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Government hires wonk who thinks Northern cities should be abandoned

September 24, 2012 3:35 pm

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Remember when Policy Exchange – often cited as Cameron’s favourite think tank – argued that Northern Cities were failures, should be abandoned, and that the people of Liverpool and Bradford (for example) should move to Oxford and Cambridge?

The report, “Cities Unlimited”, was co-written by one Tim Leunig.

The government just hired him to work in the Department for Education as a policy adviser.

Good luck, Northern schools, you’ll need it…

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  • Alexwilliamz

    I’m sure he has lots of experience of state education so I await his recommendations with interest.

  • Alexwilliamz

    I’m sure he has lots of experience of state education so I await his recommendations with interest.

  • Alexwilliamz

    I’m sure he has lots of experience of state education so I await his recommendations with interest.

  • Alexwilliamz

    I’m sure he has lots of experience of state education so I await his recommendations with interest.

  • Alexwilliamz

    Found this:Tim Leunig is Chief Economist at CentreForum, the liberal think tank, and Reader in Economic History at the London School of Economics. He is the recipient of three international academic prizes, and three prizes for outstanding teaching. His academic research concentrates on the UK and US since 1600. Often with coauthors he has answered questions such as whether boys who went to see ended up taller than those who did not (they did – sailors were fed well), whether smallpox caused stunting (it did), and the value of the passenger railways to England in the nineteenth century (about 15% of GDP on a social savings basis). He is currently investigating why women were paid less than men in Swedish tobacco firms (fewer well-paid outside options), and whether firms that employed more of them did better (yes), why the UK textile industry collapsed after world war two, despite inventing polyester (invention =/= manufacturing) and whether an apprentice migrant to London in the seventeenth century led others to follow in his footsteps (not to any extent).

    So lots of expertise in england pre 1960. Should fit in well with Gove’s education plans.

  • Alexwilliamz

    Found this:Tim Leunig is Chief Economist at CentreForum, the liberal think tank, and Reader in Economic History at the London School of Economics. He is the recipient of three international academic prizes, and three prizes for outstanding teaching. His academic research concentrates on the UK and US since 1600. Often with coauthors he has answered questions such as whether boys who went to see ended up taller than those who did not (they did – sailors were fed well), whether smallpox caused stunting (it did), and the value of the passenger railways to England in the nineteenth century (about 15% of GDP on a social savings basis). He is currently investigating why women were paid less than men in Swedish tobacco firms (fewer well-paid outside options), and whether firms that employed more of them did better (yes), why the UK textile industry collapsed after world war two, despite inventing polyester (invention =/= manufacturing) and whether an apprentice migrant to London in the seventeenth century led others to follow in his footsteps (not to any extent).

    So lots of expertise in england pre 1960. Should fit in well with Gove’s education plans.

  • Alexwilliamz

    Found this:Tim Leunig is Chief Economist at CentreForum, the liberal think tank, and Reader in Economic History at the London School of Economics. He is the recipient of three international academic prizes, and three prizes for outstanding teaching. His academic research concentrates on the UK and US since 1600. Often with coauthors he has answered questions such as whether boys who went to see ended up taller than those who did not (they did – sailors were fed well), whether smallpox caused stunting (it did), and the value of the passenger railways to England in the nineteenth century (about 15% of GDP on a social savings basis). He is currently investigating why women were paid less than men in Swedish tobacco firms (fewer well-paid outside options), and whether firms that employed more of them did better (yes), why the UK textile industry collapsed after world war two, despite inventing polyester (invention =/= manufacturing) and whether an apprentice migrant to London in the seventeenth century led others to follow in his footsteps (not to any extent).

    So lots of expertise in england pre 1960. Should fit in well with Gove’s education plans.

