Renewing North South Divide?

A few days ago I tweeted via the Independent newspaper’s article concluding that Labour is winning over ‘squeezed middle’ voters. According to the poll, the Tories trail Labour in pretty much all demographics except  for the fact that they lead Labour in the 65 year and overs age group and the wealthier Southern Counties.  So the poll starkly shows that Tories represent the older, richer people, most of whom are in Southern counties of England.  It’s also no coincidence therefore that Labour strongholds like Manchester, are having the biggest cuts to their budgets whilst diverting that cash to already wealthy Southern counties who, unsurprisingly for Tory favours, also contain a large number of the City bankers and hedge fund managers who caused and are still causing the financial crisis.  The reemerging and restrengthening North South divide is caused along the lines of financial austerity.  The cities containing people who had least to do with the financial crisis, are getting punished the most with the ideological budget cuts, whilst the towns and counties most laden with those who caused the financial meltdown of 2008 onwards, are the ones who are receiving the smallest effect from cuts to local authority budgets.  Those least affected are Tory and in some cases LibDem councils, whilst those most negatively affected are on the whole Labour councils most of which are in the North.

Mervyn King (governor of the Bank of England), in the last few days, said that majority of the UK population’s living standards may never recover from the financial crisis – http://ind.pn/gBCGwj which is exasperating for those of us who feel like we’re inexplicably vindictively treated by the current government.  Mervyn King’s view would be further proven if commodity futures traders are not controlled and further speculation and tax fuelled inflation continues (see my blog post on petrol prices http://www.dailywaffle.co.uk/2011/02/rising-cost-of-fuel/ )

During the last government’s 13 years, there were attempts to close the North South economic divide with the funds and grants for the Northern Councils and collaborating Universities, also through regional development agencies, EU grants, EMA (mostly subscribed to in the North), Sure Start (again very much more used in the North) and various initiatives to look at improving health of disadvantaged people most of whom live in the North.  The gap was closing. We could feel it, and see it.

We needed those initiatives to go on for years and maintained so that  projects and initiatives could be seen through to full conclusion and the benefits go on to further reduce the North South gap.  But the government’s faster than needed austerity drive, so concentrated in Northern regions, is stopping and in some cases will reverse the progress.  Closing the gap is not just about fairness and a happy country, but also key to advancing economic success.  It can’t go on with success just coming out of the South East.  The only way to compete on a global scale is to have economic and social prosperity across the entire country, so that the UK can reach its full potential, unhindered by old ruling class (read Tory) and fiscal conservative ideology (ie one hell bent on deficit reduction without ensuring countrywide economic growth first).  We need progressive thinking.

As things stand, the North South divide is now being recultivated not just along socio-economic lines, but also more strongly polarised along political lines. We’ll see how it will seem obvious to so many people North of the Watford gap why the government is becoming unpopular in such a short time after the general election (it went negative and stayed negative, on the YouGov polling scale, just before Autumn 2010), whilst the majority of population in the home Counties (for example) will remain baffled by the unpopularity they read about in the newspapers.  It will feel to them like a distant country.

Yes, the North South divide is renewing.