Developing England's North

The Political Economy of the Northern Powerhouse

Craig Berry, Arianna Giovannini, Craig Berry, Arianna Giovannini

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783319625607
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Trade & Tariffs
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores the politics of local economic development in Northern England. Socio-economic conditions in the North – and its future prospects – have become central to national debates in the UK. The status of Northern regions and their local economies is intimately associated with efforts to 'rebalance' the economy away from the South East, London and the finance sector in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The contributors to this volume focus in particular on the coalition and Conservative governments' 'Northern Powerhouse' agenda. They also analyse associated efforts to devolve power to local authorities across England, which promise to bring both greater prosperity and autonomy to the deindustrialized North. Several chapters critically interrogate these initiatives, and their ambitions, by placing them within their wider historical, geographical, institutional and ideological contexts. As such, Berry and Giovannini seek to locate Northern England within a broaderunderstanding of the political dimension of economic development, and outline a series of ideas for enhancing the North's prospects.

© The Author(s) 2018

Craig Berry and Arianna Giovannini (eds.)Developing England’s NorthBuilding a Sustainable Political Economy: SPERI Research & Policyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62560-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Powerhouse Politics and Economic Development in the North

Craig Berry¹ and Arianna Giovannini²

(1)

Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

(2)

Department of Politics and Public Policy, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

Craig Berry (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Arianna Giovannini

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

Why the North, why now and what is new? This chapter establishes the scholarly and real-world contexts within which the pursuit of economic development in the North should be studied. It discusses the Northern Powerhouse agenda, recent changes related to Brexit, the persistence of geographical inequalities between England’s regions, the historical context of devolution, the experience of deindustrialisation and the broader patterns of global capitalist restructuring within which Northern economic development is situated. The chapter also summarises the book’s contents and discusses how the North can be defined—and indeed what attempts to define the North tell us about the politics of economic development.

Keywords

BrexitCapitalist restructuringDevelopmentDevolutionNorth–South divideNorthern Powerhouse

Craig Berry

is Deputy Director of the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Sheffield. His previous roles include Policy Advisor at HM Treasury, Pensions Policy Officer at the Trades Union Congress, and Head of Policy and Senior Researcher at the International Longevity Centre-UK, and he has taught at the University of Warwick and University of Manchester. He published Globalisation and Ideology in Britain in 2011 and Austerity Politics and UK Economic Policy in 2015.

Arianna Giovannini

is Senior Lecturer in Local Politics at the Department of Politics and Public Policy, De Montfort University (DMU), where she is also a member of the Local Governance Research Unit (LGRU) and the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity (CURA). Before joining DMU she was a researcher at the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI), University of Sheffield, where she is now an Honorary Research Fellow, and a research assistant for the White Rose Consortium for the North of England project at POLIS, University of Leeds. Her research focuses on devolution, territorial and political identity, regionalism and democracy—with a particular emphasis on the ‘English Question’ and the North of England. She has published widely on these themes in leading academic journals such as Political Studies, Policy & Politics and The Political Quarterly.

End Abstract

The North of England has rarely featured in national debates in the UK as much as it has done since the 2008 financial crisis, and particularly the 2010–2016 period when George Osborne—a son of London but a parliamentary representative for Tatton in the Northern county of Cheshire—served as Chancellor of the Exchequer. In exploring the pursuit of economic development in the North, this volume seeks to account for both the genealogy of the North’s renewed (and possibly short-lived) significance to national politics, and how related political processes can be characterised. Essentially, this work is motivated by the need to understand how the Northern economy has become politicised, the implications of this, and the specific forms that politicisation has taken, after a long period of discursive neglect. In a nutshell: why the North, why now and what is new? By necessity, the political economy of the North must be studied in relation to the political economy of the UK as a whole, and indeed relationships between the UK economy, its constituent geographies and the rest of the world. The fact that the North is north of somewhere else is of course a key feature of its political economy. Yet this relationship with the South of England is merely one of an infinite number of ways in which the North is materialised as a political–economic space. The economy of the North of England is produced, and reproduced, by processes of formal and informal governance at a myriad of geographical scales, including overlapping (and often contradictory) internal structures and processes within the North. Encouraging greater cross-fertilisation among political economy and economic geography (and related disciplines) is therefore one of the main aims of this volume.

