As the FT notes this morning:
The income gap between Londoners and the rest of the UK population has hit a record high, according to the latest statistics that reveal the challenges facing the government in implementing its flagship “levelling up” agenda.
This resonates with an article in The Guardian, which notes:
More than four in five 16- to 18-year-olds say they need to move from their areas for better opportunities, including more than 90% of those surveyed in the north-east, Yorkshire and the east of England.
A survey of 2,000 people carried out by the Social Mobility Foundation found that on average more than 85% felt they needed to leave. In the east of England 95% felt that way and the figure was 91% in the north-east, 90% in Yorkshire and 88% in the north-west.
This quote from that Guardian article was personally recognisable for me:
Tom Brennan, 18, who lives in Ipswich, said: “To be honest, the biggest thing going for the town is its proximity to London. There's not many opportunities or events happening here.”
He wants to be a programmer after he finishes his studies. “There's not that many computer science roles available here. I'll probably move to London,” Brennan said. “I would miss my family but other than that there isn't much I would miss about Ipswich.”
I left Ipswich at 18 and never went back, even if I did return to East Anglia in the end.
This does, however, beg three questions.
The first is, why is London so rich? The answer is twofold. Partly it is because it extracts value from everywhere else - mainly via the financial services sector that leaches off all of society and sends the proceeds to London. Then there is the fact that it enjoys by far the highest level of state investment. These are issues that could be addressed, but are not.
Second, how is the disappointment of those who cannot move to be handled, because many will be unable to do so?
Third, income apart, what is it that people like Tom in Ipswich are looking for? Is it just nightclubs and the related hedonism that has always been most associated with bigger cities, or is there something more to it than that?
I left because of the intellectual dullness of Ipswich in the 70s. The theatre was limited. Concerts were not good. There was no university there then. It seemed like a backwater. I suspect people have their own, differing, reasons. They also change during life. As a parent I wanted very different things to those I hoped for until children arrived. My return to East Anglia and being a new parent was not a coincidence.
The question is, how do we reconcile these goals?
To put it another way, do we have an adequate theory of what a place should be to make it attractive as a broadly based community? Or are we destined to live in siloed locations serving particular interests, with London the epicentre of youth?
Answers on the back of a postcard (you have to be old enough to get that one) or in the comments section, please.
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Your opening paragraphs identifying London as a financial leech, parasitically thriving on everybody else efforts (with first call on public sector priority investment) is, um ‘on the money’. It can’t go on. Internationally, the new big battalions are not going to allow London to rake off easy profits for passing on everybody else’s money for ever: notably their money. London as a money centre increasingly looks like a medieval notary, overcharging for using a stamp.
We need local community-based financial services, the bank of TourTown serving You where You live. Bristol seem to have got a foothold here with first the Bristol Pound and now Bristol Pay (an alternative to VISA etc where profits go to locals and not some mysterious offshore entities). Happily too here come the forward-thinking Preston Council (and others) with their plans for community banking
https://cles.org.uk/what-is-community-wealth-building/the-principles-of-community-wealth-building/making-financial-power-work-for-local-places/mutuals-and-community-banks/
I come from Sunderland but moved away in the 1960s seeking better opportunities. It makes me laugh when I read of the alarm, mostly from those living in the south of England about the rise in illegal immigration, when the biggest influx of immigration to the south of England has come from elsewhere in the UK, at least since Margaret Thatchers economic revolution which saw the destruction of most of the traditional industries of the north.
I’m a big fan of the 15 minute city model. Recalling my childhood in the 70s, my home town was very much a working environment but it did have excellent shopping facilities, numerous local pubs and a smattering of other entertainments. Housing was plentiful and cheap (but of varying quality), employment was easy enough to find (be that the shipyards through to the local corporation services) while even there still existed plenty of public spaces in a heavily industrialised setting. Public services, such as healthcare had small facilities in the town while within easy reach of larger installations. Great public transport links meant that both the local beaches and closest city were just short journeys. In many ways what seemed like a rather unremarkable English town met many of the criteria of being a 15 minute city (or town in this case). It certainly wan’t perfect (back then) but as someone that left only to return after more than 20 years, the changes in the place have been stark and sadly, none of them positive.
