Everyone’s in favour of regional economic rebalancing for the UK – until someone suggests actually doing something about it

We’re all familiar with nimbys: people who are in favour of new housing developments so long as it’s “not in my back yard”. But now they have some competition in the disingenuousness stakes from the “YBNTs”.

Almost everyone claims to support regional economic rebalancing in the grossly over-centralised UK. And it’s pretty plain that this is unlikely to be achieved without moving some operations out of the over-stuffed capital city of London, with the onus on central government to take a lead.

But propose transferring specific resources and one immediately starts hearing: “Yes, but not that.” What the YBNTs seem to envisage is a form of immaculate rebalancing, which involves no disruption whatsoever to the capital and its workers. They were out in force this week after Labour suggested moving “some functions” of the Bank of England out of London to Birmingham.

The first thing to note is that Labour’s “some functions” proposals were misleadingly written up by the (London-based) media as Jeremy Corbyn wanting to move the entire Bank, wholesale, to Birmingham.

We had the same kind of hysterical media reaction when the BBC moved its sports and children’s TV operations to Greater Manchester in 2004. There were similar wails when the Government said this year it wants to shift “part” of Channel 4 out of London. And don’t even mention the idea of migrating Parliament up north while the asbestos-ridden Palace of Westminster is extensively repaired. In the end MPs refused even to move across the road, never mind decamping to the Bull Ring.

It’s amusing to see how business journalists and political commentators, who can usually be relied upon to preach the abstract economic ideal of mobile workforces and invigorating commercial churn, suddenly turn into Mick Cash on a bad day when the possibility emerges they might have to move themselves.

It’s true that regional relocations can fail. The transplant of most of the Office for National Statistics out of London to Newport a decade ago has not been a success and the agency plainly lost some valuable expertise in the transition.

Yet, as a relocation prospect for staff, the third largest city in Wales is very different from Manchester and Birmingham, the second and third most important urban hubs in the country.

As regards the Bank, one of the objections to Labour’s suggestion is that the regulator-cum-policymaker’s current berth in the heart of the City of London represents an intangible benefit that must not be jeopardised. But have they ever considered that this proximity might actually be a source of weakness, opening up the Bank to excessive lobbying and regulatory capture by the hundreds of firms surrounding its Threadneedle Street fortress?

Conversely, following the complainants’ proximity logic, why is the Bank’s physical distance from manufacturers in the North-west, Midlands and North-east, not a disadvantage for its policymakers? As the Bank of England itself frequently tells us, its job is to set interest rates for the whole country, not for one sectional or regional interest.

And the history of the Bank and the Government in this regard is hardly unblemished. The strong pound in the 1980s onward reflected the boom of the City of London in the Thatcher era of deregulation. But the overvalued currency was harrowing for UK manufacturing. 

And in the post-1997 era of operational independence, even the former Governor, Mervyn King, has openly wondered whether the Bank might have got it wrong in tolerating a super-charged currency, and all its associated distortions, in the years leading up to the financial crisis.

This is not a clinching argument for relocation. It’s facile to claim that if the Bank’s HQ had been historically based in Birmingham we would have avoided the financial crisis. But it supports the case for keeping an open mind.

Each relocation proposal should be scrutinised carefully and judged on its merits. The tone matters. And the tone reveals. The suggestion of a shift of some resources to one of our major regional economic hubs should really not be provoking the pearl-clutching reaction we have seen in recent days. And the fact that it does merely underscores our inordinate national over-centralisation problem.

This article was first published by The Independent on 12/12/17

The IRA couldn't destroy the Mancunian spirit - and neither will the latest attack

Terrorism has carved out the modern city of Manchester. Twenty-one years ago, an IRA truck packed with 1,500kg of fertiliser turned a sizeable area of the city centre into a smoking wreck. It was 15 June 1996, my first day at work as a shop assistant in the grand old Kendals department store, just down the road from the bomb. We were gathered in a scruffy upstairs meeting room for a routine briefing by the head of security when it went off. 

We could hear the blast before it impacted, barrelling down Deansgate like an invisible tsunami. When we emerged (thankfully unscathed) onto the street for evacuation, the first thing we saw was that the shop's ground-floor display windows had all been shattered and the fashion mannequins were lying half in and half out.

Monday night's atrocity in the Manchester Arena is simultaneously less destructive and more so. Unlike in the IRA's outrage, which caused upwards of £700m of damage, the direct destruction of physical property this time seems likely to be minimal. But the human cost this time is on a different scale of grief. 

There were some 220 injuries from the 1996 blast, some of them serious, but no fatalities, mainly because the IRA gave an hour's warning. Suicide bombers, however, don't give warnings. At the time of writing, 22 people are already dead and 59 injured. And the horror of the target this time - young people attending a pop concert - makes this feel like it belongs in a different category: a separate species of depravity.

Manchester's modern economic renaissance arguably began with the 1996 bombing. The city responded to the devastation with an imaginative programme of urban regeneration. It has delivered new transport infrastructure, buildings, renovations, clean-ups and the fashioning of some wonderful public places. An extensive overhaul of the previously unlovely Victoria station, adjoined to the very Manchester Arena complex where Monday's mass murder took place, was completed only two years ago.

Public investment has helped to uncork the animal spirits of the private sector. Thousands of new firms have come. International firms, from Adidas to Kellogg's to Gazprom, have located their UK headquarters in the city. Chinese investment is flowing in. The BBC has a major presence in neighbouring Salford, with possibly more media companies to follow. My old employer Kendals must now contest the luxury retail market with southern titans such a Selfridges and Harvey Nichols.

Manchester shows that "post-industrial" can be a springboard, rather than a curse. Its industrial heritage is still all around in the shape of magnificent classical warehouses, built by Victorian cotton barons. But Manchester isn't stuck in the past. It's a services-based economy now: outward-looking and confident. The warehouses have been converted into flats. In the decade to 2011, the city centre's population grew by almost a fifth, the biggest expansion of any UK city outside London. Manchester has cemented its position as the second most economically vibrant city in the UK. Northern Powerhouse indeed.

How will community relations in multicultural Manchester be affected by this atrocity now that Isis has claimed responsibility for the attack? How will Manchester's services economy cope? What will befall its thronging retail and entertainment sectors? What will happen to investment? One suspects the city will manage in the same impressively resilient way that London has coped since the 7/7 suicide bombings on the capital's transport system in 2005.

There's no going back on the Mancunian diversity front. Manchester's two huge universities mean that the city is stuffed with proud citizens of the world of all ethnicities and religions who come to study. And the students often stay after graduation. Manchester has long been a tolerant place - and that is most unlikely to change. Businesses will push on too. This economic snowball has too much momentum to be stopped by a maniac with a rucksack full of explosives and a head full of medieval bigotry.

Manchester's capacity, its symbolism, its openness, its sheer importance, all made my home city a target for the merchants of hatred and violence back in 1996 and, it seems, in 2017. That openness, of course, is the city's vulnerability. But, as with all great cities, its vulnerability is also the source of its strength. And that strength will, once again, show itself.