Every generation of politicians seems to believe that they are the first to discover the North. In Andy Burnham’s speech today he said that Britain was ‘over-centralised’ and that the ‘broken’ Westminster government was not working for the north-west of England. He promised ‘the biggest rebalancing of power our country has ever seen’, with decent infrastructure in all parts of Britain and ever more devolution.
Burnham rails against the London-centric approach of our politics and economy. But has such a centralised system actually been in place in our recent history?
It can’t have been during Keir Starmer’s government, which came to power on a pledge to ‘spread control out of Westminster’ and began an overhaul of council tax to fund the north at the expense of the South. It can’t have been during Rishi Sunak’s government – Rishi himself was the driving force behind the Darlington Economic Campus, which is part of a programme to move 22,000 civil service jobs out of London.
Urban regeneration has made a big difference in cities like Manchester and Liverpool
It can’t have been Rishi’s old boss Boris Johnson, who championed levelling up and freed up billions of pounds for investment in local infrastructure across the country. It can’t have been Theresa May, who kept up the Northern Powerhouse project, which she inherited from David Cameron. That initiative was spearheaded by the arch-neoliberal George Osborne. And the Northern Powerhouse was a repackaging of ‘The Northern Way’, another central government expenditure programme initiated by Tony Blair and kept on by Gordon Brown.