Like all of these post-industrial towns suffering a drawn-out demise, it desperately needs resources along with care, attention and local planning integrated with equally far-reaching, progressive national policies that puts the well-being and happiness of the population as the prime focus of government. All a bit vague I suppose, but I am sure that most people reading this will understand. I wonder what Ian Nairn would have written of Britain today.
I’ve always lived in or near cities, but an important thing for me has been how easy it is to get out of it. I was a child in Sheffield, the centre was a bombed out wreck, there was lots of smoke, probably more from domestic chimneys than industry, but there were frequent buses and trains to the wonderful Hope Valley in the Peak District, and fresh air. There were a couple of theatres, and a week of opera from time to time, as much as I could afford then. Of course I had to follow the work I wanted, but I would have not wanted to go to London.
Yes, lack of affordable public transport must be a factor. 50% of buses have disappeared in County Durham over the last few years. To get to Newcastle, which takes 20 minutes by car, would take 2 hours by bus. No trains.
Kids from Newcastle used to go to York for the nightlife. Kids from York used to go to Newcastle for the nightlife. An hour by train.
Can’t afford it now.
The north east is the only area in the country where employment has gone down in the latest figures.
https://northeastbylines.co.uk/north-east-jobs-market-turns-negative-again/
A huge question Richard but as an initial first pass Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs would be a simple place to start.
Does the place you live provide you with a real living wage, a place to live in, enough nutritious food to eat, clean water to drink, healthy human relationships, places to socialise, some kind of meaningful cultural life. etc.
Secondly If that first level of need is met,, is your income, your place to live, etc, reasonably safely assured or is it constantly vulnerable? Can you walk around safely at any time of the day? Do you have a Government, Council or Police force that fulfills their most basic function of keeping you safe?
I would suggest that the number of places in England that get anywhere meeting the first need has hugely declined in the last forty years, with the last thirteen years representing an ever increasing rate of descent.
As for the second need to be safe, even in London the need is mostly not met, but given the proximity of great wealth it does at least offer a very long odds gamble of possibility,
Given these fundamental circumstances the rest of Maslow’s hierarchy, Belonging, Respect and Self-actualization, become ever harder to find anywhere in our toxic society.
Thanks – good analysis
Of course Maslow can be criticized as simplistic, but coming from a scientific education I have always been aware that even the latest and best scientific explanation of how any aspect of how our world works is most fruitfully seen as only the latest and best approximation.
Meanwhile, in many or even most situations, older less accurate approximations still provide explanations accurate enough to provide practical solutions. The relationship between the Newtonian view of the universe and Relativity being the best known example. We know that Relativity is a more accurate approximation but in order to measure, design and build the world we live in Newton is enough for most purposes.
Agreed
Whilst I suspect I agree with Paul’s approach, I do wonder where the myth of Maslow’s Hierarchy came from?
It is as a colleague more carefully pointed out a laundry basket. You have to meet all of the components all the time, just the magnitude of which component you b personally require changes all the time. The sequential approach is the production line view of life, but that ain’t how any living thing prospers, and surely we need to prosper in mind, body & soul…
something more complex is Spiral Dynamics . I am not interested in the management applications so much as the model of societal development . I would say it can only be an approximation but is thought provoking.
https://jthowlett.medium.com/using-spiral-dynamics-to-understand-development-930098e8f092
I think one can be easily misled by the usual convention of using a pyramid diagram. If one was to diagram it accurately, it would look like a set of Systems Theory pyramids with each potentiality domain feeding into each other. In short, Life’s more complicated than that! But, the thrust of Maslow’s argument still stands when considering how far our economy is failing to distribute the resources needed to keep body and soul together. This country created a welfare state worthy of the name in 1945, because what went before was failing. The national debt then was as large as it is now, with the added bonuses of damage from The Blitz, and labour shortages. But we did it anyway. Why? Because what went before was not working. I hope we find that spirit again.
Some great questions there. I think it is possible to create communities outside London that are attractive to all ages… my home city of Cambridge is one such, and it has knock-on attractiveness for surrounding towns and village too, to some extent. My son has settled in Leeds, which also seems to have cross-generational attraction (not least of which is more affordable housing).
