Northern Growth Strategy: these key strategic investments must be just the beginning
Mosaic. That might just be the most appropriate description for the thinking required at this moment in time, in order to bring together a coherent, progressive economic strategy that is domestically focused yet globally driven.
That challenge, for Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves and the Treasury, was always going to be an invidious one, not least as the country’s first female Chancellor was forced to begin her Number 11 race with a rusty nail in her shoe, left there by her predecessors.
Hamstrung from the off, then, the headwinds have only increased in knots: as Labour came to power, few could have envisaged a ‘special relationship’ with the United States that involved a war-hungry US President hurling insulting remarks across the Atlantic at the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Yet, here we are.
That the remarks made about Sir Keir Starmer’s mettle have not cut through to public opinion, here, perhaps reveals more about that which intelligent Britons think about Mr Trump than it does Mr Starmer. Amidst that maelstrom, then, Ms Reeves is formulating an approach that puts the regions first, in the case of the Northern Growth Strategy, our region. With investment for defence research and manufacturing, digital innovation and fintech services for Sheffield, Manchester and Leeds respectively, the Chancellor’s hand reveals how many horses must be ridden in a world riven by war.
But this has to be just the start: the likes of Hull, York and Teesside are already, understandably, keen to reach out to Government in order to work with Ministers so that they too will have their ambitions accelerated and their unique qualities – the Humber Estuary generates one fifth of all UK electricity – leveraged in order to create opportunity through prosperity.