. But who’d liberated the Falklands, seen-off the union barons and stood up to Communism?

People who think that politics is polarised now should have been around in the 1980s. There was no room for nuance, just one titanic struggle: East-versus-West, Left-versus-Right, Red-versus-Blue. But with the start of a new decade, everything changed. The Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet bloc collapsed. It was the end of an era at home, too. Margaret Thatcher was pushed out and the old simplicities went with her.

By that time, I was living neither in halls nor in a student house, but in lodgings. That had the benefit of taking me out of the university bubble, and the Sheffield people I got to know were nothing like the middle class lefties on campus. Both groups detested Maggie, of course, but that’s all they had in common. I couldn’t know it at the time, but the Remain-versus-Leave cleavage that would surface decades later was there all along.

Student politics taught me that the Right was an incoherent category too. What did I have in common with the campus libertarians for whom the individual was everything and the community nothing?

So, by the time I graduated, the Left-versus-Right model of politics was broken — at least in my own mind. The trouble is that I had nothing to replace it with. I was a science student; I didn’t have any labels for the political ideas I was looking for. In fact, terms like Blue Labour, Red Tory and post-liberalism hadn’t even entered the conversation.

So it was a long time before I could even name the politics I believed in. And yet, like a lot of indefinable qualities, you know it when you see it.

*

A revelation of the visual kind, one spring day when I was revising for my A-Levels, is probably the closest experience to a political awakening I ever had.

Adults try to prepare teenagers for all sorts of “changes”, but they don’t tell you about the awakening of one’s aesthetic sensibilities. I know that sounds pretentious, but it’s when you suddenly notice beauty in the world — and not just the human variety. Suddenly, you see nature not just as a big green thing to mess around in, but as full of wonder.

I don’t suppose it’s the same for everyone, but for me, looking out the window one day and being struck by that wonder was a profound experience. It made me view our built environment in a different way, too. Having been bored by architecture as a child, as a young adult it became a source of joy… and also dismay.

Why, I wondered, had we made such a mess of our towns and cities? Why such needless, pointless ugliness? Why would a rich country build dysfunctional places for people to live in? Who was responsible for this disaster?

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The hideous spread of 'spreadsheet architecture'

By Peter Franklin

The answer was staring me in the face. Some of the monstrous carbuncles had been built by the state and others by the market. Both were responsible. Both had imposed their will without listening to local people. And whether it was done in the name of progress or profit, the outcome was the same.

Some would say these are just matters of taste. I say they’re deeply political — because the same dehumanising arrogance is at work in all spheres: economical, social, environmental and cultural.

That’s why I’ve long lost patience with the partisans of both the market and the state. There is so much that matters more than either — and that is vulnerable to both.

We met as the 48-year-old was clearing up for the day on his fish stall in Doncaster Market. “I hope Boris Johnson will sort it all out,” he told me.

Mitchell, like many in this town at the heart of South Yorkshire’s mining community, is a lifelong Labour voter. Yet he admits to liking Johnson, who visited the market earlier this month, where he bought some English plums and a cob loaf. “People here were very impressed with him,” he said. “The other MPs all want to line their pockets but Boris seems in it for the good of the country.”

Mitchell, who hopes fish prices will fall post-Brexit after seeing his margins badly squeezed in recent months, views Johnson as closer to ordinary folk than most Conservatives, despite his Eton education and fondness for classical quips. “Boris does not seem a Tory to me. In the past Tories have been all la-di-da and posh but he seems more down to earth, not really posh at all.”

Since the affable fishmonger was dismissive of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of Labour, I asked if he would put his cross next to the Conservative candidate at the next general election?

“No, I don’t think I would vote Tory,” he replied. “I like the Brexit Party. They are very similar in views to the Tories and Boris, while Boris and Nigel Farage also have similar views. I’d like to give them a chance.” I told him I was puzzled by this, given his desire for Brexit and admiration for the Prime Minister. “I don’t really know why I couldn’t vote Tory,” he said. “Maybe the Tories just seem southern, while Labour is the Northern party.”

And here lies the pivotal issue for British politics as the prospect of an election looms over the divided country. For the Tories, bound so firmly to Brexit, need to win scores of seats in the Midlands and North to make up for heavy losses that are anticipated in the Remain strongholds of Scotland, London and the south-east.

But can they really make significant incursions in traditional Labour heartlands?

