Why would anyone leave London?

On the 27th July 1987 I set off, suitcase in hand, from Kent House Station to arrive some four hours or so later at Bradford Interchange. It feels odd to think that all those years ago I made the decision to leave the place where I'd been born and brought up, the South London suburb of Beckenham, to take a job in Bradford. Lots of people, especially Londoners, have asked me why I did it, why did I leave the 'Greatest City in the World' to live in one of those dreadful, dreary, northern places they'd seen on the telly. Even a few curious Bradford folk have asked!

My usual answer is either: "someone gave me a job" or a longer explanation that, even in 1987, London was expensive. There was little hope of me being able to afford to buy even a tiny place in my home town and I faced the prospect of either spending most of my life on a train in from Essex or North Kent or else buying a pokey flat in Hackney where you'd need three bolts on the door and daren't go out at night. Leaving London was an easy decision and choosing Bradford was simply because, besides the job offer, I actually knew somebody in Bradford.

I'm writing this sitting in the kitchen of our house in Cullingworth where, if I stand out on the terrace, I can look out at the wooded valley where we live, can hear the chatter of birds, the basso profundo moo of cows fattening in nearby fields and the bleat of sheep on the moor. Sometimes in a morning the clip-clop of horses passes by on the bridleway out back, accompanied by girly giggles or gentle conversation. In twenty minutes I can be in the centre of Bradford, it's a little more than half an hour into Leeds and even Manchester can be reached within an hour. If you put your foot down on the north bound A629 you'll be in the Yorkshire Dales National Park in a breath and an hour later, given favourable traffic, Windermere and the Lake District beckons. Why would anyone leave London?

Yet sometimes the idea of leaving a place, especially a place a grand as London, seems an impossibility:

One beneficiary of this idea, though, could be the former 5 Live presenter Victoria Derbyshire, who could be appointed the Today programme's fifth presenter. She comes from Bolton, so the argument goes. Trouble is, her family is unlikely to welcome such a move. Her husband is a fellow West Ham season ticket holder and she has two teenage children. Why would anyone want to uproot their family like this?

This was Iain Dale talking about the daft idea of sending a bit of the Today Programme "Up North" in the form of Nick Robinson. As a piece of tokenism this is classic BBC but Iain's tone troubled me, not because moving to a new job sometimes comes with tricky decisions for families, but because there was a sense of "only in London" about the post. Or maybe it was just Dale using the term "Professional Northerner" in his headline.

Crossing this attitudinal bridge, the view that everything of importance happens in London, is central to the idea of "levelling up" England's regions. And it is perhaps the most difficult part of the project to achieve for the simple reason that people don't see what I see out my window, they see what they'll lose even if the view from their window is just a brick wall. Not just the West Ham season ticket but the connections, the familiar places and bewildering choices. To go where? To Durham, Hull, Stoke or Wrexham, to places you've vaguely heard of but (if the average person's geography is a guide) would struggle to place on a map.

Part of the problem is fifty years of portraying England's north and midlands as dour places filled with slightly unhealthy blokes in work clothes talking funny. Pictured in drama as an endless struggle interspersed with strong tea and large women in flowery aprons: The North, whose leaders arrive in London, twisting their proverbial cap in their gnarled workers hands, to ask the rich folk for more money. And now, when those leaders no longer look like professional northerners, nothing has changed. Week after week little clumps of the North's great and good cram onto the train to head for meetings with ministers and civil servants in the glittering glories on London. "Please Sir, can we have some more?" is the plaintive cry of these folk.

This picturing of places far from London as primitive, barely out of the stone age, is not new. I recall a geography lesson where we discussed perceptions of distance and place. Mr Delaney produced what Dungeons & Dragons DMs would call a "crudely drawn map" showing England from the perspective of a Londoner. A map where The North was a place of rude huts and outside toilets beginning at the end of the Metropolitan Line, and where London contained everything of any importance or significance. This mindset, even from those who began their life somewhere other than London is what must be overcome if we are to level up.

I'm not sure how we do this, how we change attitudes, expectations and opportunities so people don't see ending up in Hull (with a decent job and a cottage in South Cave) as some sort of failure. Some of this is, as Chris Blackhurst suggests at Reaction, about government's choices:

The brain drain has to be reversed, the civil service has to move north, out of London, and not just the back room jobs but all the jobs, leaders included. The private sector, too, has to be incentivised to relocate. Again, it can’t be the rehoming of satellite operations – the North has long and bitter experience of those, of their arrival and their subsequent closing – but the headquarters.

But Iain Dale's article tells us that, if the reaction to one journalist leaving London is "oh my god, what a terrible idea, everyone's in London", what will be the reaction of civil service mandarins with a nice house in Amersham and children at a good day school? I mean, do they even have good day schools in Newcastle? Civil service reorganisation will be doubly difficult if the reorganisation doesn't just mean a new set of names for ministries and moving to a different office in Chiswick or Kensington but means moving to some place you've never heard of in a part of England that's more than an hour from London.

The other day I read a newspaper report about some men who'd gone for a pint somewhere in East London and been charged £6.40 for a pint of ordinary session bitter plus a late night supplement. Here in Cullingworth you won't pay more than £3.30 for a beer like that (and it will have been brewed in the village too). Yesterday I went to the Polish bakers on Manningham Lane in Bradford returning with five loaves of fresh bread plus a challah - all for just over six quid. Compare that to the price of a single sourdough loaf in Borough Market.

