There is a subtle ideological shift going on in the Tory party. At the top of the party, there is an increasing appetite for a modern form of industrial strategy. As George Osborne argues in an interview in the current Spectator, ‘The Conservative party is at its strongest when it’s not the party that says there is no role for government and the state should just get out of the way… That is not a strand of Conservative thinking that, by itself, is enough. You need to have a bit of the Michael Heseltine: “I’m going to take the Docklands and build a financial centre here and build an airport here.” Or, “I’m going to take the Albert Docks in Liverpool and put the Tate Gallery here.” That’s an important part of the Conservative argument.’
You can see this in Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse project which is designed to create a northern hub to act as a second engine for the UK economy. The whole project is dependent on improving the transport links between these cities via the so-called HS3 rail project and a set of improved roads.
Osborne’s plan is based on the view, taken from the work of the economist Jim O’Neill, that large cities are increasingly the drivers of economic growth and so it is essential to create a northern hub which has a London-sized population. But it is also a potential answer to the Tories’ northern problem; the fact that they hold very few seats in the urban north. As Osborne puts it, ‘you have to have an offer to all parts of the country, if you want to be a party of all parts of the country’.
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