So I went to Doncaster — which voted 69% Leave; has comparatively low rates of immigration; and three Labour MPs — to explore whether the party of Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron has a chance of winning over Labour supporters infuriated by Westminster’s failure to resolve Brexit.

Tiffany Allen, 52, a mother of four who works in social care, votes Labour because “it has always been for working class people” and backed Brexit out of frustration with the decline of public services and bad government.

“We were just fed up with the country,” she explained, detailing to me how the care system had declined “disgracefully” over her 25 years working in the sector. “No-one can get anywhere. Work, pensions, the NHS – it all seems a bit rubbish these days.”

She shares the widespread disgust over Westminster that I heard again and again from all shades of opinion — but admires Johnson, despite saying he was a clown. “I’m cross with everyone else, but not him,” she said. “There’s just something I really like about him – it may be that he seems laid back, he speaks our language.”

Allen should be a prime target for Labour. She works in the public sector. She saw her wages drop when moving to Doncaster from Stockport three years ago. She is worried about the NHS, which is treating her mother with dementia and son with terminal cancer.

She even admitted to liking Corbyn at first — until the Labour leader refused to meet US president Donald Trump, which she thought demeaned his position. Now she has no time for him and does not believe he could fund all his spendthrift promises.

So the big question: could she bring herself to put her cross next to a Tory in the voting booth? “It is all bizarre – but I think I could cope with voting Conservative,” she smiled.

Such voters show how fast the tectonic plates are moving in our politics. They are the reason Johnson was willing to visit Doncaster — where former Labour leader Ed Miliband sits on a 14,024 majority —  at the risk of facing public anger over austerity. This shift was recognised by Johnson when warned by a rebel MP the Tories could lose Guildford, among the truest of blue seats with a majority of 17,040 in 2017, if they backed hard Brexit. “Guildford will have to go then,” the Prime Minister replied.

The election, assuming it arrives soon, will be coloured by Brexit and speed up the electoral changes seen in recent elections as the Tories twist towards older, poorer and less well-educated citizens and Labour woos middle-class, affluent voters.

My snapshot, an escape from London’s bubble to drill down into views of northern voters, was fascinating. It was not a scientific study — I merely talked to people around town — although a polling firm source said my findings echoed focus groups they held in the same area last week.

“All they care about is that the 2016 referendum result is respected,” said my contact, who was testing views of Leavers. “They see it as a north-south issue, with northern working class people wanting to leave and southern people trying to thwart them.”

In fact, Danny Dorling, a professor of geography at Oxford University, has actually found that while some northern towns voted heavily for Brexit the bulk of support came from southern English voters. But perception is everything in politics.

What I did find in Doncaster was widespread disgust with Westminster, immense distrust of politicians and intense dismay on all sides Brexit has not been resolved. “They should all be sacked – they can’t do their job properly,” said Paul Singleton, a forklift truck driver.

Not one person had anything good to say about Corbyn — and several lifelong party supporters were scathing, sometimes over minor issues such as refusing to bow to the Queen. Both Remainers and Leavers saw the party sitting on the fence over Brexit and spraying around spending promises that cannot be fulfilled.

This is astonishing for an area such as South Yorkshire, with its history of mining and municipal socialism. But my findings only underline polls showing Corbyn with the lowest approval ratings on record for an opposition leader, while Labour is level-pegging with the Liberal Democrats nine points behind the bitterly-divided Tories.

“It’s in my blood but I don’t know if I’ll vote Labour or not vote at all,” said Gaz Skoof, 38, a Remain-voting structural engineer from a mining family background. “It’s all just a mess, an embarrassment on the global stage. I’m fed up with it all.”

Skoof was contemptuous of Nigel Farage, who held a rally in Doncaster this month. Yet he did say that his father, who stood on picket lines during the 1980s miners strike, was likely to back the Brexit Party. “A lot of people will be swayed by them.” Indeed, a poll back in April had the Brexit Party down to win most votes.

When I asked Skoof about Johnson, he smiled before saying he admired his efforts on Brexit — highlighting the bizarre confidence many voters place in a politician with a record for duplicity, whose brief stint as Prime Minister has failed at every turn.

Yet not everyone is convinced. “I like Boris because he is quirky but I would not vote for him because he’s told  too many lies and fibs,” said Heather Stewart, a Labour Leaver who works in a pharmacy. “I don’t think he will deliver. I don’t trust him.”

