Mr Osborne’s balancing act

Rather than boosting the private sector, which would have involved politically distasteful acts such as cutting tax and regulations, New Labour chose the easier path of letting the public sector rip, stuffing Whitehall and town hall alike with new jobs, regardless of how useful they were, and creating quango after quango to spread the state’s tentacles still further.

Meanwhile, the private sector – the agent of economic growth – was largely left to its own devices.

The inevitable result, come the arrival of the bust which Mr Brown said he had abolished, was a hideously unbalanced economy with a private sector badly weakened everywhere other than the still booming London region. Meanwhile, an overmanned public sector was clearly in dire need of slimming down even though this would only add to the lengthening unemployment line.

As a result, while it is true that George Osborne should have done more to stimulate growth since coming to office, it has to be acknowledged that he could scarcely have been dealt a worse hand. Even after 18 months of the present Chancellor’s public-sector cuts and private-sector growth strategy, the proportion of employees working in the private sector, which dropped alarmingly after the 2008 crash, had still not recovered to its previous level.

Only a year later, however, and the figure has 
exceeded the 2008 level all over the country, most gratifyingly here in 
Yorkshire which has posted the biggest increase in private-sector jobs, outpacing the South-East and the rest of the North.

With this region being among those that had suffered the worst of the pu blic-private imbalance, such progress has long been awaited. But it is no cause for complacency.

Regional growth, after all, is not a zero-sum game and the longer that Yorkshire’s neighbours have to wait for their own recoveries, the slower this region’s progress is likely to be. It should also be remembered that, even within Yorkshire, the recovery is not evenly spread, but concentrated in specific towns and cities, while the worrying rise in youth unemployment continues.

In short, then, there is much work for Mr Osborne still to do and he could start by making an unequivocal commitment to Lord Heseltine’s plan for regional growth and devolving money and spending power to those on the ground in Yorkshire who know best where it is most needed.