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Why Northern England is poor
And why Thatcher is partly to blame, but not in the way most people argue.
It is a heavily simplified and selective story, but I think it tells the key parts of how North England fell from being the birthplace of the industrial revolution and among the richest places in the world two centuries ago to being an economy substantially lagging everywhere else in Northern Europe today. The lack of universities in North England meant that the industrial revolution was heavily powered by Scottish science and largely occurred at a distance, both geographically and culturally, from London and Westminster. They celebrate new scientific institutions in London such as ARIA that repeat — against strong evidence that it will not deliver greater returns in doing so — the centralisation in the South East of England of our national research capacity.
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