POWER TO THE NORTH
» Labour pledge ‘irreversible shift’ of institutions & cash away from London » £150billion to boost schools, care homes, hospitals and council houses
LABOUR will today pledge to pump £150billion into regions left on their knees by nine years of Tory cuts.
The North will be one area to benefit, with a new Treasury unit moved there to spend the much-needed cash on schools, hospitals, social care and council homes.
Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell is to promise “an irreversible shift in the centre of gravity” away from London. He will say: “Power is coming home. Back to
the people. We can only deliver the real change we need by putting power into the hands of communities; of the people who know their local area best.
“Spent over the first five years of our Labour government, the Social Transformation Fund will begin the urgent task of repairing our social fabric that the Tories have torn apart.
“£150billion to replace, upgrade and expand our schools, hospitals, care homes and council houses. To deal with the human emergency which the Tories have created.”
Mr McDonnell will outline his regeneration plans in a speech at Liverpool, a stone’s throw from where his dad, Bob, worked on the docks.
Areas that Tory austerity have left with shockingly poor public services, often starved of so much cash councils have no choice but to close down facilities for children and pensioners, will be in line for a cash boost.
Mr McDonnell will say of plans to open a northern Treasury: “This is where the investment is needed and this is where those decisions on investment need to be made on the ground.”
The Mirror understands Labour plans to put around half of the money into housing with the rest on schools, hospitals and other key public infrastructure.
Spending in the North has fallen by £6.3billion in real terms – more than any other region of the UK – but has risen by £3.2billion in the South East and South West.
The latest annual State of the North report by the Institute for Public Policy
North think-tank found the North-South divide in pay, wealth and life expectancy are all growing.
It revealed two million working-age adults and one million children live in poverty in the area. Weekly pay has fallen by £21, or 3.8% in real terms since 2008. It has dropped 3.3% nationally.
Mr McDonnell’s cash pledge comes on top of Labour’s £250billion Green Transformation Fund, already announced, bringing total spending on the projects to £400billion.
The money would also be spent through Local Transformation Funds which would be overseen by nine civil service boards in each of the nine regions of England. Each board would hold a general assembly for the public to ask questions twice a year.
The £150billion pot will be raised through a big increase in borrowing, with the issuing of Government long-dated bonds and spent on capital projects that raise the productive capacity of the economy. Mr McDonnell’s speech comes after Jeremy Corbyn told an audience in Telford, Shrops, on Wednesday that unlike the Tories he was not “born to rule”.
In a thinly veiled attack on Eton-educated PM Boris Johnson and his crony Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Labour leader added: “I don’t pursue that kind of politics at all… the parlour game, the debating society game.”
He also vowed to clamp down on clever accounting methods that allows fatcats to dodge paying their fair share of tax and deny the Treasury millions of pounds that could be spent on schools, police, the NHS and defence. Asked how he felt about billionaires, Mr Corbyn replied: “My personal views is that they’ve obviously got a great deal of money therefore they’re in a very strong position to pay a lot more tax.
“So our tax plans will affect the richest 5% of our society. We will be chasing down tax evasion, avoidance and tax havens because if you’re doing some very clever wheeze which somehow or other is avoiding your levels of taxation you should be paying, what happens then? You’ve got an underfunded school, hospital and public services as a whole.
“You’ve got a moral obligation to pay your taxes. However rich, powerful and famous you are. One day you might have a heart attack. Then you’re going to need the public services.” Mr Corbyn vowed to be a “very different kind of PM” who “only seeks power in order to share power”.
Mr Corbyn’s pledge came after desperate Mr Johnson tried to compare him to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin as the PM launched his election campaign with a rambling speech outside No10.
Chancellor Sajid Javid is also expected to give a speech less than an hour away from the one given by Mr McDonnell.