London is expensive, crowded, often lonely, crime-ridden and unhealthy. For all the great institutions (the ones you never go to because you're too busy), it's as much a place of homelessness, mental breakdown and filth as it is of those famous bright lights. Londoners spend hours hanging from straps on tube trains, cramming overground trains and holding a pole in a bus. Hours that could be spent sitting in the garden with a cup of tea or walking into the village for a pint. We're told that the business of London is a good thing, "drives the economy" say all the experts, but somehow I've a feeling I was right to leave.

But then, why would anyone leave London?


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On UnHerd - my argument that the North should stop trying to be like London.

Let's turn off the Northern Powerhouse...

Most of the North is not urban, is not in a state of seemingly terminal decline and is not remotely desolate except in a “Cathy running across the moor shouting Heathcliffe” way. Speak to a Northerner about the North, and they will talk about moors and mountains, lakes and rivers, market towns and stately homes, woods and rolling acres.

Yet our blinkered economic development approach completely ignores this in favour of linking together five or six city centres with speedy trains and filling those centres with shiny offices.

It’s time to turn all this on its head. Leave behind those dreams of past industrial might and talk, instead, about what makes the North special. Let’s talk about what makes it unique: its environment.

 You can read the whole thing over at UnHerd.

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If the North wants to succeed it needs to place more value on enterprise than it does on government

Rather, the evidence shows that the strongest predictors of cross-national variation in entrepreneurial activity were normative, with social norms being the most strongly associated with entrepreneurialism and rates of organizational founding.

So if we want more start-ups then we need a more entrepreneurial culture. It's not about tax breaks or R&D or STEM education or finance, it's about having a society that values and celebrates enterprise and the ideas that lie behind it. For years I signed up to the 'pull this lever, press that button' approach to economic development and it seems I was wrong - the reason the North of England has fewer start-ups isn't about lack of investment, poor education or too few universities but rather that our social norms are less strongly associated with enterprise than elsewhere.

So what are the features of that enterprising society, the social norms we need? The authors of the article the quote above comes from point to three - gender equality, valuing and rewarding performance, and endorsing status privileges. This is essentially the bourgeois environment that embraces the idea of what Deirdre McCloskey called 'trade-enabled betterment' and something valuable and important.

McCloskey also warned us that government and many among the powerful reject this environment:

“For reasons I do not entirely understand, the clerisy after 1848 turned toward nationalism and socialism, and against liberalism, and came also to delight in an ever-expanding list of pessimisms about the way we live now in our approximately liberal societies, from the lack of temperance among the poor to an excess of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Antiliberal utopias believed to offset the pessimisms have been popular among the clerisy. Its pessimistic and utopian books have sold millions. But the twentieth-century experiments of nationalism and socialism, of syndicalism in factories and central planning for investment, of proliferating regulation for imagined but not factually documented imperfections in the market, did not work. And most of the pessimisms about how we live now have proven to be mistaken. It is a puzzle. Perhaps you yourself still believe in nationalism or socialism or proliferating regulation. And perhaps you are in the grip of pessimism about growth or consumerism or the environment or inequality. Please, for the good of the wretched of the earth, reconsider.”

"Capitalism is the problem" - how often do we hear this from people? Not from those who (some claim) are somehow the victims of capitalism but from its beneficiaries. And the North of England has more of these anti-capitalist doomsayers than most places. Such folk are comfortable in their public sector jobs, consultancies and tenured professorships, they are the elite in the North's society and they have convinced themselves that liberal capitalism has visited on society a catalogue of evils.

Not only this but they have created an entire ideology - 'inclusive growth' - to describe their chosen way of bettering the lives of Northerners. This isn't founded on enterprise, risk, innovation and capitalism but rather on the largess of 'anchor institutions' which can, in an act of protectionist self-harm, limit their procurement to the locality they occupy. To add to this, the advocates of this municipal growth model, then demand that the national taxpayer splurge billions on grand schemes, sponsors great fairs and funds elaborate arts projects. Where we might have had entrepreneurship, we get people and businesses clucking round the municipal great and good in the hope of consultancy work, project funding or a few quid to design a website.

To rediscover the enterprising society requires a fundamental shift in the way we view business, risk and choice. Look at the reporting on business, at the way in which the business person (usually the businessman) gets portrayed in drama and at the eternal warnings that businesses are just out to scam you. Consider how were told that it is somehow unfair that someone who created value for consumers should take some small part of that value (which could be millions even billions) for him- or herself. And look at the commonplace portrayal of a free market as dog-eat-dog rather than as a triumph of co-operation, collaboration and mutual benefit. If we want the North to boom we need to change these things, to see that enterprising people, businesses and risk-takers are the real heroes in our society and that they deserve their rewards and the status that reward gets them.

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Would cutting income tax for young people stop the North's brain drain?

Poland has announced a dramatic tax policy:

Poles under the age of 26 who earn less than 85,528 Polish zloty ($22,547) a year will be exempt from the country's 18% income tax starting August 1. The allowance is generous, considering the average Polish salary stands at just below 60,000 zloty ($15,700) a year.

The aim of the policy is to try and stem the tide of young Poles that head for other countries - an estimated 1.7 million people left Poland in the past 15 years which, as the Polish PM observed, "It's as if the entire city of Warsaw left".

