Paul Collier

Northern lights: Seven steps for levelling up Britain

It requires guts and an irreversible reorientation of public policy

If you ever need a reminder of what northern Britain has achieved, I’d recommend a trip to York. The National Railway Museum brilliantly evokes the local creative energy that produced Stephenson’s Rocket which ran on the world’s first inter-city passenger railway and ushered in the railway age. Just over the River Ouse is the chocolate museum, which celebrates York’s chocolate-makers and their entrepreneurial legacy.

It’s easy to be scornful about Boris Johnson’s talk of ‘levelling up’. Real levelling up would mean that for the foreseeable future, the North will grow faster than London, which seems almost unimaginable to Whitehall and in the City. But whatever the cocktail of culture and genes needed, northern Britain is evidently endowed with it, and, as I’ve argued in The Future of Capitalism, it simply must be done. Healing the economic and cultural divergence between London and the rest of the country is existentially important for British society, but it requires guts and an irreversible reorientation of public policy: power has to shift from Whitehall to the provinces.

There are three revealing examples of levelling up: two successes and one failure. Edinburgh and the cities of west Germany are the successes, all now energised and prosperous. The failure is east Germany. Despite huge sums spent since 1990, it’s still far behind. Why has it failed? Why did the others succeed? Well, there is no ‘magic bullet’ for Whitehall to fire, but these examples show that perhaps there is a ‘magic cartridge’: seven bullets, that, if fired all together, could produce the result that this government absolutely must deliver, if it wishes to survive.

The first bullet is local political autonomy. Whitehall cannot plan the economy of a city: it has to devolve the power of decision to local government, which being closer to the businesses and communities, is better able to learn through experiment.

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