Where am I going with this? I think I’m concluding that building vibrant, multi-generational communities everywhere is not as hard as it might at first seem. Levelling up just needs to identify which elements are missing from each location, and address those gaps. It feels like it should be possible to create a handbook with recipes to do that. Now all we need is competent political will to make that happen… oh!
All big cities across the world – especially megacities such as London – have churn – sucking in the young, with older cohorts leaving and moving to more rural areas.
Within London there is an increasing split between Inner London and Outer London, shown in the 2021 census data. The expectation (before the census came out) was that Inner London would be the faster growing of the two (with the ‘bright lights’ of the centre and all the new developments such as docklands), but it was Outer London which grew that fastest, as the outer London boroughs are cheaper to live in (such as Barking & Dagenham and Hounslow), and thus a place for young families, and hence greater demographic growth. (In fact Camden and Westminster – two central boroughs that the ONS estimated were amongst the fastest growing in the 2020 ONS mid year estimates – declined in population in the 2011-2022 census period.)
(It will be interesting to see the ONS population estimates for mid 2022 when they come out on 28th September, to see if there have been any interesting changes or developments.)
In other words, people who want to move to London – and don’t have huge amounts of money at their disposal – need to live in an outer borough, rather than in the centre.
I don’t understand why the real living wage has a London weighting of only £1.05 an hour more than the national £10.90. It must cost more than that to live in London.
The only time I refused to move anywhere my husband had a job was when he ended up having to work at Taylor Woodrow’s head office in London (long story), and I said there was no way I was going to teach in London.
We ended up moving to Hampshire and quickly realised we couldn’t afford to live there.
In the 90s we were looking for somewhere to buy a guest house, and were looking all over the country. After looking at lots and deciding for various reasons that we wouldn’t buy there, we often went back to York for the weekend. That’s when we decided that York was the best place in the country to live.
We did consider Cambridge but even then houses cost £100,000 more than York.
I’ve noticed that students these days are saying that they will go to the university closest to where they live in order not to have to pay rent on top of their fees.
I’ve also noticed that Durham University has 70% of students who went to private schools, even more than Oxford and Cambridge. I wonder why that is.
Durham has, dare I say it (and I know people there) a reputation as a polace for Oxbridge rejects.
Like Bristol and Exeter.
I think what makes a place attractive to live in varies enormously with personal circumstances.
In the 90’s I worked in criminal defence, mainly in Hartlepool. Many of our clients aged under 25 were more terrified of getting community service sentences than of getting imprisonment. The reason was because community service had to be done in Middlesbrough, which they had never visited and were genuinely in terror of having to do so.
For many a place is attractive to live in because it is familiar.
For those not familiar with north eastern geography, Hartlepool to Middlesbrough is less than 15 miles with (then) very good bus services.
26 miles from where I live to Hartlepool. It would take over two hours by bus or bus and train.
Phew – where to start?
I too live in Sunderland and am of an age where I have witnessed the destruction of whole industries and, as a result, communities (Thatchers years onwards). I worked with many of the communities who were decimated during the miners strikes and can honestly say that I have never experienced the same community spirit since. Camerons ‘Big Society’? Built on the rubble of what they’d already destroyed and continue to destroy (there’s a pattern whenever they are in charge).
I have travelled the length and bredth of England, Scotland and most of Wales in my time but I have always enjoyed the journey home… my favourite landmarks being Penshaw Monument if I’m coming via the A1 northbound or seeing the sea on my way past Easington if coming via the A19 northbound (different landmarks when heading towards Sunderland southbound). Even the Angel of the North has a lovely rusty wave as you pass by it southbound on the A1.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and as an amateur photographer I look for the beauty when using my camera in and around Sunderland, which is actually a remarkably beautiful City if you look for that beauty, as can probably be said for many places in the UK. Unfortunately many are encouraged to moan about where they live and portray a negative image instead of thinking positively. If standard of life is based on what others have that you don’t have then life will appear negative, but I count my blessings for living way up North because of the quality of life you can enjoy which can be defined in many ways, not least of all – the pace of life.
Levelling up? It will never happen where all parts of the country enjoy the same benefits, infrastructure, finance or quality of life partly because too many people want to be part of the mythical land of milk and honey AKA London. I’ve been there and come back home feeling refreshed at seeing Penshaw Monument, knowing I’m away from the maddening crowd (to coin a phrase).