For those who have already left, especially the better educated (something like 750,000 graduates are in that 1.7 million figure), the incentive probably isn't good enough and they're likely to be earning more, even after tax, that they would in Poland even assuming there's a comparable job. But it might have two effects - to slow down the departure of young Poles in the future and to encourage new investment to exploit this pool of labour.

Which brings me to my question - could we use the same policy as a means of slowing down the "giant sucking sound" (to borrow from Ross Perot) of Northern graduates heading to London and the South-East? I'm not convinced it's a 'silver bullet' but it would add to the existing incentives of lower living costs especially for housing. It may even attract a few soft southern pansies like me up north! Worth a punt?

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It's time to stop obsessing about trains - they aren't the infrastructure solution we need

Let's imagine for a minute that I'm going to give you several billion pounds for the purpose of making the North of England's infrastructure "fit for the 21st century". Let's also forget that, in the real world, this looks unlikely because when you put infrastructure schemes through the Department of Transport's models they tell you that investing in the North - compared to yet another rail scheme for London - is a financial no-no.

Now, because you're an assiduous consumer of commentary and consider yourself bang up to the minute on transport issues, you come straight back and say something like:

High Speed Rail from York to Liverpool - maybe extending HS2 to Newcastle as well

Electrification of assorted railway lines (Calder Valley, Harrogate-York, etc.)

Rail links to Yorkshire's airports and ports

Light rail for Leeds (that may or may not connect to Bradford, Huddersfield and Wakefield

New stations, new rolling stock, fancy ticket machines and ticket systems

More trains, bigger trains, faster trains...

I know this is the response most folk will give because, even in the North where 95% of people don't use trains (on anything but a very occasional basis), the reporting on transport issues is utterly dominated by problems with trains - too old, too crowded, strikes, break downs, timetable problems:: you name it the BBC, Yorkshire Post and local media will be all over it.

Tell me, when did the newspapers or television news last cover the fact that your bus is old, slow and subject to delays and cancellations? When was there a shock horror report complete with vox pops from exasperated commuters saying how the endless summer of road works has caused congestion everywhere? One of the main routes into Bradford, the B6144 along Toller Lane and White Abbey Road, has been closed for eight weeks while Yorkshire Water try to find some of the wet stuff - have there been any reports on the sheer annoying inconvenience and cost of this work? You missed it?

Yet the single most important means by which people in the North get to work is by car and, however much you might want to parade your green credentials, all that vast investment in railways won't make anything but the tiniest of dents in this traffic. And, as you all know of course, the problems on the railways result from the decision (something to do with privatisation) to incentivise increasing passenger numbers - there isn't enough capacity on the rail system. Modal shift (every councillor I've ever met who has served on a transport committee can intone this - it goes with 'get more freight on rails' as a mantra) if it is a success simply results in the rail system seizing up.

So here's an alternative list for your infrastructure investment - one better linked to reality and less to the fact that too many transport planners still have a model railway in the attic:

Bus priority schemes, new buses and better bus stations

Superfast broadband - targeting where the commuter traffic is coming from not where it's going to

Car share apps and schemes - with financial rewards for users

Properly funded road maintenance and improvement - dealing with the thousands of stalled small schemes

Deregulation of taxi and minibus - getting something like the US Dollar bus schemes

Support for employer run bus schemes

Incentives for home working and local shared work spaces

Better cycling infrastructure (including, for larger places, cycle rent schemes)

Railways - for all that they have a place - are still 19th century technology. The EU auditors recently reported that the only high speed line on the whole continent (including HS1 and the Channel Tunnel) that is profitable is the Paris-Lyon line. The money spemt on railways represents a huge subsidy to wealthy urban commuters and we're paying the price of this with potholed roads, outdated diesel buses, over-regulated taxis and the almost complete absence of any national (let alone regional) strategy for roads. It is time to line the transport planners up and ask: "do you like trains?" If the answer is "yes" then get rid of them.

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The North's biggest assets are not its big cities - they're its problem

Most analyses of England's "North" start and finish with industrial decline and the ever-deepening divide between North and South. I fear that our analyses suffer from a fatal flaw in that they focus on the idea that the future for The North lies in those former beating hearts of industrial England and especially the transpennine cities - Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield.

The result of this analysis is a false imaging of The North as a peculiarly working-class place - once of flat caps, whippets and tea from chipped pint mugs while sitting on a box at the allotment, now of urban wasteland, sportswear, obesity and despair. Here's Phillip Blond concluding his analysis:

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.

Now I live in The North, in a lovely village an hour from Manchester and 20 minutes from Leeds and Bradford. It's a short drive to Skipton and beyond to the Yorkshire Dales. I simply don't recognise Phillip Blond's caricature of Northern culture or believe that this is the reason why people leave The North. You need to have a spectacularly narrow view of The North to say this:

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.

And then to suggest that the reluctant move of a bit of Channel 4 to somewhere outside London is how you resolve this void. It all reads like "there's nothing do do in The North", it's a cultural wasteland dominated by Blond's conception of a "working-class monoculture" stretching from Sheffield to Carlisle. And, of course, working-class people don't have the sort of culture that would appeal to Jeremy and Jocasta!

