For obvious political reasons, David Cameron had to run a mile from Policy Exchange’s report on northern cities. But as John Rentoul argues in an excellent column in The Independent on Sunday, the report was actually right about certain things:
the striking thing about the Policy Exchange report is that its analysis is broadly correct. It specifically said that Liverpool, Rochdale, Bradford and Sunderland were not “doomed”. (This was reported by The Independent under the headline “Cities in North doomed, says favourite Tory think tank”.) The report went on, however: “We cannot guarantee to regenerate every town and every city in Britain that has fallen behind. Just as we can’t buck the market, so we can’t buck economic geography either.”
It is curious that such a statement of orthodox economics should provoke such a reaction, and not just from politicians such as John Prescott – who, in his memoirs, protests his ideological openness while boasting that he never allowed the words “New Labour” to cross his lips – but from the leader of Margaret Thatcher’s party, too.
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