The North-South myth

ON Tuesday, Chancellor Gordon Brown will deliver a pre-Budget report overshadowed by rumours of bitter rows between himself and the rest of the Government, especially Tony Blair.

But one key plank in his programme commands universal support among his colleagues. Not the euro. Not public spending. But the regions.

Brown's first big speech of the year covered regional policy and he has returned to the theme again and again. The need for 'balanced growth' - code for closing the 'North-South divide' - is expected to feature strongly on Tuesday.

Last week, independent researcher Rob Huggins published a UK Competitiveness Index showing the divide widening and calling for more public money and better co-ordination of Government efforts. Say no more - this is precisely the sort of thing Brown believes in, helping poor regions to help themselves.

And come Tuesday, he will be preaching to the converted on his own benches. Bolstering 'the regions' - what we used to call the provinces before that was considered too provincial - unites cynics with idealists.

The cynics hope that regional assemblies in England will deaden resentment over the generous treatment of Scotland and Wales, while idealists believe regional governments will cause depressed economies to blossom.

It is both New Labour (economic devolution being thought tremendously 'European') and Old Labour (helping the impoverished North to seize the rightful fruits of its labour).

Robin Cook summed up the case in 1994: 'I strongly believe one of the reasons for the stunted, stagnated performance of the British economy is that Britain is the most centralised country in Europe...Labour will put the tools of economic developmentin the hands of the local community.'

On this reading, the North-South divide is easily explicable: the further a region is from London, the more stretched is the line of command and the more fruitless the results of the centrally decided economic policy.

But for some time it has been noticed that 'North-South' is misleading. A glance at our map, giving gross weekly earnings on a county by county basis, shows the soft southerners of Kent in the same income bracket as the bracingly 'northern' folk of Argyll and Bute.

Weekly wages in the wuthering heights of North Yorkshire tower above the pay available on the easy-living Isle of Wight. Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire is in the top-earning bracket - but so is Aberdeen in the far North.

An alternative reading suggests the gap is actually 'East-West', the former booming, the latter representing an industrial rustbelt stretching from Cornwall's clapped-out tin mines to Glasgow's shrunken shipyards.

But as our map shows, East-West is scarcely more useful than North-South, with Suffolk, Lincolnshire, East Yorkshire, Northumberland and Durham letting down the theory.

Should we throw away the compass and look to the transport system for answers? Both the M4 and M11 have been spotlighted as development 'corridors', as has the trans-Pennine M62. But so extensive is our crowded trunk road network that one can join the dots any which way and create one's own 'sunrise belt'.

What about high-speed rail? Some years back, the East Coast main line was portrayed as a string of pearls - Cambridge, York, Edinburgh and points en route - while the creaking West Coast line was fingered as linking rustbelt Britain - the West Midlands, Merseyside, Manchester and Clydeside.

Spoiling this neat picture, however, are such inconveniences as Teesside and the Borders on the east and Cheshire on the west, not to mention much-maligned Glasgow, whose citizens out-earn those in several English shires.

Perhaps we should conclude that there is merely a mosaic of economic hot spots and not-so-hot spots. All Brown and his colleagues can do is try to warm up some of the cooler areas.

Indeed, this is very much the strategy. Brown has ruled out huge regional aid job creation programmes. The new emphasis is on a helping hand, a la Cook, for those local initiatives.

But, interestingly, there are one or two patterns on the development map. One is that, contrary to New Labour thinking, the hottest spots tend to be those that wear their local or regional identity lightly.

Booming Berkshire's l ocal government machine has been sliced into six authorities, while Surrey has been so mangled that its county town (Kingston) is in a different county altogether.

Lesson one, then, is to do absolutely nothing to encourage 'local identity'. Quite the reverse. And lesson two? Well, if the ' highspeed corridors' prove nothing, there is, intriguingly, a low-speed rail route that snakes its way through many of the country's hot spots while, with one exception, avoiding all the coldest ones.

It runs from Brighton through swinging west London, to Reading, Oxford, Birmingham, on through Cheshire, Manchester and Carlisle to Edinburgh.

Only once (in Dumfries and Galloway) does it traverse an area in the lowest earnings band. Services run only once a day in each direction, and the journey is one of the longest on the network. Slow trains and low-key local patriotism. It may not sound very inspiring, but perhaps it works.