This concentration on the city and failed urban places is, I think, where our analyses of The North go wrong. Airedale, where I live, is doing OK - not brilliantly but pretty well. It has decent enough schools, work ranging from traditional manufacturing through to modern financial services and tech business. And it's a short train ride into Leeds or Bradford. What it isn't is some sort of modish caricature of "working-class monoculture", quite the reverse, it's increasingly full of regular middle-class folk not so very different from those in Cheam or Epping. We'd welcome Channel 4 in Bingley - it might become a little less achingly leftist - but we don't need it because we lack culture.

A decade ago we drew up an Airedale Masterplan and Strategy, an ambitious vision of the valley and its communities. At the heart of this vision was the idea that we'd been ignoring our biggest asset for 100 years - the hills, moors and woods that dominate every vista. It's this realisation that changed how we saw our place and, on a larger scale, it's what The North should do. Forget about that "working class monoculture" for a minute and ask whether The North's biggest asset is is countryside, its market towns, its villages and its hills? When we talk about the Northern Powerhouse it's about how fast we can get from Liverpool to Manchester to Leeds, how these cities should be "economic hubs", and how we should throw money into universities, inclusive growth strategies and strategic rail systems. But this is how every struggling region, every challenged city, talks - from the US mid-west, to the Po Valley and Naples. With the same results - no change followed by another strategy, another place marketing campaign, another complaint about the lack of investment.

Perhaps The North should turn itself round, face away from its inner urban places and look instead at those hills, rivers, coastlines, lakes and forests. When rich tourists talk about Tuscany, they don't talk about Livorno with its high unemployment, declining industry (and probably an Italian version of a working-class monoculture), they talk about Siena, Chianti and San Gimignano. Maybe, when we talk of The North, we should stop trying to pretend it's any more working-class than say Crawley, Harlow or Sittingbourne, and instead point out that with York, Ripon, Whitby, Durham and the Lake District, we have a cornucopia of fantastic heritage and culture as good as anywhere in Europe.

I realise that this doesn't get rid of the issues that many places face - lack of good infrastructure, poor schools and something of an image problem - but it would shift the narrative from "please Mr London but something in our begging bowl" to "Hey you southerners get a slice of what we've got - and check out these house prices". Our biggest assets are not the big cities, they're our problem.

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'Growth for The North' - taking local ownership of the Northern Powerhouse

At a recent LGA meeting we heard from Lord Adonis, chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission and former transport minister. It was interesting, not just from the insight he gave into the work published on Crossrail Two, Northern transport connectivity and energy connections but for the context he have for decision-making. It is that context that is relevent to any discussion about the 'Northern Powerhouse'.

Much of the debate around the Northern Powerhouse is characterised by either negativity (witty statements like 'Northern Poorhouse' or 'Northern Powersham', for example) or else by an emphasis on devolution to 'metro-mayors' in the 'core cities'. It seems to me that this misses the point and worse reinforces two unwanted images of The North - as supplicants arriving cap in hand at national government's doors asking for more, and as a bunch of rivalrous, squabbling places unable to get their act together on priorities for economic growth. I would add that the capture of the agenda in some of those cities - Manchester especially - by the idea of 'inclusive growth' drags The North still further away from the place it needs to be to deliver on a Northern Powerhouse.

Lord Adonis made the observation that Crossrail Two got the green light for two reasons - the planning, costing and economic impact work was undertaken and sound, and Transport for London (TfL) as well as the London Mayor were committed to provide 50% of the scheme's funding. The result is that a £16 billion scheme will actually cost central government less than half that amount releasing the economic benefits (that show up in GDP figures and growth) to the whole nation. This is the sort of deal any national government wants to see - regardless of politics.

Right now there is not only no agreement or consensus in The North about infrastructure investment priorities but there is no mechanism for business in The North to do what's happening in London and fund 50% of that investment. There are any number of schemes and projects - ranging from the lunatic (a trans-Pennine tunnel under the High Peak) through to the sensible (reducing rail travel times east to west). And although Transport for the North has made a start with sifting these options and alternatives, it has made only a little progress and it isn't clear how its governance or administration functions. Crucially there is no means for The North to capture business contribution (for example via a business rates supplement) as national government is reserving this supplement for those places who take George Osborne's shilling off the drum and accept a 'metro-mayor'.

If, to use an eminently sensible idea, Transport for the North were to propose a new motorway linking the M56 to the A1(M) North of Bradford and Leeds, the expectation is that central government - through its agencies - would stump up all the cash. And the same would go for HS3, widening the A64, a rail link to Leed-Bradford International Airport and an upgraded Pennine crossing from Newcastle to the M6. We have to find a mechanism for local contribution and pooling that potential business rate supplement should be the best approach - assuming national government can set aside its obsession with Heseltine's rewarmed core city focus and the idea of 'metro-mayors'.

The essential requirement if we are to deliver the infrastructure elements of a Northern Powerhouse is cooperation between Merseyside, Manchester, Leeds-Bradford, Teeside and Tyneside (and the rest of The North) rather than the creation of competing entities based on travel-to-work geography in regional cities. This isn't to reject city devolution or even the idea of mayors but rather is to say that a Northern Powerhouse is best served by a bigger vision encompassing the whole of The North rather than a set of visions focused on the challenges of city government.

We're talking here about infrastructure - indeed specifically transport infrastructure - but there are other areas where The North needs to collaborate rather than compete - our education system underperforms compared to London and the South East, our urban mass transit (where it exists at all) is limited and not focused on economic growth, our cultural sectors lack bite, arts funding is London-centred, and we still experience a steady trickle of the bright and best to elsewhere in the world.

