English North devastated

Press, 12 January 1987, Page 16

English North devastated

From

ROBIN CHARTERIS,

our correspondent in London

The rich and poor, north and south, divisions in New Zealand revealed by the recent Ministry of Works and Development report have an even greater parallel in Britain. > Census figures on job losses to be published by the British Government this week point to a widening of the claimed “two nations” theory — the north increasingly unemployed and poor, the south benefiting from new service jobs and more money. The latest figures, leaked by the Labour Party, add to the apparent grim authenticity of the north-south divide in Britain. They show that 94 per cent of the 1.6 million jobs that have disappeared since 1979 when Mrs Margaret Thatcher came to power have been in the north (Scotland, northern England, the Midlands, Wales, and Northern Ireland), which has 58 per cent of the country’s population. The southern triangle, with 42 per cent of the population, has suffered just six per cent of job losses. The south-east has lost 1 per cent employment, the southwest 2 per cent, while East Anglia has gained 3 per cent. People in Britain are generally reluctant to follow jobs from one part of the country to the other, the result being a high population in the north with unemploy-

ment rates of up to 40 per cent and more in some areas and whole streets of out-of-work families. The north-south “two nations” situation created in Britain thus differs in detail from that in New Zealand, where population movement from south to north in search of jobs and opportunities has created a regional imbalance of people and resources, but no wildly fluctuating levels of unemployment. But in the one country, London and its environs grow richer at the expense of the rest of the nation; in the other Auckland and its surroundings, and Wellington, do the same. As in New Zealand, regional spokesmen in Britain blame their Government’s regional policies for the north-south trends. The British Labour Party’s regional affairs expert, Mr Gordon Brown, claims the new census shows the Government is pursuing a policy of separate development for north and south. “They are simply abandoning our traditional industrial heartland,” he says. Other political pundits point out the question goes back much further than recent Conservative Government policies. They cite decades of regional assistance policies under Labour and Conservative Governments as having made little difference. It is the

decline of heavy industry, the emergence of new technology, the inflexibility of the labour market, housing shortages, and the proximity of the south-east to European markets that has led to a rich south and a poor north. The loss of two million manufacturing jobs recorded in the census is actually 200,000 higher than the Government’s consistently underrated assessment. The difference, says Mr Brown, is practically equivalent to the nation’s entire coal and steel industries. As well as illustrating the widening gap between north and south, the figures reveal a 28 per cent drop in Britain’s manufacturing and construction jobs since .1979, compared with an increase in the same period of 4.9 per cent in Japan, and decreases of only 2 per cent in the United States, 1.4 per cent in Canada, 8.5 per cent in Germany, and 9.4 per cent in Italy. The census paints a bleak picture of Britain’s industrial decline. Manufacturing employment has fallen since 1979 from 7,067,000 to 5,126,000. With industry continuing to shed jobs at the rate of 14,000 a month, the number of people engaged in manufacturing by August this year is likely to drop below five million for the first time since 1933.