How migration caused the North-South divide

Yorkshire Day perhaps isn't the best day to share these findings but they tell a different story from the one we're usually told. I also appreciate, since I live here, that whatever they say all the best and brightest live in Yorkshire.

The thing is, however, that some clever folk at the London School of Economics (Gregory Clark, UC Davis and Neil Cummins) have looked at whether the North's relative economic underperformance is about "bad geography" or "bad people". And I hate to be the bringer of bad news but these folks at LSA have analysed surnames, probate records, MPs, doctors and other measures of social status like going to Oxford and discovered that the North's relative problem is down to the best and brightest in every generation heading South. Not just recently but more-or-less since records began (for the purposes of this research that is about 1840).




Our researchers conclude:

The poorer economic and social outcomes in the north of England have two possible sources. The first source is negative economic shocks in the early twentieth century that blighted the traditional industries of the north, and disadvantaged thereafter those born in the north in terms of employment opportunities, education and health. The second source is the selective outmigration of those with greater social status from the north to the south. In this paper we present good evidence in favor of the second interpretation, both using surname evidence and data on individual families.

Holders of surnames concentrated in the north in the 1840s were not disadvantaged in recent years in terms of education, occupation, political power, or wealth compared to the holders of surnames concentrated in the south in the 1840s. Since they are even now disproportionately located in the north any geographic disadvantage of that area would have reduced their social status. Further holders of northern surnames dying in the south were wealthier than holders of southern surnames dying in the south. And in sign that migration to the north was of less advantaged southerners, holders of southern surnames dying in the north were no richer that northern surname holders dying in the north. These northern surnames dying in the north were an adversely selected group, so the southern migrants must also be adversely selected.

To put it more simply: since about 1870 there has been a net out-migration from the North of England to the South of England and most of the migrants are, for want of a better term, the 'best and brightest'. The often noted regional inequality isn't down to the actions of government but rather to the choices of people.

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European Union has served its purpose. Time to scrap it.

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What follows isn’t one of those ‘Little Englander’ rants about the iniquities of Johnny Foreigner and how Britain’s membership of the European Union is a bad thing – probably because there’s too many foreigners involved, don’t you know! Instead – as someone who once was a swivel-eyed Euro-fanatic – it is a simple and straightforward argument for the whole show to be shut down.

The European Union has done its job. Now it should pack its bags, shut up shop and shuffle onto the dusty shelves of history.

Whenever the leaders of Europe speak of the project they inevitably – as in some sub-clause to Godwin’s Law – refer to the need to prevent European nations tearing themselves asunder in an orgy of war and terror. This is why – as we heard most recently from Helmut Von Rumpuy – the Euro-enthusiast desires to link the sceptical view of the project to nationalism. By saying that scrapping the EU will lead to a renewed ‘nationalism’ (by which of course the speaker means brown or black shirts and jackboots), a further seed of doubt is sown into the mind of the undecided.

However, having presided over the reconstruction of Europe’s industry (behind tariff walls that, once removed, meant the terminal decline of those same industries), the rebuilding of good relations between the peoples of the continent and the collapse of centralist socialism as a national model, the EU now has no purpose. Indeed, it has become an anachronism, an historical nonsense. And an expensive one to boot!

European nations – for all our football fan bluster about the French or the Germans – are not going to war with each other. We’ve got pretty used to rubbing along with our neighbours and share an enormous amount with them. Continuing with supranational institutions achieves nothing – other than to create tensions where there need not be tensions.

So it is with Ireland. A little place. Smaller in population that London or Paris and stuck out on the fringes of Europe. A nation with a difficult relationship with its immediate neighbour and whose talent has, in the past, mostly left on boats and planes to create a noisy diaspora. This was the “Celtic Tiger” – explosive growth fuelled by an asset boom the like of which the place had never seen! And, as these things do, the economic train hit the wall.

But there’s a problem. Ireland – just as with Greece and soon, Portugal – is no longer master of its own destiny. The option of reducing the value of the currency has gone as has the ability to use a central bank to support actions in the market. Ireland can either default – with all the problems that entails – or cut spending.


The EU is in the way. Local economies in Europe are less able to respond to changes in the economic climate since the Governance of Europe will always be about German business and French government. For a while this mattered since the aim was to stop another war between these two countries. Today that's more likely with the EU than without. And, in the meantime, the economies of small countries are threatened by the controlling, economic dirigisme of the European system.
It is time for Europe to be set free again to grow, to create and to succeed. And for the Bonapartist myth of a single Europe to be returned again to the back shelves of history.
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