The problem, however, is compounded by the approach of city leaders and Northern Labour politicians to the problem - the Northern Powerhouse may not be a reality as yet but it's only going to become one if you get behind the idea and make it work. Simply shouting a lot about The North's problems and blaming all of this on central government isn't especially conducive to getting any commitment - let alone momentum - behind the idea of working together with that government to improve The North's economic performance. If the only approach is to stick a begging bowl under the treasury's nose and say 'fill it up please' then we will never have the growing, self-reliant and powerful North of England that surely everyone up here wants.

It is possible for leaders in The North to make this work but we won't get there if all our time is spent waiting for someone else to jump, fussing about how too much of it is about Manchester (or Leeds, or Newcastle), or making sad noises about how badly done to we all are. The work of Transport for the North, albeit quite tentative, suggests that wider collaboration on a similar basis around the whole economy not just transport is far more important than the geography of a 'combined authority' in Yorkshire or the list of 'asks' in a city devolution scheme. We need to take the idea of Transport for the North - cooperation, collaboration - and create something like 'Growth for the North' that's prepared to fund the feasibility and prepare the ground for more central government investment in The North alongside similar investment in growth from The North's businesses and residents.

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A bad week for culture in Bradford (and The North)

It has been a lousy week for culture in Bradford. First we had the announcement that the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) collection of art in photography would be transplanted from Bradford to a new 'centre' somewhere in London. And then today we got a second bombshell as the National Media Museum pulled out of the Bradford International Film Festival.

My view of all this is that it underlines the utter and complete domination of arts and culture by a narrow, London-focused elite. The Trustees of the V&A are all based in London and it wouldn't surprise me to discover that many of them, while they've visited Paris, Venice and New York haven't visited Bradford, Gateshead or Wolverhampton. For this elite such places are for talking about - you know 'deprivation', 'poverty', 'the underclass', gritty Northern films on a left-wing theme - rather than visiting. For the London elite the best that can be said is that some of them consider the North somewhere to be patronised - not in a physical way but by appearing on late night arts shows and saying how important it for the North to be recognised culturally (just so long as we don't have to go there).

There's nothing new with this problem - it remains perhaps the biggest challenge facing England. We talk a lot about the imbalance between London and 'The North' - indeed the Arts Council spends most of it's briefing pages on funding trying to demonstrate that it really does care about 'The North' and that most of the money doesn't go to London. It remains the case that roughly twice as much money goes to London that to the whole of the North. And let's remember that The North's population is around double that of London. meaning that per capita Londoners get four times as much arts funding as Bradfordians.

More to the point, London is also much richer with more access to the private sector funding that being one of the world's great cities brings. And this means that the wider infrastructure of arts and culture - commercial theatre, art markets, music and so forth - is much stronger (or at least appears that way). So while the efforts of the Arts Council, Heritage Lottery Fund and others to redress the imbalance is welcome it doesn't get close to the heart of the problem.

This heart - the central challenge - is the assumption that major national institutions have to be based in London. This was the essential problem with the decision by the Science Museum to hand over the RPS collection to the V&A. Not that a new 'centre' for art in photography isn't a great idea but rather that the centre could only be created in London. It seems that the Trustees of the Science Museum Group, at their meetings in London, didn't even consider suggesting to their new partners at the V&A that locating the new centre in the North might be the right idea (we can't be sure because the minutes of this almost entirely publicly funded organisation are not public).

So the RPS collection goes to London, which is sad. But worse than this, there's nothing but a gap left behind. Bradford no longer has that inspiring collection and nothing will replace it (a new 'interactive gallery' at the National Media Museum doesn't work since it's not really new and isn't really culture). The decision is a narrow one driven by a combination of cost pressures on the Science Museum Group (mostly being resolved by cutting the budgets of its three Northern museums) and the in-built bias towards London.

The actual decision was taken - without engaging with stakeholders in Bradford so far as I can tell - back in July 2015 with the time since then presumably spent thrashing out the details with the V&A. I don't know when the second decision, sacking the Bradford International Film Festival, was taken but it's announcement in the same week at the RPS collection decision suggests either a similar timetable or else a desire to get all the bad news out in one week. And now the museum, from being to go-to place for the culture of photography, film and TV, has become a mere adjunct of the science museum proper, a place of buttons and levers dedicated solely to showing off science stuff rather than curating the artifacts and the content of these classic media.

What's missing - from the V&A as well as the Science Museum - is any sense of the damage these decisions are doing to Bradford as a city. London is awash with film festivals whereas Bradford had just three - all now gone or under threat. All killed off by the narrowing of the National Media Museum's focus and by the blind ignorance of that London elite running the museums. The closure of a gallery or reconfiguration of a museum in London may be agitating but it does little real damage to that city's arts and culture infrastructure. Here in Bradford - just as almost everywhere in the North - the decisions made by the Science Museum to withdraw from involvement in culture has left a raw, bloody gash in the UK's only UNESCO City of Film.

