‘Every planet has a north’

[f4f3]

 I missed this report yesterday, from a prominent right wing think tank, but it seems to have caused quite a stushie in the English media. The Guardian, for instance, turns over a chunk of its culture supplement to attempting to refute the finding (and here I paraphrase) that if you live in the North of England you should put all your wordly goods in a wheelbarrow and move to London. Or Oxford or Cambridge. Actually, I’m not paraphrasing much.

 

If you read the report from a Scottish perspective it’s good for a laugh.

 

The report only talks about England, despite its claim to “offer new policy proposals for regenerating Britain’s cities”, and the assertion that these proposals are drawn from research on 15 towns and cities throughout Britain, including Glasgow.

 

Despite this, it says nothing at all about Glasgow. In developing their thesis that coastal towns are at an economic disadvantage since they are at the end of the line, they take Hull and Sunderland as examples  but ignore Glasgow and Edinburgh.

 

“The North”, in the context of this report is not Glasgow or Edinburgh, it’s not Inverness, far less Kirkwall or Lerwick, it’s all those places south of the border but north of London– Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle and Sunderland.

 

Normally this wouldn’t be of particular relevance – “The North” is recognizable English terminology for anything north of Watford, but south of the Scottish border, and although it may raise a chuckle from up here it doesn’t cause confusion.

 

But ignoring Scottish cities in this report deals a fairly fatal blow to its conclusions, even when taken on its own definition of success, failure, and lack of being London.

 

(There’s a whole separate argument about the choice of criteria for success and failure, and whether the report fails sufficiently to recognize non-economic factors such as quality of life, happiness, stress and common civility, but I’ll leave that to others. It does advocate buidling golf course, though, since business men like golf. No, seriously).

 

The simple facts are that despite some variability within their boundaries, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Inverness and Aberdeen are all examples of successful cities (if we leave aside the £50 million hole in Aberdeen Council’s  finances), despite being “geographically uneconomic”. Over the last decade property values have risen, unemployment has fallen, and their populations have grown (I'm willing to discuss the definition of successful - Glasgow has a high crime rate and, in some areas, very low life expectancy, but a thriving service sector and low unemployment).

 

It talks about the impossibility of establishing a financial sector of any size outside London, ignoring Edinburgh’s status as just that. 

I’m not going to attempt to explain why Scotland has been ignored in this report, but it does highlight two things. One, that its conclusions are open to challenge and two, that they really haven’t got the hang of this “Britain” thing that they keep talking about.

Comments

[parthenia14.livejournal.com]

A slap around the face with a large wet cod.

I've read parts of that report. It's a bloody essay, not a serious report. There's a comment about how, sadly, the journey between Oxford and Cambridge is 'tedious' because they should really be closer together; and how very few people work from home these days.

It makes me really mad actually. I live somewhere which has great quality of life, but it also has an extremely limited job market and a culture which is not artistic or entrepreneurial in any sense compared to places like Glasgow, Nottingham or Brighton.

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

It does make me wonder why it got so much publicity - although, I guesss, "Silly Season" just about says it all really.