Contested Worlds by Phillips Martin

Author:Phillips, Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Plate 6.1: Turning to Europe

‘Britain told to pass on EC funds for pits’, Simon Beavis and Martyn Halsall, The Guardian, 26 September 1992: 38.

This does not mean that government policies proved consistently bountiful for London and the South East. The artificial bubble created by the ‘Big Bang’ soon burst. The shake-up that resulted after the immediate euphoria of the ‘Big Bang’, added to the hang-over from Chancellor Lawson’s boom-inducing policies, led to increased job insecurity, a shedding of white-collar jobs, and a collapse in house prices (Hutton 1996), with the South East taking the brunt of the cuts that resulted (e.g. Hamnett 1993). The mood created by this shift was well illustrated in the titles of newspaper articles (see Plate 6.2), although statements as to the demise of North-South divisions were replaced a few years later by declarations that the South was once more doing (relatively) alright (see Plate 6.3). As Martin (1995) makes clear, while there is no doubt that the South did lose more jobs in the early 1990s than more northern regions, these years constituted a temporary blip, rather than a fundamental realignment, of regional fortunes.

Critical for regional disparities is not what happens in the short-term but where longer term trends are leading. Viewed in this way we are still faced with a corporate economy that is heavily centred on London and nearby urban centres (Figure 6.1). Even when corporations bauk at the high costs of office space and employees’ pay in London, their decentralisation efforts rarely take them outside the South East (Marshall and Raybould 1993). Higher paid and middle ranking white-collar work stays disproportionately in this region. This occurs in a context in which high technology industry is centred on southern locations (Hall et al. 1987). It occurs at a time when global economic trends are seeing a strengthening of service industries (and particularly of producer services); the very industries that give the South East its economic strength. It occurs against a backcloth in which government policies have not favoured the manufacturing sector, so this sector has seen its share of the UK economy fall, whether in terms of employment or production, with disproportionate shares of these losses falling outside the South East. It exists within a regional setting that has the potential for an enhanced centrality in a European context, given the greater ease of travel afforded by the Channel Tunnel. Quoting French ideas on these issues, Dunford and Fielding (1997) note that those countries that have poorer economic growth performances, such as the UK, the USA and potentially France, tend to have leading cities that are best described as a megalopolis. By contrast those with better economic performances are more inclined to have leading centres that are metropolitan (e.g. Milan and Munich), rather than megalopolitan. This is an interesting observation, although, as Dunford and Fielding note, it needs to be treated with some caution, given the positions of Seoul and Tokyo. At this point it is an observation - a comment on a pattern - no more.

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