Some responses I heard on Johnson echoed those I heard in the United States when talking to Trump supporters in states such as West Virginia: that he is different to other politicians, that he is selfless, that he talks their language. Others dismiss him as a buffoon, a clown, a joker. Clearly many people see every player in the Brexit drama and every twist in the debate through the prism of their own views, which only fuels the divisions and hardens attitudes.

And the stakes are high. David Smith, a Tory-voting health and safety official, said he would switch to the Brexit Party if Johnson failed to deliver on his oft-repeated promise to leave by October 31st. “I want a leader that keeps his word,” he said. Smith sees the stalemate as ‘parliament versus the people’ — and said many locals might vote Tory for the first time in their lives if Brexit goes through. “This is Labour heartland so it’s a big thing for them,” he said. “But if he fails, they will go to Farage.”

One local Labour source said voters might grumble about Brexit but most would stick with the party. “I notice on doorstep conversations that when you get them on to other issues, people say it is true, we are electing a government for five years.” Like many other northern towns, Doncaster was hit hard by austerity with council spending falling almost one-third since the Tories took office in 2010 despite rising social care pressures and above-average number of workless households.

Yet as Smith said, dumping Labour for the Tories is a big step for voters in an area such as this. For some, it is too big a leap — especially when the Brexit Party offers an alternative vehicle for angry Leavers to display their dismay over the deadlock.

Perhaps this struggle was best shown to me by Rob and Jenny, a couple in their fifties who I met as they left a supermarket. They are both lifelong Labour voters who backed Brexit, despise Corbyn and intend defecting to other parties. Jenny, a cook, said she would probably back the Tories since “Boris is trying to do his best”. But her partner was sceptical about his agenda, worried by Tory bickering, infuriated about immigration and saw Farage as “the only one who can get us out”.

Before we parted Rob repeated a now familiar refrain: voting for the Conservatives would be a betrayal of his background, having been brought up in a mining family in the colliery village of Denaby Main. “I can’t vote Tory – it is in my blood.”

Such complexities of heritage and outlook defy crude certainties of analysts, politicians and strategists. It makes predictions so uncertain as we struggle with the Brexit referendum fallout that is corroding constitutional and political norms.

Few would argue with Stephen Carling, 64, a palliative care nurse I met standing by Frenchgate shopping centre opposite the shuttered Thomas Cook shop as heavy rain fell on a grey urban landscape. “It’s a crazy time for this country,” he said. He told me he voted to leave. “I thought we were a strong country, we might have a couple of tough years but we’d get through. But I’d have voted to stay if I knew what I know now because people like farmers and small businesses are going to suffer.

“I think it will come to a second referendum — but I don’t really agree with this. They should just do what people the country voted for – and if they go against this, people will just ask why they should bother voting?”

It is foolish to draw firm conclusions from such a flying visit, especially given the volatility of politics and unpredictability of public opinion. Yet it is clear discontent is growing, democracy creaking and Johnson’s divisive strategy may be paying some dividends in unlikely places.

Will it be enough? I am sceptical. And his populist approach — pitting ‘the people’ against ‘parliament’ and ‘the elites’ — is extraordinarily high-risk as another Brexit deadline looms: for himself, for his party and for his fearful country already so lacking faith in its tarnished political class.

“None of them have a clue,” said former soldier John Hanson, 71, a Tory-voting Remainer from nearby Bawtry, who did five tours of duty during The Troubles in Northern Ireland. On this point, at least, I found agreement in Doncaster.

Suggested reading

Will Boris lose his seat?

By Paul Embery

Many attempts have been made to find a better yardstick. One of the best is the PwC-Demos Good Growth for Cities Index. Like GDP, it avoids subjective, hard-to-measure criteria like happiness; unlike GDP, it represents whether or not people can access the benefits of growth. For example, it takes into account factors including jobs, skills, income distribution, home ownership and housing affordability. Furthermore, the index , as the name suggests, is localised: it shows what’s going on in different parts of the country. Best of all, this is not a one-off exercise, but an ongoing project that started in the immediate wake of the global financial crisis.

Further reading

People not places: the real hope for a northern powerhouse

By Phillip Blond

The most recent report was published last year and covers the 2015-2017 period. The top three cities on the Good Growth Index were all in the South – Southampton, Reading and Oxford taking bronze, silver and gold. However the top three most improved cities (compared to the 2011-2013 period) were all in the North – Hull coming third, Middlesbrough-and-Stockton second and Preston in clear first place.

