abelard
Player Valuation: £35m
What is happening in Preston is interesting, and should be encouraged, though of course by design councils mostly have to absorb London's idiotic ideological diktats and then take the blame for them, and thus, their scope is limited.
Allowing local councils to design their own bus and transit systems (rather than imposing demonstrably failed Ayn Rand experiments everywhere but London), and then funding them properly, would have a substantial impact. This alone likely accounts for much of the staggering productivity gap between European regional cities and British ones, which mostly are on the order of Eastern Europe. Of course, Corbyn was roundly mocked by liberals on twitter when he raised the issue of busing in parliament.
Britain has also (mostly by design, partly just by neglect) persistently disinvested in education and training, which is also why our productivity is by far the worst in Western Europe: This can be easily be addressed by sensible policies and more investment; as it stands, the schools are in many cases on the verge of collapse.
There are many examples of post-industrial regions which have made dramatic improvements, all of which feature a very active state investing in infrastructure, research, and education. Pittsburgh is a perfect example of what Northern English cities could be like, if London ever got its act together, and the wealth and cultural impact could easily flow to Boltons and Wigans if we tried to meet basic developed-world standards of transit. Singapore was pretty much a washed up fading port with serious poverty and crime (not unlike Liverpool in the 1980s) before the government took the lead in creating a properly housed, cared-for and educated/high-skilled populace. It is always amusing how liberals manage to so consistently misunderstand its success.
These are probably far too small-scale for Britain though, given how badly and thoroughly things have been sabotaged or left to rot. A better model (particularly relevant to our own many post-industrial areas) would be the way that West Germany responded to the fall of the Berlin Wall - massive investment in infrastructure, public health, education etc, resulting in subtantial economic growth and the rapid convergence of living standards (though I suspect the East German education system was at least the equal of ours, and its relative social equality - likewise key to Vietnam and China's initial growth - puts us to shame). Of course the state will have to play the leading role in driving and managing this type of investment, as it has in literally every other instance of meaningful and sustained national growth: Germany, France, the United States, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, China, Vietnam. Serious economists of course know full well that even liberal fantasy islands like Silicon Valley mostly serve to repackage and profit from technology which the state develops. And yes, East Germany may never be as prosperous as the West (not least because Germany more or less gave up on investment with the Hartz Reforms), but nor does Wigan need to ultimately be as wealthy as London to nonetheless achieve dramatic progress.
I wasn't kidding when I said you should spend real time in Wigan, by the way. You would learn a lot. What appears to liberals to be the causes of poverty are often really just the symptoms. And you don't have to spend much time in the North to see how the economic differences here are explained much more by central policy failures than by the fact that everyone is a racist mouth-breathing Greggs-addicted troglodyte.
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