{"id":76300,"date":"2026-07-04T06:51:07","date_gmt":"2026-07-04T06:51:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/76300\/"},"modified":"2026-07-04T06:51:07","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T06:51:07","slug":"thatcherism-killed-the-north-now-londons-reckoning-is-coming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/76300\/","title":{"rendered":"Thatcherism killed the North. Now London’s reckoning is coming"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is\u00a0Dispatches\u00a0with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from\u00a0The i Paper. If you\u2019d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week,\u00a0you can sign up here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A good way to assess the happiness or misery of people living in the different regions of England is to examine what social scientists call \u201cDeaths of Despair\u201d. This is the collective term for those who die because of suicide, drugs or alcohol, which is something that is more than twice as likely to happen in the North East of England than in London.<\/p>\n

Anguish and self-destruction may be caused by social deprivation, unemployment, poor job expectations, debt and other factors, but the excess deaths are concentrated in the North, according to a study<\/a> of Deaths of Despair in England over two years. The 10 cities with the greatest mortality are all in the North with Blackpool, Middlesborough and Hartlepool suffering the heaviest loss of life.<\/p>\n

Other statistics tell the same grim story with the 15.5 million Britons in the North East, North West, and the Yorkshire and the Humber regions having a life expectancy nearly two years lower than the country as a whole. When it comes to regional economic inequalities, the UK is the fourth highest out of 38 OECD countries.<\/p>\n

This forbidding North-South divide<\/a> in Britain did not happen solely by an unfortunate quirk of history, nor was it wholly inevitable. Other wealthy countries have deindustrialised, but in Britain the process was particularly brutal and took place without mitigation during the 1980s and 1990s. People in parts of ex-coal mining districts like Blyth in Northumberland or in Eccles in Greater Manchester still sound shell-shocked by an experience that tore their lives apart, like being on the losing side in a hard-fought war.<\/p>\n

Whatever the degree of intent, the British state presided over a man-made disaster that still has a profound, negative and long-lasting impact on people\u2019s lives almost half a century after the event. Sir Paul Collier, the development economist and author of Left Behind, says that the story \u201cbegins in 1979 when the Treasury removed all exchange controls, triggering a sharp appreciation in the currency\u2026Manufacturing exports concentrated in the regional cities were severely hit, while the international banking, concentrated in London, gained a bonanza\u201d. The North was progressively stripped of political power, as well as economic muscle, during the Thatcher years<\/a>, with metropolitan borough councils abolished in 1985.<\/p>\n

But the probable next prime minister, Andy Burnham<\/a>, promised in his speech earlier this week to reverse this haemorrhage of agency from Northern regions to London, creating a \u201cNo 10 North\u201d <\/a>which will \u201coversee the biggest rebalancing of power our country has ever seen\u201d. The new Downing Street will be based in Greater Manchester and will oversee regional authorities taking greater control of water, housing, energy and transport, as well as reindustrialisation and the regeneration of left-behind places.<\/p>\n

It is an extraordinarily ambitious set of priorities that, if fulfilled, pitches what is being labelled as \u201cManchesterism\u201d against Thatcherism. Taken literally, Burnham\u2019s programme would mean far more than the North and other regions getting a bigger share of the national budget, but would mean stripping significant power and financial control away from Treasury<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This has been tried and failed before, and will face furious resistance from the powers that be, though their record of achievement is not good. Anybody travelling around the UK<\/a> can see that it is grotesquely over-centralised with local authorities pauperised, over-stretched and mired in debt. It is clear that they should have greater tax-raising powers and greater authority in dealing with those affairs best handled locally or regionally.<\/p>\n

Yet, if Burnham tries to do anything as radical as he says he will, he will face stiff opposition. Sceptical commentators queried his manifesto, asking where he would get the money to pay for greater state intervention. The Treasury will inevitably fight like a famished tiger defending its authority over the nation\u2019s finances and letting market forces<\/a> lead the way for investment. Pessimists recall the fate of the Department for Levelling Up<\/a>, introduced by the Tories in 2019 to regenerate the regions.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Treasury viewed the new department as another instance of local and regional interference,\u201d says Collier. \u201cDespite being announced to the nation as the government\u2019s flagship programme, the budget awarded to it by the Treasury was, astonishingly, zero.\u201d The Treasury minutely scrutinised every request for money from local government, so at the end of its first year it had spent only 5 per cent of its modest funds.<\/p>\n

Will Burnham\u2019s new regional plan be similarly strangled at birth? It would be unfortunate if it does, because left behind unequal Britain has clearly had enough of being marginalised, ignored and left to rot. The Brexit referendum<\/a> was a symptom of this ill-directed rage. The highest Leave vote in England and Wales was the 82.5 per cent in Brambles and Thorntree in Middlesbrough, a ward which also had the fewest people in Britain with a university degrees or similar qualifications \u2013 only 4 per cent. Whatever the Tories and the Treasury thought they were doing since 1979 clearly has not worked in terms of popular satisfaction and prosperity.<\/p>\n