Writing for CityMetric, Neil McInroy and Jonty Leibowitz say that Preston has become “the poster child for an insurgent economic approach known as ‘local wealth building'” whose purpose is to “[rebuild] wealth from the bottom-up rather than the top-down”.

The core strategy is to develop “a dense local supply chain of local enterprises, employee-owned businesses, social enterprises [and] cooperatives” using the purchasing power of what are called “anchor institutions”,

“…such as housing organisations, universities, schools and hospitals. These institutions hold a unique position in the local economy, as they employ people, buy things, hold property and assets and are unlikely to relocate from the local area.”

An allied strategy is to increase “flows of investment within local economies by, for example, directing the funds from local authority pensions away from global markets and towards local schemes and community-owned banks and credit unions.”

Further reading

Westminster's broken: To rescue our British parliament, establish an English parliament

By Peter Franklin

As reported in The Economist, this has made a significant difference to the amount of money being spent locally:

“The Centre for Local Economic Strategies, a Manchester-based think-tank, audited the spending of six such institutions last month and found that they spent 18% of their most recent year’s budget in Preston, compared with 5% in 2013. In cash terms, this meant an extra £75m being spent in the city—around £530 per citizen. The share of their spending in Lancashire doubled from 39% to 79%. It required no extra money nor new legislation.”

The Economist describes Preston as “Jeremy Corbyn’s model town”. Preston City Council is Labour controlled – as is Manchester City Council, which pioneered the local wealth building approach together with the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES). Nationally, the Labour Party has established a Community Wealth Building Unit.

Messrs McInroy and Leibowitz, who both work for CLES, use Left-wing language in praise of the Preston model, claiming that “it slays the neoliberal dragon of trickle down economics”. Fans of the “neoliberal dragon” would no doubt protest that trickledown economics is a bogeyman of the Left’s invention – and nothing to do with them. However, I doubt they’d think much of the Preston model either – regarding it as a Lancastrian version of Juche (the North Korean doctrine of self-sufficiency). 

Narrowly interpreted, a market-based approach would require public institutions to spend our money sparingly and guided by the price mechanism alone – anything else, like trying to grow a local economy through parochial preference, would undermine market discipline and lead to inefficiency.

Except that local councils and other public institutions have an interest not only in how little they pay for something, but how much they get in return. That, of course, includes the quantity and quality of the purchase itself, but also wider benefits to local jobs, skills and investment – things which eventually flow back to the council in the form of local tax revenues and reduced demand on the local public sector. The council might get a better upfront price from, say, a London-based company, but if the money flows away into distant coffers, then it does nothing more for the community.

Free marketeers ascribe the global decline in poverty to the wealth-generating powers of capitalism – and not without reason. And yet while the countries that account for the bulk of this progress (above all, China) have moved in a capitalist direction, they’ve also been careful to trade on terms that achieve strategic objectives such as building up the strength of homegrown industries. Private enterprises and individuals in the West also make purchasing decisions on non-price criteria; the long-term strategic value of a close relationship with a particular set of suppliers and customers often counts for more than a short-term financial saving.

It seems odd that the public sector alone – and especially the local public sector – should be robotically required to accept the lowest bid irrespective of other considerations.

Fortunately, the 2012 Public Services (Social Value) Act empowers councils and other public sector institutions to take into account the wider economic, social and environmental value of their purchasing decisions. It was a Conservative MP, Chris White, who introduced the legislation as a private members bill – securing the support of the Conservative-led Coalition government. Moreover, it was the Coalition that pursued a broader programme of decentralisation – giving towns and cities more control over their future development than they’ve had for decades.

Further reading

What's the point of central government?

By Peter Franklin

I’m not saying the Conservatives should claim credit for the Preston model – after all, the whole point of decentralisation is that the key decisions should be made, and be seen to be made, locally.

However, Theresa May’s government should have been a more vocal champion of this agenda – striving to find new ways to support it. To have allowed local economic empowerment to become associated with Corbynism is yet another example of this government’s political ineptitude – and yet another failure to understand what ‘taking back control’ actually means.

When I was writing the piece I wondered whether there was a British parallel. London of course has extremes of wealth and poverty, but they’re stirred up together .