A place will only be as attractive as the feeling it gives you of ‘being home’.
I have been to Sunderland a few times and get all of that.
I just happened to end up in the fens…
But I feel the same way. For now it is home. Whether forever I have given up worrying about. But I like it, it government apart.
I like Ely. Most people forget that it’s a city as it’s so small.
We’ve nearly always lived in or near cathedral cities, although you usually have to tell people where Peterborough Cathedral is.
I wonder if we elderly like to live near water, which is something else cathedral cities need to have, although not such a good draw now it’s so polluted.
The cathedral is an undoubted lure for tourists to Ely.
The congrgation is small in proprtion to the City.
The rivers are fundamental to the appeal of the place to me.
I live in a rural part of the East Midlands – lets call it former North-West Derbyshire – and we have been undergoing an influx of people from the South East coast – we are hearing a lot estuary English up here these days.
They come up here having made a mint on their houses, building huge houses for themselves with grounds, or propping up recent developments on green field sites as the area becomes more urbanised. They bring their kids with them, too many of whom own cars and think its fun to drive around our country lanes at high speed and take up places in our schools. They bring with them a very urban form of life and house prices to match – local people (also on lower wages, including agricultural wages) ARE increasingly priced out.
Forgive me for initially sounding like someone from Royston Vasey but of course it is a lot more complicated than that.
Talking to some of these ‘immigrants’ you realise that they have moved because although their asset – their home – was of high value, the cost of living down there in the South East because of the London effect for their wage was just unsustainable – I know of postmen and nurses who have moved up here. The cost of a pint or pub lunch or groceries was just too much, competition for school places too high, transport too expensive.
To me, all of this is a blowback from using the property market to generate wealth because as it undoubtedly does that, it generates its own problems. People in this low wage economy of ours are being displaced, and in doing so have to take action that displaces others.
To me, this logic of the market is unacceptable and destructive. There is needs to be more state involvement in the housing sector – from rent controls to house prices and building. Wages and prices should be matched to house prices, support grants for rich cultural lives in these areas would provide jobs, a reason to stay and contribute GDP and avoid places turning into ‘sacrifice zones’ and being left behind.
There is no such thing in society as winners and losers – save that for the Serengeti plain. Man is supposed to be higher order animal guided by God apparently and the better angels of his nature.
It’s high time he lived up to it, because he sure as hell isn’t from where I am standing.
Many Londoners claim that they make the money, pay the taxes so that we country folk can live…. and they really believe it!
The truth is that children are nurtured outside cities, cities suck in fully educated young adults, squeezes them to the suburbs to raise kids and then spits them out as retirees. Cities require constant new blood and a place to park old blood. Now, this may be OK…. but please don’t tell me that we “owe” city dwellers!
I fit this pattern – I grew up just north of London, was educated outside London, worked in London (and overseas) and now am retired in the countryside. Each place was attractive at the time but suburban London has no attraction now; central London does – for a visit… but village life fits the bill for now.
I used part of your second para in a tweet. It begged for it.
Not sure who might have done the most recent definitive analysis of the dynamics of the demographics of place .
No doubt 50 years ago, your 16-18 year olds in smaller towns had aspirations to leave – but presumably not as high as the 90% now. De-industrialisation has meant fewer local apprentice-based /skilled careers. Expansion of higher education opened up new routes away from home – at least until the increase of student fees and student rents became so high as to close them down again.
Just under 30 million people live in big-city – centred conurbation labour markets – ‘city regions’
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/articles/populationdynamicsofukcityregionssincemid2011/
– with better or worse functioning public transport – of which of course London is by an order of magnitude the biggest – almost 9 million .
But the places outside city regions are probably still growing at least as fast (2.5% 2011-15) as the city regions – (2.3%).
More resources could be devolved to localities, proportional representation in local elections would avoid local one party mafia . Energy generation, health services could be more localised, town centres made cultural/commercial hubs – encouraged by property tax reform. The Green New Deal could be a largely local enterprise.
Nothing wrong with young people wanting to find themselves by leaving home town – but now the dead hand of lack of housing, rent/house prices is limiting possibilites, compounded by the employment limitations imposed by the gig economy.
