Osborne's 'northern powerhouse' may be more than a vote-grabbing gimmick
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Version 0 of 1. It is almost 11 months since George Osborne coined the curious phrase “northern powerhouse”. He first uttered it in an address at Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry to describe his vision of a prosperous new north of England, which would be a “brother in arms” to the economically more successful south. Returning to Manchester on Thursday to tell other northern cities that if they wanted more devolutionary powers they had to swallow their pride and agree to the installation of elected mayors, as Greater Manchester had done, Osborne said it was “no coincidence” that he had chosen to give his first proper speech as the re-elected chancellor in the north of England. Finishing the job, he said, was “one of the main reasons I wanted to return to the Treasury”. When Osborne came up with the concept last summer, it didn’t make any front pages. I thought it was largely meaningless spraff and wrote a sniffy piece making fun of the idea. I felt confident the Labour-run northern metropolitan councils, very tribal jungles, would give Osborne short shrift too. I thought they would dismiss the plans as fairytale vote-grabbing fodder in the runup to an election, when the Conservatives desperately needed to make gains outside of their southern heartlands. But when I phoned Sir Richard Leese, the long-serving, no-nonsense leader of Manchester, he said not only did he rate Osborne’s speech but “we” – Greater Manchester – “basically wrote it”. It turned out he and the rest of the overlords of the former Cottonopolis had been up and down on the Virgin Pendolino for months drawing up plans for the biggest redistribution of powers from Whitehall to the regions in living memory. I later asked him if it didn’t stick in his gullet to have to suck up to the Tories when they were simultaneously cutting his budget so savagely. He suggested it was a damn sight easier than trying to persuade some of his own political colour to move power from the centre to his city. In September I met Jim O’Neill, the former Goldman Sachs bigwig most famous for coming up with the term “Brics” to describe the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Then at the helm of the City Growth Commission, this respected economist, a Mancunian, was clearly giving the devolutionary agenda serious thought, ruffling feathers by suggesting the 4 million-strong populations of Greater Manchester and Merseyside get over their differences and become the mightier “Manpool”. He didn’t see the northern powerhouse as a vote-grabbing gimmick – though the fact he was given a seat in the House of Lords on Thursday, when Osborne appointed him commercial secretary to the Treasury, suggests that while he’s a Manchester United supporter, he’s blue at the ballot box. As summer turned into autumn and autumn into winter, Osborne kept coming back up north to put meat on the bones of his powerhouse skeleton. By the start of November, Leese and his counterparts at the other nine councils of Greater Manchester had dropped their opposition to having an elected mayor and were duly rewarded with a devolution deal, giving them control over their transport budget, a £300m housing investment fund, £500m of skills spending and other goodies. By the end of February, the same gang had wrung an even bigger prize out of the Treasury: control of Greater Manchester’s entire £6bn health and social care budget, allowing them to work towards the long-held goal of integrating the two vital services. Other city regions looked on jealously. Digging their heels in over the issue of elected mayors, South and West Yorkshire carved out wishy-washy deals with the Treasury which were deathly pale in comparison with that being celebrated and ever-embellished on the other side of the Pennines. With five years of majority Tory rule stretching out in front of them, it can’t be long before Yorkshire’s leaders cave in too. As the Guardian’s northern editor, people keep asking why I think Osborne is bothering with all of this. It’s not exactly winning him votes. Any gains the Tories made in the north last week – notably in Morley and Outwood when Andrea Jenkyns booted out Ed Balls – were cancelled out by their losses. In one of the more surreal moments during the election campaign, I ended up with Osborne in an ice-cream parlour in Cleveleys. I asked him whether the northern powerhouse was part of his long-term electoral plan to win parliamentary seats in the north of England. He insisted not: “I’m a north-western MP. I grew up in London and I’ve seen myself that the country became too imbalanced and that we were reliant too much on the success of London, as important as that is, and on financial services.” But he must know that if people have more money in their pockets they are statistically more likely to vote Conservative, and so a wealthier north means a stronger Tory party. After almost a year of typing the words northern powerhouse, it was during hustings in Knutsford two weeks ago that I suddenly realised why Osborne was doing it. He wants it to be his legacy. Asked whether he planned to protect the greenbelt from what the questioner called “the relentless push for economic growth”, he cited Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, which follows the campaign against building a railway from Manchester to Gaskell’s home town of Knutsford, immortalised in the novel as Cranford. “That was, of course, in Victorian times but there was also a massive campaign against the M6 being built back several decades ago,” Osborne told a crowd of 200 at Tatton Academy. “Development is always controversial and there are always reasons people give for stopping it. But I don’t want to be part of a generation of Britons who gave up, who said ‘we’re not going to build anything any more’, who accepts it was in the past, when we built our roads, our railways that powered our economy forward and gave people a decent living.’ I don’t want to say to our children ‘that used to be us’.” |