North must get powers it needs to hit true potential
PROTEST Child at an anti-Brexit demo in Parliament Square DRINKS-IT Leaver Nigel Farage toasts Article 50 trigger yesterday IT’S time to shout it from the rooftops – give more power to the North, more resources to the North and more jobs to the North.
The needs of the North are being neglected in Theresa May’s Brexit power grab. Today, she will announce she is taking key responsibilities from Brussels.
The North needs many of these powers for its economic development and future. The North-South divide is about to become such a chasm we will be a United Kingdom in name only.
Any number of proud facts should reveal the North as a thriving region – with the inventiveness and graft that made the North-East, the North-West, Yorkshire and Humberside leaders of the industrial revolution.
As a single entity, its £300billion-plus economy would be the 10th-largest in the EU. The North has 29 universities, many of them global centres of collaboration for science and industry.
But other statistics show the North is struggling to fulfil its true potential.
North-East unemployment is twice as high as the South-East – 6.8% versus 3.5%. Take the North-East and NorthWest together and they’ve created only 69,000 jobs in two years compared with 429,000 in London and the South-East.
BALANCED
Average incomes in the South-East are eight times those of the poorest areas in the North. Anger at European and metropolitan elites has reached a crescendo in the North, where despite being the biggest manufacturing hub to Europe, most towns voted Leave.
It need not be this way. A new form of economic federalism still has the power to save the UK from dissolution.
The popular thinking has always been that what was good for London was good for the country and in a Londondriven UK, prosperity would trickle down.
The truth is that little of the capital’s success spills into the regions. Indeed, a London-centric view no longer works even for London. A balanced approach to regional economic development is in the interests of both North and South.
Brexit means powers over migration, agriculture, fisheries, VAT, environment and regional policy are repatriated. A strong case is being made that Belfast, Edinburgh and Cardiff, as well as the London Assembly, take some of these.
But the North also needs more powers to attract new industry and investment, co-ordinate roads and rail, and support research and development. It is time to consider empowering the North to take its own initiatives with decisions made in the North, by the North, for the North.
One way forward is to create a Council for the North with local authority leaders and Mayors. And the Government should call a UK-wide constitutional convention to look at how we redistribute power fairly. The first item on the agenda should have only two words – The North.