Once a week, about half of the Cabinet make the rather pointless journey into an underground bunker in Whitehall to learn just how quickly the British economy is disintegrating. This is all to humour Gordon Brown, who calls them his ‘National Economic Council’ and has them meet in the nuclear-proof room as if they were at war with the recession. After six months of such meetings, it is depressingly clear to all concerned that the recession is winning, and in ways that they never really thought possible.
Given that almost everyone in Westminster is trying desperately to read the politics of the recession, those summoned to the Brown bunker have at least one clear advantage. They are learning about its character: how, for example, the City of London’s pain is being shared in unlikely satellite towns such as Bournemouth, which had grown a mini-financial services industry. They know there is no sign of Mr Brown’s stimulus making a blind bit of difference anywhere. Among developed countries, only Iceland’s economy is contracting faster than Britain’s.
Just as economic growth was not shared evenly — being disproportionately generated in the south — so too the recession is uneven in its impact. This was shown in a stark briefing prepared for MPs last month by the House of Commons library, reproduced here. While unemployment is certainly rising in such places as Liverpool and Glasgow, it makes relatively little difference to the overall picture. But in the south of England, things are changing at a dizzying pace.
A list of the areas that have experienced the sharpest rises in unemployment include Buckingham, Christchurch, Wantage and Wiltshire: of the top 75 constituencies where unemployment has doubled, 49 are Conservative-held seats. Of course, in such locations the figure tends to be rising from a small base.
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