Growing inequality is limiting geographic choices – among younger and lower income people.
Maybe we don’t need to fully ‘reconcile’ all our goals at different phases of life – and that living anywhere involves some kind of compromise – and tension between different goals, and that’s what keeps us going?
Never wanted a ‘suburb’ – but Edwardia seems to be where we are. Hampstead was fine but couldnt last , after Manchester and Leeds and escaping the original W Yorks industrial hill village.
Wherever we are, we may well need to be in a cathedral and summit a Scottish munro at least once a year ……….
England needs devolution, and more power needs to come back from Westminster. Roll on Proportional Representation, for Local as well as general elections.
I wonder if the root problem arise from the mechanistic Tayloristic view of the world that led to Cobusier’s view of the world, towns were places to sleep in, industrial parks places to work in, and city centres places for managers to direct everything else from.
It is still prevalent in Town planning thinking, zoning residential areas, commercial areas, professional areas etc.
But liveable places require all of them to be close together.
See the ultimate commercial Zone the out of town shopping centre or Mall that kills most friends that have one.
The financial services sector is driving inflation, as perceived by BoE, but as it raises intest rates so bonuses & wages in that sector rise, but everyone else gets hammered, so inequity grows. Perhaps a interest rate surcharge should be applied to all taxes levied on financial services co.s including NI, Income & Capital Gains taxes, and even VAT. Might help to bring them into real world.
Some of us are London born and bred, and find this urge among provincial youth to leave their home regions to seek success in the William Cobbet described as “The Great Wen”, the place that inspired Dr Johnson to write “Hell is a city much like London” . I came from a working class cockney district of London, and so did my wife. We were educated in London schools. We got out of London as soon as we were able, both to provincial universities and then after marrying, to a village near a rural market town in a region where agriculture and woodland remains the main land use. We would never go back, but watch with a degree of sadness the local youth leaving the area as would-be Dick Whittingtons and Delia Whittingtons seeking their future in the dirty, polluted, overcrowded, noisy, fiendishly expensive city that I remember earlier generations named as “The Big Smoke”. Well, Shakespeare left Stratford for the Globe in Tudor times, Dickens’s Pip left the Kentish marshes and came with great expectations of London early in the nineteenth century, and the Prodigal Son in the Gospel left the farm for the big city 2000 years ago. Neither Pip nor the Prodigal enjoyed the success that Shakespeare had, but theirs and Dick Wittington’s life stories of migration to the big city repeat patterns of rural to urban, or provincial town to metropolis that have been happening for the the seven (?) thousand years since the first cities were built, and are continuing around the globe now as developing countries expand their economies and rural peasant farmers flood into the shanty towns and bustees and favelas and townships. And too, in the more developed economies, there will be a drift of young people from lower in the urban heirachy upwards to to the primate cities – from North East England to London, from the Dakotas to New York, from County Galway to Dublin, from Brittany to Paris. Can anything be done – and should anything be done – to staunch the vast and endles haemhorrage of population from the countryside and provinces ? I suppose “levelling up” (hahahaha), the diversion of investment to places away from the great cities , the flattening out of the urban hierarchy, and an education and encouragement and development of young talent towards employment non urban and non metropolitan economic activities – environnment, agriculture, forestry, transport, artsand craft.
Thanks
I was born and bred in Nottingham but I was really made in London between 1994 and 2000 whilst at Uni’ as a mature student.
I still believe that everybody should work there for a bit even though it tends to suck in everything although this is not London’s fault – it’s iniquitous the way the country is managed.
There was a buzz about London sadly lacking elsewhere when I was there – it had nothing to do with how long you’d been around, it was about what you could do as I was later able to compare it with more regional cultures.
Everyday in London was like being in the full public glare – there was nowhere to hide and I felt that I hacked it – everyday was a performance in getting something done.
Mind you, these days I could not afford to live there – rents were more reasonable back in the mid to late 90’s and so was the odd night out.
And we used to spend our weekends out in the Kent, Sussex and Hampshire countryside or on the coast – the South Downs ended up being one of my favourite places in the UK – lovely – with excellent fish and chip shops to be found in places like Pulborough and Lewes.