Further reading

The brutal apartheid of the French banlieues

By Peter Franklin

However, looking North for CityMetric, Sam Gregory argues that Sheffield is not one city but two:

“Sheffield A is a healthy, wealthy and leafy mix of greens, golf courses and gastropubs stretching from Fulwood and Ranmoor in the west to Nether Edge, Meersbrook and Dore in the south. This is the city that made international headlines in recent months with a campaign to protect its street trees from an incompetent and complacent council.

“Sheffield B is an adjacent but almost entirely unconnected city running down the Don from Upperthorpe to Hillsborough, up to Ecclesfield in the north and stretching to Tinsley, Attercliffe, Darnall and Gleadless Valley in the east. It is a place economically characterised by poverty, lack of opportunity, low-skilled work, poor quality housing stock and even poorer public transport.”

The west/south versus east/north split is remarkably similar to that of Paris, but Gregory draws a striking parallel with another European city:

“Uniquely for a British city, where pockets of deprivation are usually nestled uncomfortably between well-to-do suburbs, Sheffield’s dividing line runs directly through the city like the Berlin Wall. How did this happen?”

As it happens, I lived in Sheffield for three years as a student – so its Paris-like social geography should have occurred to me before.

The reason it didn’t is a telling one: almost all the students lived and studied and amused themselves in Sheffield A (though there may have been changes since my time). The politics and culture of the university was decidedly leftwing, albeit in a middle-class-but-pretending-not-to-be kind of way. The instinctively Labour but culturally conservative politics of much of working-class Sheffield was the one variety of leftism with no voice on campus. Indeed, there was very little about Sheffield B that impinged upon our solipsistic little world.

Sheffield is obviously a much smaller city than Paris, London or Berlin. You can travel from Sheffields A to B readily enough. Yet there are other kinds of distance. Gregory describes neighbourhoods along a bus route across the city where “average life expectancy falls by 7.5 years for men and almost 10 years for women”.

How did the city come to be so divided?

“The wealthier half, much of it dating from the turn-of-the-century, represents the flight of the managers and mill owners from the noise and smog of Blake’s ‘dark satanic mills’. The rich ensconced themselves in an enclave high above their employees, literally: Sheffield A is significantly hilly, particularly the parts that border the Peak District to the west. The spacious Victorian houses often feature spectacular views across the seven hills.”

This west-versus-east pattern can be seen in many cities with a long history – and is partly explained by prevailing wind patterns and their contribution to air quality. It could be that this general factor combined with Sheffield’s particular topography to produce an especially strong geographical gradient of social separation.

However, as in Paris, architecture and urban design has also had an impact. The traditional streets and dwellings of Sheffield A, while by no means uniformly luxurious – are attractive, adaptable and loved by their residents. They are organically self-sustaining.

Non-traditional architecture, especially that purpose-built for social housing (like Sheffield’s brutalist Park Hill estate) is very different. It comes into existence through top-down initiative and can only be sustained in the same fashion. In more than one sense of the word, it keeps its residents structurally dependent upon those with power.

Further reading

"Sneckdowns" and desire lines: A parable for the big data age

By Peter Franklin

In her recent speech to National Housing Federation, Theresa May said something surprisingly profound about social housing:

“Whether unintentionally or by design, the decisions we make about the homes we build for social rent – their location, quality and appearance – can all too easily make them distinct from the community in which they stand.

“This, in turn, can cement prejudice and stigma among those who live in them and wider society, leading to lowered expectations and restricted opportunities.

“It shouldn’t be this way.”

That’s right, it shouldn’t. But when one looks at the evolution of our cities, whether bigger ones like Paris or smaller ones like Sheffield, what stands out is that successful, sustainable patterns of development take hold when residents have genuine control and agency over the places they live in.

Politicians must therefore close their ears to the theories of fashionable architects (and their pockets to the donations of wealthy developers). The key to true regeneration is to give everyone the same chance to shape their own space.

Suggested reading

People not places: the real hope for a northern powerhouse

By Phillip Blond

When we speak of a place being ‘left behind’, the people who leave it behind are, first and foremost, its very own, it’s ‘brightest and best’.

That’s why I fully agree with Phillip’s people-before-place prescription for northern revival. “The North,” he says, “has to become deeply attractive to the people it needs to bolster its technical, entrepreneurial and educational reach.”

Spot on, but investment in places – as long as it serves the primary aim of attracting people – has an important part to play. Moreover, the ‘who?’ of the decision-making process is just as important as the ‘what?’, ‘where?’ and ‘when?’ of the actual decisions .