This is not to argue that Burnham possesses some magic formula labelled \u201cManchesterism\u201d which can work on a national level. Central Manchester and Salford are not a Potemkin village, but the forest of tower blocks that look like a mini-Manhattan are somewhat misleading<\/a> as to the state of the local economy. Partnership between property developers and local government has worked as a magnet drawing in investment, but great swathes of Greater Manchester, with a population of 2.8 million, people have not benefited.<\/p>\n

Yet the very fact that the next UK prime minister has pledged to locate part of his administration in Manchester is significant in itself. The by-elections that finally sank Sir Keir Starmer<\/a> \u2013 Gorton and Denton followed by Makerfield \u2013 were in Manchester. If voters in non-metropolitan England believed they might attract the attention of the British political establishment \u2013 political and media \u2013 by voting overwhelmingly for Reform in the local elections on 7 May<\/a>, their calculation has turned out to be entirely correct.<\/p>\n

Sceptics will say that Burnham may not be able to do many of the good things he would like to do because of fiscal rules and tight budgets. But this misses the point that the limited amount he did and could do \u2013 in a place where so little effective had been done by government \u2013 first of all made him a vastly popular mayor of Greater Manchester and has now made him prime minister in waiting of the UK.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven if No 10 North turns out to be a gimmick, it will be our gimmick!\u201d writes Joshi Herrmann jubilantly in the Manchester online newsletter The Mill<\/a>. \u201cAnd the prime minister will be sitting inside it on a very regular basis, every minute of which will suck power, money and authority into our city.\u201d<\/p>\n

British voters are discovering that prime ministers and policies can be made in places other than in Westminster and Whitehall. Real-world devolution of power is under way. <\/p>\n

Further thoughts <\/p>\n

Suppose a teacher wants to explain to students learning English as a foreign language the meaning of the saying that a person \u201cis not conformable in their own skin\u201d, they could do no better than show the students a film clip of Sir Keir Starmer sowing edgy discomfort in an interview, a speech, or a pub.<\/p>\n

I used to wondered at Starmer\u2019s capacity to sound robotic and inauthentic<\/a>. until deciding that he is displaying a genuine lack of empathy with other human beings, and has few authentic opinions of his own. Hence the sense remoteness and phoniness which he exudes. <\/p>\n

Critics over-focus on these failures of presentation, describing Starmer as \u201clacking political instincts\u201d, but I believe it would be truer to say that he does have such instincts but they are self-centred ones. He presents himself as a dull but honest man, even a bit of a plodder, yet during his career he has repeatedly reversed his views<\/a> and disposed of or abandoned close colleagues.<\/p>\n

After entering parliament in 2015, he joined Jeremy Corbyn\u2019s shadow cabinet but later kicked Corbyn out of the Labour Party. He stood for the Labour leadership in 2020 on a left-wing platform, which he promptly abandoned and purged the left. He stood in the 2024 general election as the agent of change, but in government stuck firmly to the status quo<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In his two years in Downing Street, he fired his chief of staff, Sue Gray, and a myriad of senior aides and officials, culminating in the sacking of the head of the Foreign Office, Sir Olly Robbins, unconvincingly held responsible for the fatal appointment of Peter Mandelson<\/a> as ambassador to Washington. Blaming others for his own blunders has been a frequent but unsavoury feature of Starmer\u2019s behaviour, such as implying that his speech describing Britain as \u201can island strangers\u201d<\/a> using the rhetoric of Enoch Powell was the fault of a speech writer since Starmer had not read it before delivering it.<\/p>\n

Worst of all, he appeared to endorse Israel starving Gaza of food and water, though once again he sought to wriggle away from his own words. He distanced himself only grudgingly from Israel\u2019s bombardment of Gaza which left 70,000 Palestinians dead, including 20,000 children. In the UK, this former human rights lawyer proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, resulting in vicars and retired nurses being arrested for supporting them.<\/p>\n

Politicians and pundits alike were taken aback by the visceral loathing for Starmer expressed by voters in this year\u2019s local elections and the Makerfield by election on 18 June. Yet when Starmer\u2019s political career<\/a> is looked at in the round, it is surprising the electorate wanted to see him him gone<\/a>?<\/p>\n

Cockburn\u2019s picks <\/p>\n

The media is suddenly awash with profiles of Andy Burnham as the prospective prime minister and descriptions of \u201cManchesterism\u201d, but the best account I have read on both is by Joshi Herrmann in the The Mill<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is\u00a0Dispatches\u00a0with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from\u00a0The i Paper. If you\u2019d like to get this direct to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76301,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[26],"tags":[7786,5043,27,1074,19889,20201,4579],"class_list":["post-76300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-london","tag-andy-burnham","tag-devolution","tag-london","tag-manchester","tag-north-of-england","tag-north-south-divide","tag-subscriber-newsletter"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116860386279939797","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76300\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}