The place of my birth is situated at the far and opposite end of New Zealand from Auckland, the nation’s largest city. The Otago-Southland region is the New Zealand equivalent of Scotland — its capital, Dunedin is named after Edinburgh and even the weather is the same. Where once there was mining and manufacturing, today Otago-Southland relies on farming, forestry and supplying venison and salmon to the tourists who come to gawp at Middle Earth. Residents of Auckland are famously disinclined to travel beyond the Bombay Hills — New Zealand’s equivalent of the Watford Gap — and spout increasingly ignorant, ill-informed, bullshit about people and places, the further away from them they are. So, the ‘northern condition’, upside down and all, is familiar to me .

A Tory thinktank says Mackemland (and others) should be closed:

Millions of people in northern England should move to the southeast because years of regeneration has failed to improve cities like Liverpool, Hull and Sunderland, a think-tank said on Wednesday.

From the Manchester Evening News:

Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle all have decided strengths, but they are not successful enough to deliver prosperity to neighbouring towns, such as Rochdale, Bradford and Sunderland, in the way that London is able to support relatively poor communities in North Kent and South Essex.

‘Support relatively poor communities’ is code for a pool of reserve labour on the periphery of the metropolis, employed in the service sector on the minimum wage. Dave Osler describes the report as the ‘apogee’ — or is it nadir? — of ‘contempt for the North’. He writes

just before you write these guys off as hapless wonks, remember this; in less than two years from now, the lads and lasses of Policy Exchange — David Cameron’s fave thinktank, no less — will have a real input into government policy. This is just a foretaste of what we can expect after the imminent wingnut takeover.

New Zealand, is a shining louring example of the effects of an unfettered neoliberal economy, when services are eroded and degraded. For example, parents in Invervegas are faced with a journey of over 1600km (that’s 1000 miles for primitives) if their children require treatment at the state of the art children’s hospital.

There was eye-gouging in the ruck here today over Welsh nationalism. The Policy Exchange report underlines the need for collective strength and unity in the former engine rooms of the industrial revolution, not for separate Welsh or Scottish national entities. The people of Wales, Scotland, the Northeast and Northwest have a shared industrial heritage and experience. The oppressor is not England, but the leeches who stuff their pockets off the sweat of working people — they are to be found in the City of London.

For an independent Federated Republic of Prydain