Our Manifesto for the North is the message of positive change this election needs
The UK is both the most politically centralised and regionally unbalanced country in the OECD. That was the finding of Bob Kerslake’s UK2070 commission earlier this year.
These two depressing facts are intrinsically linked. If you concentrate politicians and civil servants in one part of the country, it is unsurprising that they will make decisions that favour that place over others. And if people in other places feel they have no real means of challenging this injustice, it is unsurprising that they will come to feel alienated from a political system that neglects where they live.
This is the backdrop to the 2019 general election. The Brexit debate is real, but it is also a proxy for a much deeper dissatisfaction with our politics, which has been brewing for decades. A system that rewards parties for focusing on a small number of key marginals rather than the fortunes of whole regions is, by definition, dysfunctional.
So far, this election appears to be following the usual pattern. We have seen certain lucky towns hand-picked for visits and government funding, but little mention of the north-south divide that has been widening for decades.
This is now dangerous. An election campaign pitting “the people” against parliament could easily take the country to an even darker place and unleash unfocused anger unless, alongside the Brexit discussion, it quickly gets into a much more positive debate about real solutions to the loss of trust in our political system, and the serious reforms needed to rebalance our country economically and socially. This election desperately needs to be a change election for the north of England. So far I’m not feeling it – but I hope that’s about to change.
Thursday brings a general election intervention truly without precedent.
Never before has an entire English region united across geographical and political divides to call for change.
The publication of the first Manifesto for the North, resulting from the recent Convention of the North, simply can’t be ignored. It is a positive intervention into an otherwise highly divided political debate. It sets out the terms for a new political settlement, around which all political parties can and should unite, and upon which a badly divided nation might begin to heal in the long term. Crucially, it asks the government to make rebalancing the economy a formal HM Treasury objective, to deliver transformational investment for the north. In the past, it has been all too easy for talk of the north-south divide to be labelled “northern whinging” and relegated to the margins of national political debate. But that won’t be possible this time. First, our “power up the north” call, championed by our newspapers, is a positive, self-confident ask for the power to do more for ourselves, rather than just a plea for resources. Second, it is backed by heavyweight analysis from a commission led by the former head of the UK civil service, Lord Kerslake, which has found that the north-south divide in England today is as stark as the east-west divide in Germany in the early 1990s.
To many people here, that gets to the heart of the matter. It has always felt that we live in two different countries. The most obvious example is transport. The transport system in the north, which runs on Victorian infrastructure, feels as though it belongs to a different era and country to the one that operates in London and the south east. But the great transport divide is not just down to infrastructure. It also runs to different rules or, in the case of our buses, no rules at all.
Westminster’s decision to deregulate bus services everywhere except London in the 80s has left people in the north paying more for a poorer service. A single bus journey here can cost £4 compared with £1.50 in the capital. Vital routes can be cut on a whim.
Then there is housing. The north is not alone in suffering from a housing crisis, but it is hurting people here in a more profound way than many in Whitehall realise. This week, the Manchester Evening News published a hard-hitting investigation into the growing scale of hidden homelessness. It exposed a 400% increase in the number of families in temporary accommodation since 2015 – often filthy single-rooms in B&Bs, miles from their children’s schools and friends.
Given the north’s lower-wage economy, it has always been the case that communities have had a higher need for social housing than elsewhere. It therefore follows that the government’s right-to-buy policy and curbs on councils building replacement homes have hit the north harder. When you add on top of that the cuts to benefits over the last decade – and in particular the freeze on the local housing allowance, which helps people afford homes in the private-rented sector – you can see how the hellish conditions described by the Manchester Evening News’s Jennifer Williams have come about.
The Manifesto for the North confronts this reality of life in the north today. It seeks to free us from the shackles of short-sighted Westminster policies on transport and housing, and give us the power to solve these things for ourselves.
At a time when our politicians can barely agree on anything, devolution of power to the English regions is perhaps the only big idea in politics uniting people across the political spectrum. For that reason alone, it must be embraced.
At a time when our politicians can barely agree on anything, devolution is perhaps the only idea uniting people