But is all much changed now and extremely expensive, I don’t know how working people can live down there anymore to be frank.
I don’t regret my 20 years in London – and living in a small area throughout that time so that Wandsworth bevame my village.
I thought it was great at the time.
Woudl I ever go back? No way, never. And not just ebevcause I could not afford to do so. I think I would find it horribly claustrophobic now.
Maybe there is no one answer to my question.
Perhaps the young need to move.
Maybe that is why university is so important for so many.
Like Richard, being a fellow East Anglian – living in the wonderful Bury St Edmunds (Suffolk’s cathedral town (not a city though), with the remains of Europe’s second largest abbey), the town has a great Theatre – Theatre Royal, the Apex events centre, and so many restaurants for a town of around 45,000, it is such a great place to live.
Being an East Anglian, I have got to praise to the wonders of Norwich – the ‘fine city’ – two universities, was the second city for centuries before the industrial revolution, and so many arts, and eating places. It has got it all. Norwich is usually in the top ten places to live in Britain. Not many people leave Norwich for the bright lights, because it has so many ‘bite sized’ bright lights!
I say the same about Cambridge too!
I have to say Norwich is a great place – barring nthe football team (sorry, but I will always be an Ipswich town supporter – that is deeply embedded from my youth and its remoteness.
That apart, there is amoot going for it.
And Bury is underknown – including its cathedral, which I like, and the Abbey Gardens which my boys loved as chidlren.
I went to Ipswich to be a programmer in 1988 and left in 1994. I left to go to Nigeria! Speaks volumes really. Never been back either.
🙂
I seem to be an outlier, I was brought up in Sevenoaks, My father, an architect, worked in London. I got interested in old Welsh metal mines during family holidays and went to Cambourn School of Mines in Cornwall. On qualifying I got a job in Zambia at Mufulira Mines for some 20 years. I joined Arcon Mines 1999 (in Co. Kilkenny Ireland), buying a stone built Irish cottage, surrounded by farm land. I wanted to be close to the mine in-case of emergency call outs. I was involved in mine construction, operation and closedown, meeting all environmental requirements, I was pleased that the remediated tailings dam is now a nature reserve.
That is some career.
I remember having a conversation with a physiatrist about Northern Irish Politics.
The conclusion was that the place was not very attractive and as a result anyone with any get up and go had got up and gone.
What concerns me is that if young people leave their home towns the people who might have become Councillors & MP’s for that area, skilled workers, managers and local business owners, etc have gone effectively ‘decapitating’ the community.
I have to disagree about the attractiveness of Northern Ireland.
This effect is also evident in Gaza, John.
There are two prestigious degrees available from the universities there. Graduates in one of them (Civil Engineering) have a propensity to leave the place.
It’s a sad situation but by subtraction the graduates in the other main subject who cannot leave the place end up dominating local politics.
I was lucky enough to go to Charlotte Mason in Ambleside when I was becoming a teacher. I looked at all the other sites available, but non came close. The memories I have of spending family holidays in the south lakes meant it was Ambleside or nothing. I found out shortly how astronomical the prices were for rent, mortgages and food after talking to the people that lived there. I count myself blessed that I was able to attend university at such a beautiful place, that it was worth the hardship
One of the advantages of going to university far away from your parents is that it gives you the feeling that you could go anywhere to learn or to live. I was the first person in my family to go to university and I don’t think it would have been as liberating for me if it had been near my home town. I think my parents thought, although they never said as much, that I would come back home, get a “good job in the city”, better than my dad could ever have got, and commute on the steam train to London for the rest of my life. Fortunately or unfortunately it was not to be.
I agree.
Those heading to Uni this weekend need to go to learn at least semi-independent living
Our generation could afford to as we got grants.
When I went to college I was a mature student and had moved away from home and had two sons. We’d also moved 4 times so I think I was fairly independent of my parents.
However, in order to get a grant they wanted to know my dad’s wages, not my husband’s! As my dad was a bus driver, I got the full grant. Weird system.
Very!
Jenw
I went to University as a ,ature student aged 28 (1984). I got the full mature student grant and they were only interested in my own income (I was single). The University (Durham) wanted to know my father’s occupation but I think that was more to do with social mobility.