It's true that Bradford people will pick themselves up, will gather together and put what pressure they can on government, on the Arts Council on the museums. And maybe a few conciliatory crumbs will come our way as a result, doubtless loudly trumpeted by those London institutions as great news for poor old Bradford. Of a considered approach to that bloody gash in Bradford's cultural life there will be none. The big arts and culture institutions won't set up a group to work on mending the wound their decisions have made, instead they'll spin what little (and it is vanishingly tiny) they've done until such a time as the national media stop taking any notice.

Even more, without some sort of big stick from government there's no way for us 'stakeholders' in Bradford's culture to influence the decisions made by that rich London-based elite that makes the decisions about how England's arts and culture infrastructure should be developed. I'd like them to visit Bradford - let us ask some questions of them. Not just about why everything has to be in London but about how they can support those of us who want to create a cultural heart for the North of England, who want to see the arts infrastructure developed and who are fed up with being supplicants to grand men and women in London who have - as we've seen in Bradford - the power to thoughtlessly tear great chunks from the cultural life of Northern cities.

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A question...

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What if the projections are wrong? What if, rather than the city growing younger and larger it grows older and smaller? What if the economy becomes dominated by the business of looking after that older population? And what if the older people who remain are the poorest and least healthy?

Residents of seaside towns, large and small, will be familiar with this picture. From being wealthy places of leisure and pleasure they have - from Blackpool to Bridlington, from Southend to Littlehampton - become just these kind of places.

The question for people in marginal northern towns - whether in East Lancashire or Yorkshire of the North East - is whether this picture is a real possibility for our future?

I ask because the happy thriving future we're being sold be politicians and planners might not be real.

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Regenerating the North - a start...

There was a small storm when The Economist spoke of the problems facing the more peripheral Northern towns and cities:

The fate of these once-confident places is sad. That so many well-intentioned people are trying so hard to save them suggests how much affection they still claim. The coalition is trying to help in its own way, by setting up “enterprise zones” where taxes are low and broadband fast. But these kindly efforts are misguided. Governments should not try to rescue failing towns. Instead, they should support the people who live in them.

The articles pointed to places like Hull, Hartlepool and Middlesbrough, once thriving places now struggling. The argument is that these places – and the word place is important in this discussion – have got beyond the fixable meaning that we need to manage their continued decline by supporting those who stay and encouraging those who leave.

In one respect this is an understandable, if depressing, conclusion – that places which have contributed so much to England’s glory should be allowed to die. But in other respects the conclusion is liberating.

The efforts aimed at regenerating the North have failed. I know we can point to grand shopping arcades, refurbished mills and many a shiny business park, things that have helped, have provided jobs and have created a sense of economic progress. But the truth is that these things are the fur coat that covers up the absence of underwear. The picture of Liverpool’s brilliant city centre, vibrant with culture, is wonderful. Yet the city still contains some of England’s poorest communities, places unbudged since the jobs went in the 1970s and 1980s.

And, before the wrath of scousers everywhere falls on me, the same picture is seen in Hull, in Teeside and, indeed, in Bradford. Faced with the pull of the South East and the attractions of Leeds, Manchester and Newcastle, these communities continue to struggle. Here’s one observer:

Cardiff, Manchester and Newcastle have their stunning new developments and you can tell there are people there with plenty of money just by walking around. Go a few miles up the read, though, and you will find blighted and boarded up small towns. It doesn’t matter how cheap they are, employers are avoiding them. The worse they get, the less likely firms are to relocate. The lure of cheaper property and wages only goes so far. It may tempt organisations away from the South-East but only to the larger regional capitals. Small town Britain is a step too far.

I would go a step further in this understanding – this author suggests that firms may move away from London but only to places with those ‘stunning new developments’ (and I would argue within swift travel of central London – perhaps the only sound argument for HS2). The reality is that – unless, like the BBC, politics forces the move – these firms are not relocating to Leeds, Manchester or Newcastle let alone Bradford, Liverpool or Nottingham.

And the problem is about scale. Here’s a comment about Chicago, a far bigger and more successful city than Leeds, Manchester or Newcastle:

Some may say, “Aaron, weren’t you the one who said Chicago wasn’t a global city?” To which I’d respond, I’ve always said Chicago is a global city. I only think that the global city side of Chicago is not sufficient to carry the load for this gigantic region and state. It can’t even carry just the city, though to be fair if you broke off global city Chicago into a standalone municipality of 600-800,000 like San Francisco, Boston, and DC, it would be a very different story, at the municipal level at least.

In simple terms Aaron is saying that, despite Chicago’s success (the company headquarters, commodities exchanges and cultural excellence), it is not sufficient of an economic driver to drag the wider hinterland – that old rustbelt greater Chicago – along behind. Those communities get left behind.

Back in England, we can see the same in Manchester and Leeds – walk out from Manchester’s city centre and you quickly arrive in places that are the flip side of ‘shiny’ Manchester. Indeed, after Liverpool, Manchester has the highest number of deprived SOAs (‘super output areas’ for the curious). And Leeds with Seacroft, Harehills and East End Park isn’t so very different.

Even these more successful cities may not generate the critical mass to bring peripheral communities along with their thriving centres and odd little bohemian enclaves. If they do, this success will be at the expense of other places further removed and most significantly those sufficiently disconnected – Teeside, East Lancashire, Hull and The Humber.

Faced then with this challenge, what do we do? Right now we’re planning for a larger population, for new jobs in ‘creative’ and ‘knowledge’ industries and for more of the same (or what we believe to be the same). Except this isn’t the case. Quietly we are seeing a new focus – through ‘combined authorities’, local enterprise partnerships and city regions – on the three or four hub cities: Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle and, perhaps, Liverpool.

