Yet another dozen.
, .
A new week and a new "British" think-tank/policy/lobbying group emerges to explore the causes of Britain's economic stagnation and propose fixes.
British in quotes, because, as so often, and unless both me and three AI assistants are missing something big, 2030 Prosperity Alliance is almost completely a South East English affair. Some contributors working as far North as Oxford make up the numbers and a few may maintain homes in rural Wales, Scotland, and Cumbria after careers in London, often in between votes at the House of Lords. It is hard to be completely sure where people live and work, but the pattern is overwhelming, even within that uncertainty.
We know from our surveying work at Open Innovations that opinions on British prosperity vary enormously depending on where people live and work. Such an unbalanced group is unlikely to gain more than a very partial view of Britain's challenges and opportunities.
All this within the context, so unintentionally well-covered on Radio 4's flagship Today program last Thursday, of the UK's regional economic inequality, now the highest in Europe. That inequality, as explained by Danny Dorling in Oxford, in conversation with Amol Rajan in London, is substantially driven by the underperformance of Britain's large cities, especially in the Midlands and the North of England: places we conspicuously heard no voices from. The program spoke to John McTernan in London and Jeremy Hunt in London interspersed with a clip of Rachel Reeves speaking in London. The level of discussion was consistently poor. The clever-sounding but trivially true "of course inequality within places is higher than between places" trope was rolled out to divert the discussion back to London when it risked veering further than 60 miles from the BBC's headquarters. Poverty, an important but importantly different topic, was covered from Colchester, a city within that same radius.
Back on regional economic inequality, Jeremy Hunt, a former Chancellor, was talking down devolution. He rolled out a statistic that since devolution Scotland's GDP has grown slower than England's. With such limited knowledge on the panel, and certainly no-one in Scotland at hand, it went unchallenged. Both Scotland's GDP/capita and its labour productivity, the measures almost everyone agrees matter much more than a GDP boosted by huge immigration under Boris Johnson, have grown quicker than England's since devolution. The outperformance is even larger when using the kind of synthetic control approaches our media delights in when reporting about Brexit but seems uninterested in within our own country.
No doubt the 2030 Prosperity Alliance will repeat the same lines that have failed Britain for decades. We must build more in the South East, back our strengths such as the City of London and Universities in the Golden Triangle, expand Heathrow, involve experts, think long-term, and achieve cross-party consensus. No surprises there.
What surprised me more was the reaction on social media. Seemingly well-primed and overwhelmingly positive, people flocked to celebrate yet another group that looks almost exactly the same as those that have led us into stagnation for three decades. I have no hope that this new outfit will avoid being as badly wrong on a new set of topics as similar groups have long been on things like the importance of formal skills to economic growth in our economy.
If the positive reactions were genuine, I despair. My hope is that they came from people well-trained in the British art of public positivity mixed with private disagreement. I am often told to be more like that. To get the early train to London, to sit on the panel, to feed into the consultation, to be a good Briton, pro-actively working together with fellow stakeholders to find and back a new inclusive national purpose. And if I do not, I am branded a monomaniac on the issue of -- astonishingly -- trying to make more of Britain a more prosperous place. I am fed up of that.
I intend to be more Dutch. Collaboration and compromise work better if they start with blunt honesty. Earlier today I declined an invitation to set my alarm clock for before 6am, lose a day of work, spend £240 on a train to London and back to speak with the Department for Transport lead on building a tram in Leeds and Bradford. Such a meeting should be in Leeds or Bradford and I refuse to pretend otherwise just to avoid being labelled as unhelpful and divisive. My hope is that those with any influence over think-tank/policy/lobbying groups like the 2030 Prosperity Alliance will be similarly bold. Please tell them, and tell other similar groups, that they are contributing to the very problem that they claim to be trying to solve, even if it costs you a seat at the table, some of your income, and some of your reputation. Britain cannot go on like this.