Douglas Carswell

Northern power house does not mean more power in the North

It's not been a great week for the Northern Power House, has it?

First fracking. Despite sitting on enough natural gas to fuel the kind of industrial revival seen in America, it is proving almost impossible to get the stuff out of the ground. Why? It's not the laws of physics that are different on this side of the Atlantic, but the laws of regulatory restraint.

The gas must remain underground. Any dream of a northern industrial revival on the back of cheap energy must remain precisely that.

Then the rail upgrade between Leeds and Manchester got scrapped.

A day after this much heralded investment in northern transport infrastructure got cancelled, we learned that either Heathrow or Gatwick is going to get an extra runway. So much for regional rebalancing.

Despite all the talk of a Northern Power House, the economy in the north of England is barely back to where it was before the financial crisis.

The economy of London, meanwhile, surges ahead, the financial service sector fuelled by subsidies from central bankers and lashings of easy money. Quantitative Easing (QE) has been a great boon for corporate banks in the south of England.  

If you handed out free flour to bakers it would be a massive subsidy to the baking industry.  QE does something similar to banking, with easy money handouts to the banks.  No wonder the London economy is roaring ahead, while the north struggles.

Far from rebalancing the UK economy, government policy is exacerbating differences. Rather than empowering the north of England, George Osborne's wheeze makes the north of England ever more dependent on the whim of those inside the Treasury.  

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