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The CSR and the revenge of the South

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Governing is no mere technical matter. It involves making choices of priorities and resource allocation and these are driven by values. So governing is intrinsically political. One cannot complain therefore that this government is being “political”. All governments are political. The point is to recognise what that politics is so that the differences between technocratic option-taking and ideological interventions can be surfaced.

Of course, all governments also deny that they operate politically as this latter notion seems, well, somehow “un-British”. We don’t do ideology in this pragmatic, empiricist country. Yeah, right, and I believe in the healing power of crystals.

My argument is not helped by the somewhat confused politics of the last government. Whilst it talked lots about social inclusion and child poverty, the gap between rich and poor expanded massively and if anybody was squeezed until the pips squeaked it wasn’t the uber-wealthy. However, in all the contradictions you can just discern a geopolitics within the UK. There was some modest but real bias towards distributing public resources northwards and to the Celtic Fringe, where most Labour voters happened to live.

This was not just about explicit regeneration investment, which went particularly to the former industrial areas. Housing investment – money for new build and to knock down slums – also found its way to the rust-belts of the UK. The cost of housing and out of work benefits was also something more or less paid for out of the tax dollars provided by the wealthier south and London. The massive growth of public sector employment in the last decade or so was also more pronounced in the north. One statistic:the North-West lost more than 50,000 people in the noughties but gained more than 80,000 new public sector employees.

Of course the last government also invented regional development agencies, which despite funding regions in the South did pump a lot of investment and development capacity into the North. Finally, the way in which local government was funded changed to the benefit of the North to some degree, with a trend towards specific grants hypothecated for causes which were disproportionately northern – regeneration spend was one but there were other streams such as Building Schools for the Future, Decent Homes or PFIs which helped the North more than might have been expected from mere demography.

So while no-one in the last government discussed this openly, there was a mild politics of the North (and former industrial areas of the UK) in what it did. I always wanted them to be explicit and have an even more robust transformational strategy for the North which would have really restored its economic base and taken communities up from retail jobs and off benefits, but I should recognise that for all its limitations there was an undeclared direction of travel northwards. This was the love that couldn’t speak its name, not least because the Blairites wanted to capture the South and were slightly embarrassed by the northern strength of the party even when many of them had been parachuted in to become “northern” MPs.

It is in this sense that the politics of the current government – despite having Liberal Democrats in it, with their strong positions in northern cities – must be seen as “southern”. I spoke at a conference recently and described the policies coming out of the Coalition since May as amounting to the “revenge of the south”. The CSR confirmed this.

Essentially, everything “northern” described in this text thus far has been dismantled. Regeneration investment: ended Bricks and mortar housing subsidy: ended. BSF and PFI: over. Decent Homes: no new money. Local authority specific grants: greatly reduced. Public spending: cut massively with its disproportionate effect on areas heavily dependent on public sector GDP. RDAs: killed. Benefits: cut.

Whilst much comment has focused on the ideology behind these cuts – the drive to a smaller state with less support for the poor and needy – there is a geography to the politics which needs to be understood. It’s the same geography as the 1980s. The South is to have its day once again.

We hear lots about One Nation politics and “we’re all in this together”. But the nation stops at Watford Gap and the “we” is confined to what Nancy Mitford used to call “people like us”. Something the great Sam Goldwin once said comes to mind: Include me out!


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