OPINION: I’ve heard that travel broadens the mind but I often think it actually narrows it. What I mean is that sometimes going “abroad” makes you grateful about some of what you have at home. I was reminded of this from my recent globetrotting.
I have been in Barcelona, Berlin and Paris in the last few weeks as well as in London and some provincial British cities. So, I feel well placed to comment on some –obviously deeply researched yet unpretentiously reported – comparisons between them all but also with Sydney, where I live, when I am not galivanting around the place.
The first is simple but embarrassing. Having not done much travelling on the European mainland since I went to Australia in 2010, I noticed the wealth gap between continental and Australian cities on the one hand and British cities on the other.
You see the gap in private consumption terms but also, particularly with the European cities, in the quality of the public domain and transport infrastructure. All three of the ones I visited seem to have gone forward since I left – no connection – but London and the UK cities I saw seem to have stalled. In Paris, office occupancy is higher than in London and so the cafes and restaurants, while damaged by Covid, were not wrecked by it.
Mass transit use looks higher to me too and all three have recently invested in it.
While I love London, it looked tired to me and was very expensive to get around by public transport. As to the two towns in my homeland of Wales I visited, boy did they look run down and rather poor. Bearing in mind I also spent a few days in a former industrial town in Germany I can reliably inform you nothing in a town like that today stands comparison with the poverty and degraded environment I found in its equivalent in my ancestral homeland
I’m not making a political point here though to be fair I do think things have slipped back since the Tony Blair days when we also had more comprehensive regeneration strategies in play for our former industrial places. These were not perfect but they were better than what we have seen since. “Levelling up” was not even a great slogan let alone a thought through and well funded program of targeted, strategic interventions and investments.
The Financial Times economist Tim Harford recently put some numbers into this discussion which illuminated and reinforced what my instinct was telling me. He wrote recently of the British economy now being in a “generation-long slough of despond, a slow-burning economic catastrophe”.
It appears that real household disposable income per capita has not actually grown for the past 15 years, since the Crash (global financial crisis), from which other countries emerged to recommence some sort of growth trajectory and the UK didn’t.
The UK had a government of all the talents, you may recall, which opted for austerity or the “kicking the poor beggar while he is down and out” strategy which so appeals to the geniuses in the UK Treasury from time to time.
Harford got my full attention, as he should yours, when he pointed out that since 1948, this measure of spending power had been doubling in the UK every 30 years.
He says it was twice as high in 1978 as in 1948 and almost doubled again by the time of the Crash. However, as of now, I understand, it’s gone back to those pre-Crash levels, indicating there has been no real growth in the UK since that point.
He describes this as “extraordinary” and so it is. By his arithmetic, this means that had the usual trend seen before the crisis (but not since) happened “the typical Brit would by now be 40 per cent richer”.
In reality, no advance in wealth was made. Nada. Harford cites the Institute for Fiscal Studies as referring this calamity now as a “second lost decade”. I’d say, and add: if you want to know what austerity and a lack of any urban renewal strategy or cities policy achieves for you, go to a South Wales town and compare it with even a former industrial community in the old East Germany.
While both will still be tough places, the East German town will have made progress. At best our versions of such places have stalled or gone backwards. The gap certainly has grown between outcomes in British regional cities and their continental counterparts. I add: Australians have also gone forward in wealth terms since 2010 but then many countries seem to have done better than the UK.
In so far as the UK has an economic policy it also seems to echo the recent past in essentially seeking to promote financial services in London on the notion that this will lead to some trickle down for the rest of the country.
Marlene Dietrich may have been thinking of prime minister Rishi Sunak when she sang “why do they never learn?”. It just lifts the southeast and further widens the gap between London and the regions in terms of growth and wealth.
Levelling up has not only been verbally abandoned: it cannot survive the actively pro financial services economic focus as this means in effect promoting the south-east of England over the North. We’ve been there before. It never ends well.
Oh and if anyone wonders what the Welsh devolved government has been doing while Welsh people if they were lucky, have stayed as poor today as they were in 2013 and if they weren’t, have got poorer since then, the answer is stark: not a lot.
But then over 50 per cent of the entire Welsh budget is now absorbed by the ravenous mouth of an unreformed National Health Service leaving little spare cash for something like a serious economic and regeneration strategy for the valleys.
They are in some difficulty as the year gets going – and things will get worse before they get better.
And all the above ignores the strikes in the National Health System, the schools and on the railways which on a very bad day seemed to return the UK to the not glorious 70s.
So, I return to Sydney as critical as ever of what problems we do have here – the housing crisis causing inequality and the absence of sufficient public and social housing come to mind – but we do, if we wish, have access to the resources to do something about our problems.
We can change for the better. I’m not convinced now that one can say the same about the once flourishing former industrial regions of the UK now on their knees or the enfeebled British state in which they find themselves. It is close to being a failing state: whatever NSW is, it’s not that.
