The UK should rectify regional inequality in the way Germany has done

However, when historians look back at our age, I now believe that Brexit will be seen as a footnote in a much larger issue which blights British life.

That larger issue is geographical inequality.

The UK is geographically unequal for a country in the developed world. The recent Tory landslide was an endorsement among swathes of England and Wales demanding a ‘levelling up’ in economic fortunes.

We tend to blame London for its success, but wealth (unlike energy) can be created and it can be destroyed without needing to explore the issue of transferring it through taxation.

Countries like Germany have demonstrated that with serious ‘buy in’ from central government regional strategy can act as a stabiliser to areas left behind. The eastern cities of Dresden and Leipzig are now catching up with west German competitor cities.

Despite decades of communist rule and no participation in western capitalism the areas of East Germany (although still quite poor) are steaming ahead.

Why then is our own region so behind the national average? Regional inequality is a UK-wide matter, but it would be foolish to completely discount our own history.

The campaign of violence did not create any wealth, it merely destroyed what wealth was being created.

But neither should we console ourselves too quickly, the NI economy was already faltering in the early sixties.

Policies pursued by the then unionist majority government did little to stem the collapse of heavy industry, the disparity in wages (which still persists) and the under-investment in cities like Londonderry.

The anomaly seems to be Scotland.

Although it has been able to exploit oil reserves in the North Sea, Scottish policymakers did not accept their fate. Long before devolution the Scottish office has long been lobbying central government for investment into their cities and towns which has seen them speed ahead of the North of England. According to the Economist magazine it is now the richest region after London and the south east.

Northern Ireland has an opportunity to emulate the position of Scotland. We have had secretaries of state of varying degrees of competence but regardless the apparatus of the Northern Ireland Office (NIO) should not be a government of last resort simply for when devolution fails, it should be an instrument on pressure on central government to ensure we are part of future ‘levelling up’ strategies.

Tackling geographical inequality in NI will not be easy.

As the Economist notes, these are all knotty problems, which cannot be unpicked quickly.

They compound each other. Just as people are seldom poor for one reason, regions do not fall behind only because they have poor transport, poor schools or poor leadership, but for all those reasons and more.

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