Where’s Yorkshire’s share of this £150bn being pumped into Britain by tech companies? - Andrew Vine
When Sir Keir Starmer takes the stage at the Labour Party conference next week for his keynote speech, he has a lot of ground to make up with the northern voters to whom he owes so much.
They gave him a landslide election victory in the expectation that years of being neglected by a political establishment that promised much but delivered little would come to an end. Trouble is, that hasn’t happened.
The Prime Minister will be speaking in Liverpool, which really ought to concentrate his mind on what the north expects and deserves from a government that never misses an opportunity to declare its commitment to what it calls “working people”, of which we have an abundance.
Yet the rhetoric isn’t being matched by reality and that has only been underlined by last week’s injection of investment in Britain by US technology companies.
It’s undoubtedly good news that £150bn is being pumped into Britain, but where’s our share of it?
Yorkshire and the wider north account for getting on for a quarter of this country’s population, yet we don’t appear to be receiving even a fraction of this new money.
There are bits for the north-west and for Scotland, a slightly bigger slice for the Midlands, but the lion’s share goes to where funding has always gone – to the south-east, with a particular emphasis on what the government has branded Britain’s Silicon Valley, around Cambridge.
This sounds very much like the same old story of the richest part of the country getting even richer while the north looks on and wonders yet again why it loses out because of the shameful regional inequality perpetuated by successive governments, whatever their political leaning.
It may be that Yorkshire’s three Labour mayors are at the conference, and if so they ought to be having a quiet word with either the Prime Minister or those close to him on the subject of the north not getting its fair share of investment.
Northern MPs should also be pressing the same point, since their constituents are anything but stupid and rapidly losing faith in Labour’s ability – or commitment – to make a real difference for the better.
Yes, there have been some encouraging gestures. There is going to be money to get the West Yorkshire mass transit system under way and a pledge to invest in new rail links across the Pennines, even though the prospects of transformed train services are years, if not decades, away.
Very welcome though this funding is, it really doesn’t compare with the billions pouring into the south-east from the deep pockets of American tech giants.
One awkward question raised by this continuing focus on the most affluent region of the country is whether the government is actually promoting the north as a place to invest.
Has it suggested that these companies look beyond London’s commuter belt as a location for their data centres and AI hubs, or even pointed out that because land is cheaper to buy and build on in the north their money would go farther?
A government genuinely committed to improving the lot of working people would certainly have done so, because the north needs the jobs and revenue generated by massive new investment more than the already prosperous south-east.
It’s a safe bet that Sir Keir will either gloss over the issue of regional inequality or ignore it altogether at his party’s conference.
But he does so at his government’s peril. By failing to address the north-south divide, the Prime Minister, an avid football fan, offers an open goal to Reform in the red wall seats that returned to Labour last year and contributed so much to its resounding win.
He also imperils his own position at a point when there is evident unhappiness among his backbenchers at the government’s performance and increasingly persuasive speculation that the mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, may attempt a return to Parliament, followed by a challenge for the Labour leadership.
Whatever the merits of Mr Burnham’s record as a member of the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown governments, it is unarguable that he has been the most prominent champion of the north and shown an understanding of its needs, attracting substantial new investment to Manchester.
Recent electoral history demonstrates that the north can make or break governments. It gave the Conservatives a spectacular victory in 2019 and then smashed them five years later. If he doesn’t start sending investment our way, and quickly, Sir Keir could find the north smashes him and Labour too.