‘Brexit’—the UK’s decision, in the referendum of 23 June 2016, to withdraw from the European Union (EU)—looms large over the book’s content. Like the UK in general, most parts of the North are highly integrated with, and as such dependent upon, at least in the short term, the wider European economy. More generally, the EU’s political and economic structures and processes are in an integral dimension of the (evolving) political economy of the North. Interestingly, the areas of the UK (including large parts of the North) where jobs and production are most dependent on European economic integration (and indeed EU investment) are those that voted most strongly to leave; it is a myth that the big cities, principally London (but also the Northern ‘core cities’), have higher levels of economic interaction with the continent (Los et al. 2017; Hunt et al. 2016). This is a fact that should not be forgotten, uncomfortable as it is for some commentators: the population of the North chose Brexit, albeit against the advice of the region’s leaders—just as Northern elites are often complicit in the maintenance of national political–economic practices, even though (as many chapters of this book will argue) such practices help to keep the residents of the North poorer. Brexit will undoubtedly, over time, reorder the means by which economic life in the North is governed. Yet this is not a book about Brexit and the North. Above all, we do not know, at the time of writing, whether the UK will experience (or choose) a ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ Brexit; in practice, there will be degrees of stiffness across the different spheres through which Brexit will be operationalised, and we may yet see the form and extent of Brexit differentiated by geography within the UK. More generally, there are, quite apart from Brexit, innumerable local, national and international processes which, as they progress, threaten to reorder economic governance within the North. Historically, the North’s development and prosperity have been shaped far more by its status within the British political economy than by the UK’s relationship with the EU.

The book’s empirical focus is therefore the multitude of post-crisis policy agendas which have newly exposed the (global) political economy of the North, chiefly Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse framing, but also the broader devolution agenda. Exploring the Northern Powerhouse and devolution may (or may not) help us begin to understand the many implications of Brexit for the North, but is also an urgent task in its own right—not least because initiatives related to the Northern Powerhouse and devolution have been largely driven by Whitehall, and Brexit will in all likelihood increase the formal authority of Whitehall over Northern cities and regions (as well as perhaps also offering new opportunities, in the longer term, for more substantial forms of devolution). The fact that the Northern Powerhouse as a specific discursive ploy appears to have been marginalised within the Theresa May government is worth pondering—as it is by several of the book’s chapters—but should probably not be exaggerated. Moreover, we should not overstate the extent to which the Northern Powerhouse encompassed a distinctive and original set of tangible policy initiatives. Many of the policies that fell under this framework have links with very long-standing agendas, many of which are still being pursued, albeit with a little less fanfare. And crucially, there are as yet no reasons to conclude that the assumptions about the North (and its economic imperatives) which underpinned discourse and practice related to the Northern Powerhouse have been expunged from the architecture of central government—not least because the Northern Powerhouse agenda appears to have merely reflected these pre-existing assumptions.

What is the North?

We recognise that what we mean by ‘the North’ is not entirely obvious from the term itself. At the same time, notwithstanding some debate over ‘borderline’ areas, we would contend that most people in the UK have a general understanding of what is, and what is not, considered the North of England, and that this understanding is usually upheld in scholarship on the North. The book has not been compiled on the basis of an editorial line on how to define the North, although it is worth noting that all chapters implicitly share the view that the definition of the North that has at times been explicit in officialdom—being composed of the regions of the North West, North East and Yorkshire and Humberside—is largely accurate.

It is of course not possible to tell the story of the North without referring to places unambiguously outside of these three regions. This is in part, first, because other parts of the UK resemble North in terms of socio-economic outcomes. Danny Dorling (2010, 2011), one of the leading scholars of the so-called ‘North–South divide’, actually includes Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and a large chunk of the Midlands in his definition of the North, given similarities in outcomes such as household income and life expectancy. The Northern regions are disadvantaged, but not uniquely so within the UK. It is also because, second, the North is not a distinct economic space. Generally speaking, it obviously interacts with the domestic and international economies; moreover, we should not assume that the North’s constituent parts interact with each other economically more than they do with ‘exogenous’ areas. We cannot understand how the Northern economy (or economies) functions without also understanding these wider relationships and processes. Yet none of this means that the North cannot be distinguished analytically. The North may not be uniquely disadvantaged but there may be (relatively) distinct explanations for its disadvantage. Similarly, while it may be necessary to locate the North in its wider political–economic contexts, the way in which these contexts shape specifically Northern economic life is a legitimate object of inquiry.

We would also offer a note of caution about a predominantly spatial understanding of the North. The book’s central disciplinary perspective is that of political economy, and its analysis generally focuses therefore on how the exercise of power across multiple spheres shapes Northern economic life, or the way in which the North interacts with the rest. The relevant spheres may be local, national or international. The lack of any formal institutional framework through which the North as a whole is governed may make this exercise challenging empirically—but arguably underlines the urgency of understanding the wider political processes which shape the North (Hayton et al. 2016). A political economy perspective also encourages us to focus on the social construction of the North, and the framing of its spatial identity by elite forces. Any simple understanding of the North’s characteristics or boundaries is belied by an inherently complex social reality, but the delineation of the North is itself an act of power in need of interrogation (Paasi 2000; Jessop 2012, 2015). Indeed, it is not difficult to detect the power relations implicit in the notion that the North is different, unique or even ‘foreign’ from English or British norms—a notion that is reinforced even in narratives and policy initiatives that are designed ostensibly to ben...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Powerhouse Politics and Economic Development in the North
• Part I. Economic Policy and the Political Economy of Northern Development
• Part II. Place, City-Regional Governance and Local Politics
• Part III. Inequality and Austerity in the Northern Powerhouse Agenda
• Part IV. Conclusion
• Back Matter