‘In economics today, the path to truth is mediated by its priesthood’.
» David Boyle
It is an experiment that ought to be better known, its progress tracked on the BBC and fought over in parliament.
Inclusive growth is a game-changer.
There are ways for places to plug the funding gap
Glasgow has suffered from the symptoms of one-party rule now for generations. It doesn’t encourage brave imagination: now that is being challenged by the SNP, but nationalism doesn’t seem to encourage the unconventional either.
There is the opportunity of grassroots entrepreneurs, reaching across the community divisions, and beginning to make things happen – in a way that smaller nations can sometimes make possible.
There is no other city in the UK which has the experience that Liverpool has, now over two generations, of making things happen in housing.
It is a divide between those who want to wait, patiently or impatiently, for the Chinese to invest or before they clutch the national reins of government and launch a new regeneration programme to kickstart the local economy of our cities – and those who want to get on and do something themselves.
It may even be that the very success of Leeds has concentrated the poverty, raised property prices, made home ownership more difficult, entrenched the difficulties of Bradford next door – the closest we get in the UK to the disastrous pattern in the US cities where success is twinned with failure next door, St Louis and East St Louis, Philadelphia and Camden, New Jersey.
The language of the Northern Powerhouse is still about attracting investment to the north, building them roads so that other foreign corporations can truck their goods more easily in and out, and a little will trickle down and stay put. There is a supplicant element to the economic language about devolving powers to the north still, despite the powerhouse clothing. It is dependent.