It’s a point brought home in a piece by Tom Arnold for CityMetric:

“Saturday 23 June marks a significant anniversary in British political history. No, not that one: it’s four years since George Osborne, in a speech at Manchester’s Museum of Science & Industry, first coined the phrase ‘Northern Powerhouse’”

Real devolution to the North of England is in fact a bit older than that – starting with 2011 Localism Act and the launch of the City Deals process in the same year. Furthermore, its true driving force wasn’t George Osborne, but Greg Clark – who I had the honour of working for at the time. Nevertheless the Northern Powerhouse label was a touch of genius – and has long since passed from being a mere government slogan and into the full ownership of the North itself.

Suggested reading

Westminster's broken: To rescue our British parliament, establish an English parliament

By Peter FRanklin

Arnold notes that “right now… Osborne’s promise of improving infrastructure to the point where traversing the North is the ‘equivalent of travelling around a single global city’ appears laughable”. However, he also acknowledges some real achievements:

“Its most significant achievement is the creation of Transport for the North (TfN), the UK’s first ever pan-Northern government body. Established in 2015 and granted statutory powers in April this year, TfN can now be regarded as the Powerhouse project’s civil service.”

Significantly, this new ‘civil service’ is reshaping the policy agenda it inherited from the actual (London-based) civil service. The previous “over-emphasis on the North’s largest cities, and Manchester in particular” has given way to a more holistic vision. This makes sense because no one city dominates the North to the degree that London dominates the South. A much better analogy is with Germany’s most important conurbation, which isn’t Berlin or Munich, but the Ruhr. With a population of over eight million, it is Germany’s industrial heartland and the third largest urban centre in the EU; but how many of its individual cities could you name?

It is surely right for the North of England – and especially its Liverpool-to-Leeds core conurbation – to aim for the same degree of cohesion.

Tom Arnold remarks that the “the Northern Powerhouse probably isn’t what George Osborne thought it would be”. But that’s the whole point of devolution: London politicians shouldn’t be making the big strategic decisions anymore.

One can’t expect the North’s natural leaders to stay in (or return to) the region if it isn’t in charge of its own destiny.

The origin of this flyover designation for the North is both economic and cultural. Yet the standard explanation is almost exclusively the former, with nearly all analysis and policy focus directed at economic decline. Broadly speaking let us call this the ‘place hypothesis’ – that if only the North had what it needed as a functioning economic ‘place,’ then equity with the South of England would be restored, and decline reversed.

It is certainly the case that the North has woefully insufficient connectivity, with poor railways, roads and tunnels, and it has acre upon acre of sub-standard 19^th century working-class housing.  And some might additionally argue that it lacks investment, interest and the radical governance/devolution structures to turn it all around. But if we really want to understand the North’s decline then focusing solely on the economic is a mistake, as most of this only really arose as a problem during the last forty years or so, whereas the North’s decline began much, much earlier.

If we wanted to maintain the ‘place’ explanation, we might with more merit argue something like the following. The decline of the North is probably due to its unprecedented global and regional success in the 18^th and 19^th centuries – the massive innovations in commodity production and its transportation focused all the investment and expertise on production in industries like shipbuilding, cotton, coal, and steel. Then when, after the First World War, the global economy shifted and northern British commodities became uncompetitive against both new international competition and revived trade barriers, the North proved incapable of adapting.

Instead it was the South that moved towards services and complex manufacture like planes and cars. And in adapting to this structural shift it was the South that captured, through deploying ideas and innovation, the future of production. Whereas the North, overly invested in a now defunct and low skill raw production model, remained too far from the global innovative frontier for it to catch up.

I think all of the above is true, but I also believe it is insufficient in explaining how the North became “flyover” territory. For it was not so much a dearth of place, but more of people. After all, the Industrial Revolution happened in Northern England, and not elsewhere, largely because of the people.

The rightly celebrated work of economic historians like Robert C Allen may highlight the material explanations for the Northern English location of the Industrial Revolution – the enormous coal deposits lying near the surface, and the high wages and cheap energy that created an incentive to develop machines that replaced expensive people with inexpensive coal. But the North of the 18^th century also had decentered capital, lots of opportunistic merchants looking to invest, and a phenomenal mass grouping of innovators and inventors in Northern towns who founded small scientific and technical clubs in places like Wigan and Preston, as well as the big cities such as Manchester and Liverpool. This is the mix of human talent and local capital that allowed the North to give birth to the industrial age.

