I'm trying to limit snark in my responses to this article, but wow. It turns out if you invest in something continually at the expense of everywhere else it becomes the lynchpin of the system. Good grief.
The major reason people in the north hate hearing about investment in the south is because politically it is very clearly a zero sum game. If the south gets investment, the north doesn't.
For additional perspective, look at the Crossrail projects: hugely expensive with benefits only felt in one part of the country. (No, Londoners paying tax doesn't count)
For the cost of crossrail, or HS2, every city in the UK outside of London could have comprehensive tram networks and massive active travel infrastructure. What stings the most is that if London didn't exist, became independent, or fell into the sea, everyone else would likely benefit very rapidly.
Almost all regions/cities make below-average contributions to the UK economy. That's because London drags the total way up (IIRC Bristol is the only other that's above-average, but barely).
That's obviously driven by a feedback-cycle that encourages investing in London rather than elsewhere. That does not imply that the rest of the UK would "benefit" from losing London; it would be an economic disaster.
The problem is that governments are focused on raising the UK's GDP, but that's the sum of each region's GDP and London's contribution is so large that it's equivalent to just maximising London (to optimise a weighted sum, put all the weight on the largest term). Perhaps a solution is to use metrics that combine regions geometrically (multiplying each region's GDP): that encourages investment in poor areas, since they drag down the result (rather than simply contributing less; and in the extreme case, a contribution of zero would wipe-out everything else).
We could do the same analysis on other partition too, e.g. multiplying each sector's contribution would make things less dependent on finiancial services.
Indeed. But that’s politics, not a law of nature. The zero-sum game is completely artificial: the money tree does not exist until you need it and then it does. A sensible revitalisation policy for the North would pay for itself over the long term.
The incentives are really not great from a political point of view and that is very unfortunate. Still, hurting London economically won’t help the rest of the UK in any way.
This entirely true and very unfortunate. It is great to see Manchester making improvements on that front, for example, and I hope many cities will follow as the current model is absurd. Franchising like in London is not ideal but a marked improvement.
That said, there aren’t many places in the UK where a single train line can affect hundreds of thousands or a million people each week. Up to a point, improving transport around London is the best bang for your quid.
> Try living up North where hourly trains regularly get cancelled.
Yeah, but that’s a reason to improve the situation in the North, not to rejoice when something breaks down in the South. There are massive political issues to overcome for that, but the UK would be a better country overall if the North was taken seriously.