The north-east of England, which contains about a 25th of the UK population, was represented by "a third of Blair's first cabinet", noted the veteran anatomist of British power networks, Anthony Sampson, in 2004.
Between 2007 and 2012, unemployment rose faster than in any other UK region, to more than 10%, the highest in the country. Throughout 2013, as joblessness receded in most of the UK, in the north-east it carried on rising. This year, it has begun to fall a little but remains the worst in the nation. Since 2007, the area's contribution to national economic growth, measured as gross value added, has shrunk from an already weak 3% in the Blair years to barely 2%. The Northern Rock building society, with roots in the region going back a century and a half, has suffered a humiliating meltdown.
According to the Special Interest Group of Municipal Authorities, a typical council in the region will lose £665 in government funding per inhabitant between 2010 and 2018, the biggest national fall. Meanwhile, public sector employment in the region – the highest in England at more than one job in five – has been falling since 2009, a year before the coalition took office.
Between 2011 and 2012, child poverty rates in Middlesbrough and Newcastle Central rose to 40% and 38% respectively. "For as long as anyone alive will remember, this has been a 'problem region': a special case, a sick man," wrote the Newcastle-born novelist Richard T Kelly in a 2011 essay, What's Left For The North-East?
"It is at least as hard to buck geography as it is to buck the market," said the influential Tory thinktank Policy Exchange in 2008. "It is time to stop pretending that there is a bright future for Sunderland."
And last year the Tory peer Lord Howell suggested the region had "large uninhabited and desolate areas… where there's plenty of room for fracking".
Weeks later, the Economist described Middlesbrough and Hartlepool as part of "Britain's rust belt" The magazine concluded with an unlikely but ominous comparison: "The Cotswolds were the industrial engines of their day. One reason they are now so pretty is that, centuries ago, huge numbers of people fled them."
Middlesbrough grew fast because of iron foundries: from only 25 inhabitants in 1801 to 165,000 in the 1960s. The Victorian centre was built to a grid pattern, like a US boom town, with docks just to the north for exporting iron and coal. But in 1980 the docks closed, the population began to fall, and a void opened between the town and the river. It is still there, starting a few yards from the town centre; a great windswept triangle of rubble and rust, boarded-up houses, Dickensian wall fragments and roads to nowhere. Derelict waterfront warehouses stand in the distance. The town's population is around 138,000. To a visitor, the long, straight streets of the town centre seem eerily empty of pedestrians. At the sizable railway station, the weekday rush hour sometimes barely exists: at 8.30 on a Friday morning, I counted fewer than a dozen other people on the platforms. The station cafe had not bothered to open. In Middlesbrough, the riverside wasteland has been earmarked for regeneration – as a new area called Middlehaven – for almost 30 years. Recessions, anxious developers and the town's wider economic struggles have confined most construction to the area's fringe. in the window of the Jobs Shop, only half a dozen positions are offered. One is at a local seaside care home for the elderly: the successful applicant will earn £107.20 for a 40-hour week. In the north-east, the increasingly de-skilled, low-paid labour market of Britain under the coalition is at its meanest. Full-time wages are the lowest of any UK region.
"The north-east is at the far corner of the country, but it is separated by more than just miles," writes Harry Pearson, born near Middlesbrough, in his 1994 book The Far Corner. "There is the wilderness of the Pennines to the west, the emptiness of the North York Moors to the south, and to the north, the Scottish border… Sometimes the north-east seems more like an island than a region." It is an island that the HS2 rail project is not currently intended to reach.
The prospect of Scottish independence and the near-certainty of more Scottish devolution threatens to marginalise the region further. "Scotland can already do more to attract inward investment than we can," says Chi Onwurah, Labour MP for Newcastle Central. "More power for Scotland, in that sense, would not be a benefit for us."
"If things carry on as they are now," says Alex Niven, a leftwing writer from Northumberland, "in five years the situation will get somewhere like Detroit." Niven sees the north-east's revival under the Blair government as "largely superficial. In the long term, it didn't lead to better jobs and infrastructure. You can't base the revival of a region on nightlife and football."
The North-East Local Enterprise Partnership (Nelep), works for the area's economic benefit. The staff is a core is four and add people loaned to it, there are about 11 or 12 in all. Nelep replaced One North-East, a regional development agency that had 400 staff.