I grew up in Hastings with many of my mother’s friends working in the Merchant Navy or driving their fishing boats ashore on an open beach at Hastings historic Fishing Stade in the Old Town. It was interesting growing up, but I left the UK at 17, a bold adventurer on my own traveling and working in Spain, France and Switzerland before we were in the EU. Even if I had stayed in Hastings, I could have got a regular job that paid enough for me to live modestly, but independently in a bedsit. I only ever spent a few months back in Hastings after leaving and I funded my travels by working on yachts and spending the winter months working in Switzerland, Geneva and Leysin ski resort.
As an eco-nomad, I soon noted countries where one could always find work, legally or not so legally. This was well known to all fellow travellers; I called such places ‘open-door’ countries. Working on yachts provided a special exemption with regard to work. as it was legal to work on a foreign flag boat, but not on a French boat in France. Working on yachts took me all over the world, 150,000 miles of major ocean passages, I crossed the North and South Atlantic 13 times under sail. I settled down, marrying an American, but luring him away to sea as we delivered charter boats down to the Caribbean.
I have led an incredibly fulfilling life of travel and adventure, and now, after returning to the UK as an older, less mobile person, my reckless life is catching up with me, but I am incredibly thankful for the huge wealth of past memories. Officially I am retired, but I work on concept and design innovation, and I now live in Oxford. I really like Oxford, I enjoy being in a university city, surrounded by bright young minds, there is good local bus service and easy access to London and airports on frequent coaches. It’s certainly not a cheap place to live, but at least we have strong Green Party representation, and I can vote Green without letting in a Tory.
I cannot help feeling incredibly guilty for the damage my generation has done to decimate the life chances of the younger generation. If I hadn’t been a dyslexic drop out, I could have secured a government grant to go on to university, it would have covered my living expenses and no worry about tuition fees or student debt. Even in the US where they claim, “there is no free lunch”, a US grant paid to certify my dyslexia, paid for me to take my US Coast Guard license and gave me a Pell Grant for training to become a Surgical Tech when I decided, I needed to get a real job. Young people in the UK are still living at home with their parents well into their thirties. because there is no job security in the gig economy and rents are so high, only those with wealthy parents are helped onto the housing ladder.
Crime of all crimes, Brexit destroyed the opportunity for our young people to live, love, study, and work anywhere within the EU; Boris even dragged us out of the Erasmus program. There are more restrictions on UK citizens traveling in Europe now than I faced when I left home as an unemancipated minor before we joined what was originally the Common Market. Post Brexit, British citizens can spend no more than three months in any one year within the EU. Why did Boris force through such a hard Brexit? The Tories didn’t want European workers with the same rights as UK citizens; there was no room for exploitation! Now foreign workers can be paid 20% less that UK workers and the further away they come from the more compliant they will be with exploitation and abuse.
I believe that the current ‘small boat crisis’ was at least partially by toxic Tory design. I claim that this must be true, or why would the Tories have depleted the ranks at the Home Office and why refuse to let asylum seekers work legally to earn their keep as they clearly want to? The Tories have knowingly created a growing pool of black-market workers to provide cheap labour specifically to break the power of the unions! The UK is essentially an ‘open door’ country for those prepared to work illegally and, despite the danger, the desperate will keep coming. The threat of deportation to Rwanda and the barge, are all just distraction tactics so that people will not recognize the disgraceful truth of a policy driven by pure greed.
There is no incentive to train young people in the UK with a Government policy of ‘Scavenge; Exploit; Deport’. When the Tories talk about apprenticeships what they predominantly offer is what could more accurately be called ‘exploiterships’, where young people can be paid even less than the already lower young persons minimum wage, to learn very basic skills that were once part of a steady regular wage job. If young people are unemployed, they don’t even receive the paltry amount that is standard Universal Credit as they are expected to be living at home with their parents. I left home at 17 because I was eager to start into the adventure of living and traveling independently; sadly this is no longer possible.
The Tories know full-well that if kids live in poorly insulated, freezing cold homes, that their parents can’t afford to heat, and they subsist on cheap junk food, going to school hungry, they will struggle to learn. This near destitution is also by design, as the poor represent the next generation of worker drones for the wealthy to exploit. If they try to gain further education to get a better start in life, they end up wallowing in debt. Today’s ‘kickout kids’ who are forced to leave home young as I did, will end up starving and sleeping rough as there is no secure work and no safety net. Those trapped at home with parents, ‘Prisoners of Mother England’, unable to afford to leave home, miss out on the opportunity for youthful independence that I so valued and enjoyed.
