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by KateR » Wed Sep 23, 2020 6:39 pm
The Office for National Statistics covers the UK by looking at twelve regions. Out of those twelve regions, three voted Remain: Northern Ireland, Scotland and London. The other nine regions voted for Leave: Wales and the eight regions of England outside London. Those eight regions, from 1975 and the first referendum to the 2016 referendum, moved from being the most Euro-enthusiastic to the most Eurosceptic.
That issue is now starting to receive academic attention, but when one looks at it, a number of issues come to the fore. One is public spending. If you had the UK as an average of 100, Northern Ireland is at 121 – so it receives 21% per person more public spending than the UK average. Scotland is at 119, Wales and London about 118, the East of England is 91, the East Midlands is 91, the South-East of England is 90, the South-West of England is 90. So, one aspect is more spending and leveling is required.
Another aspect is regulation. Small and medium-sized firms basically don’t complain about particular regulations, they complain about the whole scale and monumental size of regulation. So, what one sees in say, the North-East of England, which has been mentioned, is issues like free ports are now coming more and more to the fore, the fear of car manufacturers is another.
One of the big issues that comes out in the academic work is who represents citizens. When you ask people in London whether Westminster represents them, they say yes. When you ask people in the rest of England, on average they say no.
There was a time following the vote where people in London wanted to emphasise how different they were from the rest of the UK and how differently they voted in the referendum. There was a suggestion London should have its own immigration policy. In fact, some people have produced some papers on what can be done for London alone. In lots of big cities of course, the vote was like London and significantly different from elsewhere in the country.
So I can definitely see people in London and especially in the finance arena being more worried than many outside of that.
The main issue today is that all that comes out is what are the downside issues, unfortunately, having the EU dictate how they wanted negotiations to unfold in a certain order, it has all been about leaving and what has to be given up and what effects it will cause. The benefits of leaving will only come later and that, in and of itself, is an issue because it is impossible to to forecast today with any certainty in the way these links do. Yet maybe the Londoners will start seeing what has been happening to the rest of the country more clearly and appreciate the issue others have had to face for decades while being in the EU, but I doubt it. I am not advocating bringing Londoners or those doing well down, but I hope the leaving will lead to some leveling up of those outside those areas.
Infrastructure projects, Freeports, Singapore on the Thames are all in the future, as are the trade agreements with other countries, but we all know that.
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