From the Guardian
Between 2007 and 2012, unemployment rose faster than in any other UK region, to more than 10%, the highest in the country. Throughout 2013, as joblessness receded in most of the UK, in the north-east it carried on rising. This year, it has begun to fall a little but remains the worst in the nation. Since 2007, the area's contribution to national economic growth, measured as gross value added, has shrunk from an already weak 3% in the Blair years to barely 2%. The Northern Rock building society, with roots in the region going back a century and a half, has suffered a humiliating meltdown.
According to the Special Interest Group of Municipal Authorities, a typical council in the region will lose £665 in government funding per inhabitant between 2010 and 2018, the biggest national fall. Meanwhile, public sector employment in the region – the highest in England at more than one job in five – has been falling since 2009, a year before the coalition took office.
Between 2011 and 2012, child poverty rates in Middlesbrough and Newcastle Central rose to 40% and 38% respectively. "For as long as anyone alive will remember, this has been a 'problem region': a special case, a sick man," wrote the Newcastle-born novelist Richard T Kelly in a 2011 essay, What's Left For The North-East?
"It is at least as hard to buck geography as it is to buck the market," said the influential Tory thinktank Policy Exchange in 2008. "It is time to stop pretending that there is a bright future for Sunderland."
And last year the Tory peer Lord Howell suggested the region had "large uninhabited and desolate areas… where there's plenty of room for fracking".
Weeks later, the Economist described Middlesbrough and Hartlepool as part of "Britain's rust belt" The magazine concluded with an unlikely but ominous comparison: "The Cotswolds were the industrial engines of their day. One reason they are now so pretty is that, centuries ago, huge numbers of people fled them."
Middlesbrough grew fast because of iron foundries: from only 25 inhabitants in 1801 to 165,000 in the 1960s. The Victorian centre was built to a grid pattern, like a US boom town, with docks just to the north for exporting iron and coal. But in 1980 the docks closed, the population began to fall, and a void opened between the town and the river. It is still there, starting a few yards from the town centre; a great windswept triangle of rubble and rust, boarded-up houses, Dickensian wall fragments and roads to nowhere. Derelict waterfront warehouses stand in the distance. The town's population is around 138,000. To a visitor, the long, straight streets of the town centre seem eerily empty of pedestrians. At the sizable railway station, the weekday rush hour sometimes barely exists: at 8.30 on a Friday morning, I counted fewer than a dozen other people on the platforms. The station cafe had not bothered to open. In Middlesbrough, the riverside wasteland has been earmarked for regeneration – as a new area called Middlehaven – for almost 30 years. Recessions, anxious developers and the town's wider economic struggles have confined most construction to the area's fringe. in the window of the Jobs Shop, only half a dozen positions are offered. One is at a local seaside care home for the elderly: the successful applicant will earn £107.20 for a 40-hour week. In the north-east, the increasingly de-skilled, low-paid labour market of Britain under the coalition is at its meanest. Full-time wages are the lowest of any UK region.
"The north-east is at the far corner of the country, but it is separated by more than just miles," writes Harry Pearson, born near Middlesbrough, in his 1994 book The Far Corner. "There is the wilderness of the Pennines to the west, the emptiness of the North York Moors to the south, and to the north, the Scottish border… Sometimes the north-east seems more like an island than a region." It is an island that the HS2 rail project is not currently intended to reach.
The prospect of Scottish independence and the near-certainty of more Scottish devolution threatens to marginalise the region further. "Scotland can already do more to attract inward investment than we can," says Chi Onwurah, Labour MP for Newcastle Central. "More power for Scotland, in that sense, would not be a benefit for us."
"If things carry on as they are now," says Alex Niven, a leftwing writer from Northumberland, "in five years the situation will get somewhere like Detroit." Niven sees the north-east's revival under the Blair government as "largely superficial. In the long term, it didn't lead to better jobs and infrastructure. You can't base the revival of a region on nightlife and football."
The North-East Local Enterprise Partnership (Nelep), works for the area's economic benefit. The staff is a core is four and add people loaned to it, there are about 11 or 12 in all. Nelep replaced One North-East, a regional development agency that had 400 staff.
From the Guardian
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