This focus may not be enough (or does there come a point at which London is so expensive, so unattractive that people move away) to prevent continued relative decline but it does at least hold out some prospect of betterment. For us in Bradford – and for that matter, those in Oldham, Chester-le-Street and St Helens – we perhaps need to work out how to do three things:

1. Connect our communities to the City Centres – ideally by fast train or tram rather than by bus or trolley bus. This needs to be ambitious and requires some taboos – about providing free parking at railway stations, for example – to be broken. It’s not enough to simply tidy up the current networks, we need to connect places that aren’t connected as of now
2. Provide transforming space – just because you can get from Saltaire to Leeds inside 20 minutes doesn’t mean you have to do so every day. In these connected places (and especially the deprived communities we’re bringing into the network) let’s offer low rent studios and live-work spaces – on the proviso that those renting put something back in the form of art, music, culture or other improvement
3. Animate and decorate – create a sense of interest and excitement. Rather than some sort of dull positioning – Bradford’s current meme, I’m told, is ‘the producer city’ – we want to be a place where things are happening. But for this to work, we’ll have to let go of control and allow stuff (some of which might be a little odd) to take place.

These aren’t a solution – we can and should expect many of our brightest to go away, to leave for London or even for New York and Hong Kong. And – whatever the planners are saying right now – many of our communities will decline in size, the inner city will hollow out a little and the suburbs will get a little more crowded. But this process presents us with opportunities to do some things differently – to build an urban golf course in Allerton or a cycle track in Barkerend, to have some more new parks and open spaces and to fill them with the wild and wacky.

Rather than sticking our fingers in our ears when faced with (and it’s not the first time) the truth about the prospects for our cities, we should accept reality and work with change instead of pretending it isn’t happening. The alternative is another generation of local politicians (and the pseudo-politicians that clutter up LEP boards and so forth) clattering back and forth to London where they abase themselves before civil servants and junior ministers holding out the cap ready for the next slug of "regeneration".

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Business & politics - why Heseltine is wrong

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There's a sort of conservatism - let's call it the "business right" - that sees politics through the prism of a thing called either "business and industry" or else "business and commerce". This viewpoint produces familiar comments such as:

"We need more businessmen in politics"

And:

"Government needs to be more businesslike"

Or indeed any number of variants on this theme where the essential premise is that "business administration" is somehow a superior construct to "public administration". And, this being so, that we have only to introduce such administration to government to bring about a miraculous transformation in the efficiency and effectiveness of public services.

Moreover, by bringing in business people, we get a sudden rush of initiative, enterprise and other fabulous business virtues. Thus we get boards established, run on corporate principles and populated by private sector folk - the holy grail of public services and public investment being "business-led" is met. And we rejoice for it will be but a short while before the benefits of such initiative is felt by all!

This is the essence of Michael Heseltine's politics. The lion-maned, millionaire businessman (and politician) does not believe in free markets, free trade and free enterprise. Heseltine believes in "business", in industrial strategies, in subsidies, in picking winners. Above all, Heseltine believes that government should harken to the cries of the business establishment and fund their schemes (while putting those business 'leaders' on the boards that administer those programmes).

And it seems like the Coalition plans to adopt Heseltine's approach:

"In line with Lord Heseltine’s report, today we have also announced a package of wider support that is a big vote of confidence for our industrial strategy, particularly the aerospace, automotive and agri- technology sectors. This support not only gives businesses certainty, but shows the Government is determined to back those sectors where Britain can deliver and compete on a global scale in partnership with industry."

Weirdly, Heseltine pretends that all this is somehow radical, new and change-making. It's almost as if the old interventionist has written George Osborne's script for him:

 “We asked Lord Heseltine to do what he does best: challenge received wisdom and give us bold ideas on how to bring government and industry together. He did just that, and that is why we are backing his ideas today.”

I fail to see anything at all in Heseltine's proposals that "challenge received wisdom" or indeed do anything but repeat what Heseltine has proposed off and on since the 1970s. Hand control of planning to unelected boards, pour money into regeneration, create new regional quangos and define a privileged set of industries that benefit from government largess (chiefly the property development industry).

In the North we have had thirty years and more of this 'partnership with industry'. It hasn't delivered salvation - indeed with each passing year the North slips a little further behind the rest of the nation. It's true that some already successful business folk get to sit on grand boards - the latest being Local Economic Partnerships - but these boards achieve little even when (as with the Regional Development Agencies) they're given loads of money to spend.

Challenging received wisdom would have meant a very different approach. Rather than a snuggly little relationships with the grandees of big businesses, we might work instead with the real enterprise of millions. Instead of a grand board proposing sweeping nonsense about "green industry", "creating the technologies of the future" and other such tommyrot, we might have teams of coaches working with real people in the communities of the North. Helping people realise their aspirations, navigating start up businesses through the thickets of red tape, linking them to networks of other businesses and building a new economy on real enterprise rather than random guesses about "those sectors where Britain can deliver and compete".

This isn't about whether GDP or GVA grows but more about helping Mary, Steve, Iqbal and Samara to get their idea to work. It's about helping a bunch of young people without great qualifications to achieve something of their aspirations - whether that's to be a singer on a cruise ship or to run a successful computer repair business.