  • Brumanuensis

    Tim Leunig is actually a pretty clever guy and although the Policy Exchange report was completely bonkers, he has written a number of interesting pieces on a variety of topics elsewhere. For instance, he’s been a severe critic of the government’s plans for housing benefit:

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/25/david-cameron-housing-benefit 

    http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/2012/06/26/camerons-housing-benefit-proposal-leunig/

    I don’t quite understand why he’s been seconded to the Department for Education, but there you go. At least it wasn’t the Department for Transport, because his ideas on the railways are a rehash of Dr Beeching’s idiocies: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/2012/08/20/cost-of-railways-leunig/

  • Brumanuensis

    Tim Leunig is actually a pretty clever guy and although the Policy Exchange report was completely bonkers, he has written a number of interesting pieces on a variety of topics elsewhere. For instance, he’s been a severe critic of the government’s plans for housing benefit:

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/25/david-cameron-housing-benefit 

    http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/2012/06/26/camerons-housing-benefit-proposal-leunig/

    I don’t quite understand why he’s been seconded to the Department for Education, but there you go. At least it wasn’t the Department for Transport, because his ideas on the railways are a rehash of Dr Beeching’s idiocies: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/2012/08/20/cost-of-railways-leunig/

  • Brumanuensis

    Tim Leunig is actually a pretty clever guy and although the Policy Exchange report was completely bonkers, he has written a number of interesting pieces on a variety of topics elsewhere. For instance, he’s been a severe critic of the government’s plans for housing benefit:

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/25/david-cameron-housing-benefit 

    http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/2012/06/26/camerons-housing-benefit-proposal-leunig/

    I don’t quite understand why he’s been seconded to the Department for Education, but there you go. At least it wasn’t the Department for Transport, because his ideas on the railways are a rehash of Dr Beeching’s idiocies: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/2012/08/20/cost-of-railways-leunig/

  • AnotherOldBoy

    Tim Leunig’s report – which you inaccurately summarise – was a sensible, realistic attempt to understand what would and would not help failing cities.  The point – which was made on the basis of evidence  – was that the current regional development plans were not working and that, to an extent, some cities were going to continue to decline.

    For example, the report pointed out that Liverpool was in relative decline as a port compared to Felixstowe and Dover because the Lancashire cotton industry (which used to require vast imports of cotton) has collapsed and because we now trade more with Europe.

    The report then sought to put forward workable solutions, while recognising that there was an unstoppable trend towards growth in some cities (including Manchester and Leeds) and areas (the South East – that is why Oxford and Cambridge were singled out for growth).

    As he recently pointed out, his report was right: people are moving to the successful cities: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/17/regeneration-census-barrow-failing-towns

    I would have thought that Mr Leunig has just the sort of intelligence and clarity of thought to bring even more strength to the excellent Mr Gove’s elbow.

  • http://www.facebook.com/Dan.Filson Daniel Filson

    If you equalised the unearned income and capital held by people in the prosperous south around the country, you might well find that a good many southen towns were suddenly no longer economically sustainable, being so heavily dependent on inherited and unearned wealth and income. The economic effect of unequal wealth dstribution in the so-called failure of some towns as so-called proseity and success of others has never really been properly explored. So farewell then, Tunbridge Wells, Reigate, Chichester, Haywards Heath. Pick up your bags (no porters allowed) and move to places where real people live and real people work.

  • LordElpus

    “Government hires wonk who thinks Northern cities should be abandoned”

    I thought they already had!

  • http://twitter.com/RF_McCarthy Roger McCarthy

    To play devil’s advocate Leunig was seriously addressing a fundamental set of problems about the fate of declining cities in a post-industrial globalised society which we can’t just joke or wish away.

    And concreting over the South East and moving everyone there (which rather to Leunig’s credit is precisely what he advocated with no concession whatsoever to Tory NIMBY-ism) may be to adapt Cavafy barbaric but is some sort of a solution.

    The actual Conservative/Lib Dem policy is now all too clearly to let permanent austerity turn those northern cities  into open concentration camps for the masses that global capitalism can find no use for – and indeed to deport as many Southern ‘useless eaters’ as they can up there as well (a policy which as Brumanuensis points out Leunig opposes).   

    Somewhere in between lies a truly radical and transformative programme of national and social regeneration from which our broken industrial cities will rise again – but nobody on the left has such a programme – and there is not even the vaguest intimation that our party’s perpetually stalled joke of a policy review process will produce one or that our leadership has one iota of the Stalinist will and determination which would be required to implement it if it did magically come into existence.

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