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Why Northern England is poor

tomforth.co.uk

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Re: Why Northern England is poor

#121

Post by ipaddr »

LexGray wrote: post #67
marssaxman wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having spent my teen years in backwater Sacramento, I can confirm that it did not feel much like the center of anything. Adding a few more examples to your list, neither Olympia (WA), Salem (OR), nor Carson City (NV) are economic or social centers of their respective states.

This may stumble on a solution to the problem. London combines government and financial centers. Axe parliament and 10 Downing Street and rebuild government infrastructure from scratch in some inland port where it can drag influence north. Sacramento may not be exciting, but it is self-sustaining with fairly high property costs and a huge commuter population. I think one of the things that makes California successful…

It worked for Ottawa,Canada

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#122

Post by donavanm »

Kon-Peki wrote: post #110
nine_k wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US somehow avoids this, likely by putting state capitals and the national capital into smaller cities. Hence NYC, SF, Chicago, Dallas, Miami, Seattle, etc are all big urban agglomerations, but are not the points that concentrate everything important in their respective areas.

Those cities aren’t really good examples of intentionally putting a state capital in a smaller city of the state. Albany is older than NYC, and anyway the concept of NYC as a single large city is barely 125 years old. The original capital of Illinois is (strangely) west of the Mississippi River and south of St. Louis. By treaty between Great Britain and France, the current area of Illinois was off limits to European…

more random support for your critique of a post-hoc, and historically ignorant, classification of "small cities". Offhand the CA capital contest was ongoing one and tracked from south/central CA towards the north in the mid 1800s. It's entirely unsurprising that they landed in the Sacramento courthouse; it was ~1850 and Sacramento was 1) last inland port for shipping 2) major terminus for the gold fields 3) an obvious rail hub for the connectivity in the 1850-60s, esp bay area to Sacramento and the east. Even a trivial look at the (flawed) 1850 census shows that basically all of the (mostly new) immigrant population was in Sacramento and the goldfields. eg Los Angeles was 3,500 people compared to 9,000 in Sacramento.

Similar for the Washington Territory which was barely a collection of homesteads and tiny villages. IIRC Olympia was the first significant immigrant settlement in the northern Oregon Territory, the major (only?) early trade connection to shipping on the pacific, and connected to the few other settlers moving north in to the territory. Its not very surprising that it was the territorial capitol and remained so for the state. Yes, post statehood a lot of rail & shipping traffic moved north. But at least through the turn of the 20th century both Tacoma and Seattle were roughly equivalent in population and industry. Arguably the easier ship access for the Klondike is what cemented the prosperity of Seattle pre-war, and Boeing & related defence activity post war. But _at the time of territory & statehood_ Olympia was the major town in the region.

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#123

Post by mikhailfranco »

The boundary between his North and South roughly follows the Roman Fosse Way from Lincoln to Exeter.

The 'ditch' (fosse) and road marked the border of the initial phase of the Roman invasion after 43 AD. It was a military road for rapid deployment of forces from the legionary bases to defend border incursions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fosse_Way

Apart from the Fosse Way, almost all other major Roman roads fanned out from London. This structure is still visible in the numbering scheme of roads today:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Britain_road_numbering_s...

The natural routes for roads also influenced railways, so the boundaries of the original private railway companies (GWR, LNER, LMS, SR), and the regions of the current unified rail system, follow the same structure:

https://www.railwaygazette.com/network-rail-regions-take-ove...

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#124

Post by gizajob »

matt-p wrote: post #20
James_K wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The process is quite simple and fairly obvious. Government policy is the bedrock of all economic development. Government officials will always have the most knowledge about the capital, so all policy is tailored to it. It's no surprise that they don't make policies that benefit the North given that they don't live there.

What policy would benefit the north, without (even further) subsidising it? If we could invest £10Bn and get £20Bn back for the economy with our money back over time then not a single politician would turn that down, there's actually been a load of support over the past ~5+ years for "levelling up" (AKA investment in the north) but we've not invested much because the returns are abysmal. Meanwhile there's a whole sta…

Seems like politicians do turn down that kind of offer on a regular and constant basis, where it comes to northern England.

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#125

Post by FearNotDaniel »

matt-p wrote: post #20
James_K wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The process is quite simple and fairly obvious. Government policy is the bedrock of all economic development. Government officials will always have the most knowledge about the capital, so all policy is tailored to it. It's no surprise that they don't make policies that benefit the North given that they don't live there.

What policy would benefit the north, without (even further) subsidising it? If we could invest £10Bn and get £20Bn back for the economy with our money back over time then not a single politician would turn that down, there's actually been a load of support over the past ~5+ years for "levelling up" (AKA investment in the north) but we've not invested much because the returns are abysmal. Meanwhile there's a whole sta…

If we're talking about fantasy airport extensions, it might be good to have at least one decent international airport in Yorkshire rather than expanding MAN and/or BHX. Failing that, you would need to significantly improve the transport infrastructure around those airports to make other parts of the North easier to reach. Fast, reliable (!) train services for example. Car hire services suited to business people not just holidaymakers, i.e. reception desks in the same building as the terminal and cars you can drive away from just outside - not waiting an hour for a half an hour bus to where the car hire places are in a different village.

