>>2917164I basically agree but would also caveat that pre-collapse rural life was also terrible in its own way.
We have - but are moving to reverse - the only policy the state is capable of implementing to ameliorate the situation, mass access to higher education. Give someone unfortunate to be born in one of those areas a token sum to move to a city. The minute they've dipped their toe in the water of something better, moving back becomes unthinkable. Then you just let demography do the work.
>>2917177It's very real and Scotland is an obvious illustration of how. Scotland and Northern England are broadly similar demographically, with most differences disfavouring Scotland, yet Scotland generally gets better results per-head than northern England because it has been given a modicum of autonomy through devolution.
There's been a long-running distaste in southern England for the north. The industrial revolution briefly tipped the balance the wrong way, but pretty much every major state initiative has been designed to reverse the trend: the postwar centralisation of the railways so that instead of regional companies everywhere you've got 4 big firms headquartered in London, then nationalisation after WW2 - again, headquartering the lot in London - then Thatcher's smashing of local councils, privatisation of firms to rent-seekers all based in London, and so on.
(And I say London here metonymically, but I'm not just London bashing: London, after all, lost
their council under Thatcher. What you should resent is not "the South", but centralisation in general.)
https://tomforth.co.uk/whynorthenglandispoor/ >Without this constraint, Thatcher could destroy all government power outside of South East England. She did just that. Michael Heseltine, the Minister who made so much of the destruction happen, describes it as the greatest regret of his political career and he has spent much of his life trying, with some success, to undo the damage he executed.>The Metropolitan counties were abolished, fragmenting Northern cities into powerless chunks. Buses in those powerless chunks, one of the last remaining local services, were privatised. The Northern cities (London was treated differently for underlying reasons which should be obvious if you’ve read this far) were banned from interfering in public transport in any way. The Mechanics Institutes which the North had built largely in the face of a ban on Northern universities and which had evolved into Polytechnics and Technical Colleges were removed from local control and have since been run down to shadows of their former selves. Right-to-buy forced local governments to sell social housing, among their largest asset bases and a stable source of income, to tenants at well below market rates and give a portion of the proceeds to the central government. Powers of local governments to raise taxes were substantially removed>While Thatcher promoted the market and competition for the private sector, she created a central monopoly on the power of government. Northern cities did not privatise their remaining services because Thatcher won the argument for liberalism. Northern cities privatised their remaining services because their leaders would go to jail and Thatcher would do it for them if they refused to. The last flicker of the Northern power that the industrial revolution had created was stamped out.>"You can just do things" is an emerging meme in the pro-growth community, but since Thatcher that has been largely untrue in North England. Most of the time, someone from central government will block you, if you succeed they will try and stop you, and if you continue succeeding they will subsidise your competitors.>Britain’s equivalents of Detroit (Birmingham), Chicago (Manchester and Liverpool), and Pittsburgh (Sheffield) have not been able to bounce back from deindustrialisation in anything like the same way. They have nowhere near the same powers. Alternatives to Austin, Miami, or Phoenix similarly have no chance of emerging, lest they pose a competition to South East England. We cannot just do things.>Scotland could see what was happening. It had signed up to be part of a United Kingdom, not complete rule from London. Support for independence rose from below 15% to over 40% under Thatcher. Tony Blair’s devolution to Scotland brought that back down and freed Scotland up to outperform North England, but the return of the Conservatives to power and the huge centralisation of government within England over the last fifteen years has pushed support for Scottish independence back up to a majority view among the working age of Scotland.+
https://tomforth.co.uk/unreasonablesuccess/ on Scottish devolution.
and for the record, I think the majority of Scottish governments have been duds. It's not like they're super-competent and everyone else is shit, they're just actually vaguely close to the people they govern!Though Scotland, too, has that most British of diseases, love of centralisation… this time in Edinburgh.