The "business right" - rather like the Fabian left - does not recognise free markets but only business markets. We're in a 'global race' rather than a peaceful, pleasant exchange of value with others. Countries, regions, cities, even neighbourhoods, 'compete' - that Porterian 'dog eat dog' philosophy dominates thinking. At no point do we consider that the object isn't actually competition but the successful operation of comparative advantage.

We have a government set in the belief - the hubris - that there are a set of levers that, if pulled in the right pattern, will result in success. And the rhetoric of liberty, of allowing people the space to succeed, is pushed aside in favour of a business-led quangos and investment in privileged sectors.

I have only one prediction. Just like every other time we've followed Michael Heseltine's advice, every time we've adopted "business-led" regional strategies, these policies will fail.

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The Smith Institute (unwittingly) spots the North's problem...

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Amidst a turgid, dreary and special interest laden report, The Smith Institute, the world's last remaining centre of Brownite thinking, unwittingly nailed the reasons for the North's economic problems:

In the three Northern regions, in the boom years of 2000-08, the majority of the new jobs came directly or indirectly from public funds.

The Labour government, under Brown's chancellorship, borrowed money and spent it on creating public sector jobs. There were no "boom years" outside the public sector in places like Bradford. For a few moments it felt that way but it was a chimera.

Public sector jobs were better paid, had better pensions and (seemingly) offered better prospects. Voluntary organisations, charities and social enterprises were sucked into the government's maw where juicy morsels of grant and contract were served up. The private sector - unless it was simply delivering public contracts - stood no chance.

The North's economy is in such crisis because of that false dawn, because the Labour government conned us into believing that the solution lay in an ever larger and ever more inefficient (and ineffective) public sector. They were wrong and we're paying the price.

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Heseltine was wrong in 1982, wrong in 1992. He's still wrong in 2012.

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I don’t know where to start with Lord Heseltine’s review. Perhaps with the bits I agree with – elected mayors, for example. Or maybe with a witch’s warning about reviews that everyone seems to ‘applaud’. But I’m choosing instead to begin with the big fib that Heseltine starts with -  his claim that the proposals are innovative, radical & different.

If there is an upside to the worst economic crisis of modern times it is the emergence of an audience for deep seated and radical proposals. They distrust talk of isolated initiatives or quick wins. An ever more competitive world will only become more competitive not less. The structures and attitudes of yesterday did not work that well then and certainly will not cope with the new world order.

All this may be true but Heseltine doesn't offer "deep seated and radical proposals" but exactly the things he disdains - "the structures and attitudes of yesterday..." 

Anyone who has listened to Lord Heseltine over the years will know that the themes of his thesis remain constant. The specific context of these particular proposals may be different from that led to the urban development corporations in the early 1980s or to “City Challenge” in the 1990s but the prescription remains the same.

Competitive bidding:

All my experience confirms that competitive funding is key to unleashing the entrepreneurial spirit in local areas. It injects a surge of excitement and incentivises communities to seek a wider and much more ambitious vision to anything they had thought of before. A healthy rivalry between areas comes into play. It drives collaboration, creativity, commitment and ambition. I therefore believe that the single pot of central government funds for economic development should be made available to local areas on a competitive basis.

Plan-led investment:

The Government will need to set out the requirements that LEPs must meet in their bids to secure funding. It should consult LEPs, local authorities and the business community in doing so. It is important that this framework is focused on high level outcomes and does not become detailed and prescriptive. This would rein in the creativity of local areas and undermine the benefits of local empowerment. However, there will be some essential criteria which have to be met for government to devolve such significant funding.

Sidelining local authority planning departments:

LEPs should therefore be given additional funding, specifically to develop their new strategic plans. This must be used to hire professional private sector planners as part of a deliberate attempt to spread best practice, engage private sector expertise and avoid LEPs being entirely dependent on the already stretched planning departments of their local authorities.

Cross-department regional offices:

This leads to the conclusion that we should bring together civil servants from different departments whose work impacts on the economy into Local Growth Teams so they can work seamlessly together, closer to the people and agencies affected by their work. They should facilitate both economic development matters that straddle LEP boundaries and partnerships around and between functional economic market areas

These tired old policies are accompanied by a familiar litany of how business-style public sector management is need, how economic development is driven by “innovation strategies” and some ridiculous obsession with “British ownership” as if that is somehow significant in our economy. What Lord Heseltine presents is simply his inevitable dirigiste, managerialist vision of how government should be organised. And it’s presented with panache and conviction.

The problem is that this agenda failed to regenerate the North when Britain was booming. Why on earth does anyone think that this agenda will regenerate the North when Britain isn’t booming? There is nothing at all in Heseltine’s prescription that will take us one inch neared a more dynamic, entrepreneurial economy. Instead we’ll have an economy designed and run by a closed sect of business managers working hand-in-glove with a closed sect of public sector managers.

In the end these are tired old proposals from a delightful and eloquent old millionaire. They are policies that haven’t delivered regeneration when they were tried before – except for some shiny city centres. But ask yourself this. Those city centres – Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Leeds – have they delivered regeneration for the wider community? Travel a few hundred yards to Newton Heath, to Harehills, to Kensington and look around you. That depressing place of high unemployment, poor education, rampant crime and unshiftable poverty wasn’t changed when Heseltine’s policies were tried before. What makes you think it will work this time?

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