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#126

Post by gizajob »

stg22 wrote: post #82
matt-p wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What policy would benefit the north, without (even further) subsidising it? If we could invest £10Bn and get £20Bn back for the economy with our money back over time then not a single politician would turn that down, there's actually been a load of support over the past ~5+ years for "levelling up" (AKA investment in the north) but we've not invested much because the returns are abysmal. Meanwhile there's a whole sta…

Historically, the UK was run for the benefit of an elite and the regions they lived in, but they discovered that that ran counter to their own interests. They reversed the economic parts of that in Ireland in the 1890s ("Killing Home Rule with Kindness"), and they did so in Northern England after the Wall Street Crash. For example, for part of the 20th century, companies were banned from expanding anywhere outside of…

Part of the issue with the UK being bad at manufacturing was (ok it’s a cliche but I’ll say it anyway) that Thatcherism in not wanting to deal with the unions and the social powers they represent, defeated socialism by destroying the work and replacing industry with nothing. There’s no reason the UK couldn’t manufacture ships or precision engineering or steel - it was set up for exactly that. But doing so involves negotiating with unionised power, who vote Labour, and it was a quicker solution to merely destroy and keep destroying social cohesion and the unions around it – “there’s no such thing as society” – by destroying and defunding the work. The London-based finance powers also lost interest in funding industrial production and its workers alongside when moving money around and corruption can be done from the office in London without having to negotiate with union bosses and their insistence for a bigger piece of the pie (that they’re baking).

If you look at somewhere like South Korea, who 60 years ago had no major engineering or shipbuilding, the UK could be leagues ahead of them. The difference is that the South Koreans had the appetite and impetus to do it, whereas in the UK the government and finance planners had the exact opposite impetus.

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#127

Post by mikhailfranco »

A useful measure of the centralization of a state is the ratio of the size (population, economy) of the capital to the rest of the country.

A large capital usually means workers and companies cluster around the government to get work and contracts, but also lobby and bribe to win such favors.

Highly centralized countries include UK, France and Thailand.

Centralized countries that have a strong geographical excuse might include Egypt and Chile.

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#128

Post by graemep »

EarlKing wrote: post #75
graemep wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not that simple. The UK experts a lot of manufactured goods to exactly those sorts of countries, and imports a lot from the EU and the US. What you say is true of cheap consumer goods, but remember everything else. Even with some consumer goods, its pretty even - the UK exports cars about as much as it imports (by value, not numbers though). https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uk-trade-in-numbers... Its othe…

Are you sure you want to get into everything else? Because I could've sworn we just had a major controversy with Vivek Ramaswamy running his mouth about the supposed laziness of American workers to justify racial discrimination against them through mass hiring of H1B workers... a stance so obviously wrong it forced his exit from the Trump administration. He certainly wasn't referring to people employed producing "che…

We were talking about the UK. Since Brexit immigration policy has shifted to favouring highly skilled workers, especially skills in short supply, over cheap labour.

There are definitely people here who think like that, and we do still import cheap labour for some things (difficult low paying jobs), that British people “will not do” ( which means ”will not do for minimum wage”) but in general we have had what the govt and central bank call “wage inflation”.

We are also talking about the north of England and non-EU immigrants strongly prefer certain areas, tilted to the South. Where I live I see few non-white faces.

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#129

Post by CapeTheory »

thomasforth wrote: post #108
tom_ wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The diagram of the northern "urban" centre also fails to point out the Peak District, though you can detect it by noticing what looks like an obvious gap in the middle of the circle. In the middle of the London circle is, of course, the centre of London, world-famous capital city of the United Kingdom, seat of power of its government and monarchy. In the middle of the Northern circle? Some mountains and the occasiona…

In my comparisons with the Netherlands I explore this in detail. The centre of the Netherlands' main urban region is a six metre below sea level swamp that the Dutch never have and never will build on and which is just as much of an obstacle to agglomeration as the Pennines. So I really don't think this matters. As for the weather, Ireland, Scotland, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Denmark are hardly renowned for their…

The bad weather places you mention have largely uniform bad weather, which is not true of England - the south east is noticeably warmer and drier than the north west.

Weather is of course only a contributing factor, just like the historical influences.

Re: Why Northern England is poor

#130

Post by thomasforth »

tiew9Vii wrote: post #114
jdietrich wrote: post #26

I think there's a fundamental gap in this analysis, which is how hyper-local many of the inequalities are. Manchester has a GDP per capita of £59,000. Tameside, the poorest area in Greater Manchester, has a GDP per capita of £19,000. Leeds has a GDP per capita of £42k; ten miles away, Bradford has a GDP per capita of £23.6k. Those disparities are really difficult to explain in terms of infrastructure or commercial in…

I was born and bred in Tameside. It's a 15 minute train ride to Manchester. 30-40 min drive/bus trip to Manchester, 1 hour train ride to Leeds and slightly longer drive. Generally Tameside is well serviced, you got all the amenities you would expect and location wise you have very good access for commuting. Manchester, Salford, Leeds university all easily accessible. Tamesides location makes it popular as a commuter…

"It's funny reading these articles from people who haven't grew up poor, in the north, never seen a council estate, or the way of life". I didn't grow up poor, but I did grow up in the North, went to the local comprehensive, and have lived on plenty of council estates. When I lived in Manchester I went to Ashton plenty of times, it's not that different to Hull.
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