It is the loss of an active and engaged middle and upper class – highly educated, high status and heavily invested in the private as well as the public sector – that propelled the North into a century of decline. And it is getting back the talented, technical, entrepreneurial and artistic classes that can alone reverse it. All of which means that much of current policy towards the North which is almost exclusively place, needs to become people based if it is to have any meaningful and subsequent effect.

Suggested reading

And finally: the good news from flyover county

By Peter Franklin

This is not just conjecture. In a brilliant paper based on the study of ancestral surnames and birth and mortality data, Gregory Clark and Neil Cummins conclude “that the decline of the North is mainly explained by selective outmigration of the educated and talented.”[1. Gregory Clark and Neil Cummins, ‘The Big Sort: Selective Migration and the Decline of Northern England, 1800-2017’, LSE, May 2017]. The decline of the north is to be found in its makeup of people, not in its place.

This is best understood by recognising the scale of inward migration. Between 1800 and 1900 the population of northern England quadrupled, with massive immigration from Scotland, Wales, and most especially Ireland. But this was mostly the inflow of relatively unskilled labour that came to work in the new industries.

Fascinatingly, it appears the outflow of the educated and higher skilled from the North had already begun in the mid-19^th Century, even when the Northern industries were prospering. Perhaps because this commerce did not demand or require high levels of skill or education those endowed in both went South were their services were in demand. So, as Clark and Cummins put it, as the educated left “the North retained its unskilled population, and attracted unskilled migrants, leading to a decline in the average skill and education level of the Northern population.”

Largely as a result of this prolonged and selective migration out of the North, the North is now at the level of population share that it had before the Industrial Revolution, with much of its population remaining below the average skill and educational levels of the country and especially the south. The resulting impacts on the multiple inequities of health, wealth and opportunity remain to this day for all to see.

So much of flyover country – from the American mid-western rust belt to these abandoned Northern towns – has something of this character. They share an over-concentration on a single type or pattern of industry and its this lack of socio-economic diversity that makes them so vulnerable to economic shocks.

The question therefore, is what can be done to renew these areas? A clear lesson is that while the hard infrastructure “ask” of the North is no doubt needed, even if the investment is forthcoming it is unlikely on its own to narrow the gap between North and South. There must additionally be a focus on human capital: attracting it, retaining it and creating it locally. And politicians and policymakers concerned with regional inequality need to recognise that the working class monoculture that exists in many of the most deprived areas in the North is also part of what has cut off the white working class off from opportunity.

Just as racial apartheid is rightly abhorred, we now need to turn that disgust into revulsion at the class apartheid that marks too much of the North too strongly. We need to build back into these areas institutions that mix classes, peer groups and career pathways to create a socio-economically diverse North that can better look after, nurture and educate its people.

Suggested reading

No, Britain is not over-run with fascists or racists or bigots...

By Peter Embery

The “build it and they will come” approach is not sufficient to help these isolated communities – the shiny new buildings erected in cities like Manchester and Liverpool are no substitute for a genuine focus on creating, restoring and, of course, recognising northern culture. The North has to become deeply attractive to the people it needs to bolster its technical, entrepreneurial and educational reach. And culture in its broadest sense is the pull for such people, as it is what makes a place worth living in. But educated families and skilled people won’t remain in, or relocate to, the North unless it has the institutions and culture they expect to enjoy.

Our northern universities, particularly the higher performing ones, remain introverted institutions largely focused on their own development while ignoring the wider social and economic renewal that  they could both facilitate and benefit from. And we need even more desperately and urgently to save northern children from the long tail of underperforming, below average schools that endlessly depress the aspiration and achievement of their pupils – and probably one of the things that could help them is a mass influx of middle class families and their children.

Suggested reading

The flyover town that dodged decline

By Henry Olsen

The planned relocation of Channel 4 is an example of what is needed to attract these families and individuals – a high performing cultural institution moving its creative functions outside of London (at the laudable behest of government). We need much, much more of this; along with the sort of investment capital that the rich merchants of the Industrial Revolution invested in the North. Might a regional capital gains tax relief help facilitate this?

The more that the North escapes its working-class monoculture by bringing back the people who left, the more the working classes will benefit, because a diverse social mix is exactly what will create opportunities for the young people currently and cruelly being left behind.

You can’t flyover where you live, and the mark of the North’s success will only really be found when the middle classes who left it some 100 years ago return.