I was not in the UK to witness the appalling decline under Thatcher, but I returned to take care of my aging mother just as the Tories were ramping up their austerity measures. I do not have any children, but I feel a collective responsibility towards the next generation. All I can say is, I am deeply ashamed of my generation, and I am sorry for the damage done and still being done to wreck the life chances of our young people. Richard your tireless work presents a glimmer of hope as it offers a positive way forward. I promote your blog to everyone I meet so we can get the word out: you have convinced me that there is the potential to fund a fairer future in the UK. Keep up the good work.
The maps of rail and road infrastructure clearly show the London centric nature of the UK. I think the only solution is turning the UK into a federation based on the non-English nations and English regions. The federal govt should do the minimum around defence, national security, currency and other matters requiring overall coordination. Piecemeal, inconsistent and partial devolution is totally insufficient. I would like to explore a directorial system for the federal executive branch similar to the Swiss approach.
Why not independence for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland?
That is up to the people who live there I suppose. But do people advocating leaving the UK really advocate independence? As I understand it, they usually advocate moving from the UK to the EU. Those who don’t advocate moving to the EU are as much in error as those who advocate the UK not being in the EU. Given the challenges we all face in terms of geopolitics and climate change and the level of technical coordination required, we need to be in as bigger unions as we possibly can. That being said, being tiny in the EU means very little power compared to the big states. So, in my federalised UK , they would have much more equal power versus each other and the English regions. In my model, England as a whole cannot be a state because it is too big compared to the other nations. I don’t think England as a nation concept has much resonance anyway. Finally, one of the last things the people living in what we call England need is two more land borders with their biggest trading partners. And that works even more so if from the perspectives of Wales and Scotland if they didn’t join the EU (always assuming they were allowed to join the EU – Spain doesn’t want a precedent to encourage it’s own break up).
I think you misunderstand the issue.
No one wants Scottish independence because they want to rejoin the EU.
They want Scottish independence.
They might then rejoin the EU.
You cannot conflate them.
If the Scotland, Wales and NI were to leave the Union, I would still advocate my federal model for “England” to address the problems you discuss above.
I think you might be right to do so
I don’t think I misunderstand the issue. If Scotland left the Union and then chose to join another union, the end state would not be independence. The situation would be that they preferred not to be in a union dominated by Westminster, preferring instead the EU under the impression they would not be dominated by another country. My proposal is an alternative where they can avoid domination by Westminster and maintain unimpressed trade with their biggest trading partner- England. There is a hierarchy of scale to consider.
I am sorry, but this is an issue I know something about and your position is wrong and also deeply patronising and straightforwardly rude.
I suggest you give up now.
Mr Hill, I suspect you do not understand Scotland. Scotland is a joiner of Unions (the Reformation ended another close association, with France); England, essentially is not; we joined the EU, sadly and insincerely, in a panic. Everyone has it the wrong way round about the Union. The big attraction of Union to the Scots was the Empire, and lIttle else (as the Union documents reveal).
I quite fancy independence for Northumbria, all that land north of the Humber.
When people voted against independence for Scotland were they not promised that voting to stay in the UK meant voting to remain in the EU?
I alwaa enjoy sseeing the Nothumbrian flag
Jen asked: “When people voted against independence for Scotland were they not promised that voting to stay in the UK meant voting to remain in the EU?” That was a central part of the ‘No’ faction’s campaign: it alleged that voting ‘No’ was the only way for Scotland to stay in the EU. That, and the unfulfilled promises that the Holyrood parliament’s future was guaranteed and that further significant powers would be devolved, were ignored after the poll result came through. Instead we got Cameron’s EVEL (English Votes for English Laws) and, in time, the UK Internal Market Act, which has been used to overrule laws passed legitimately in Holyrood by our elected MSPs. This also undermines the whole edifice of Scots Law and the 1707 Acts of Union which guarantee the ascendancy of Scots Law in Scotland.