You have probably noticed: the politics of indifference over the last 30 years have left a pile-up of fundamental structural problems which are now, like the corpses of political failure, floating and rotting on the surface of our everyday life.
At the root of these problems we have a festering outrage: the systemic neglect of England outside the South East. For decades, under both Labour and Conservative dispensations this neglect was locked into policy via the Treasury’s Green Book rules on public investment.
What a colossal waste of resources. If you live in an abandoned Northern industrial town, you’ll know all about it. If you live in the favoured South East, your knowledge will likely be confined to discomfort and, all too probably, resentment at your taxes ‘subsiding’ those towns.
If social democracy is to build a nationwide consensus, its must show how resolving regional inequalities is not only the right thing to do, it is also crucial to restoring the UK’s economic and fiscal health. Because policy failure on this scale is grandly expensive. Truly, restoring and spreading prosperity outside the South East is the low-hanging fruit of the UK economy.
Really, I wonder if anything else really matters, because if we can’t tackle this, so many of our other problems will be untreatable.
These thoughts have been with me for years, decades, all my life, really. But they have been sharpened immeasurably by getting acquainted with the extroardinary life and work of Fiona Hill. Not the Fiona Hill who was Theresa May’s co-chief of staff. Rather, the Fiona Hill the coal-miner’s daughter from Bishop Auckland who has risen to serve as security adviser on Russia and Europe under three US presidents.
I first heard her discussing her remarkable journey on a Lex Fridman podcast, and subsequently I’ve been looking at her book ‘There’s Nothing for You Here - Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century’. Great title. From Bishop Auckland to Moscow to Washington, she brings a highly unusual perspective on all these societies which I think is very valuable. Her journey starts as a working-class girl growing up among the failure of Bishop Auckland’s all-nationalized industries during the 1980s (coal, steel, rail-wagons etc). Her escape from that failure demanded not just inspiration, imagination, and determination but also the unexpected intervention of a web of international solidarity ventures you’ve never heard of. I warmly recommend her story to you.
‘There’s nothing for you here’ is a phrase which rings so true, and is so damning. My father said something very similar to me, aged 13, and I’ve never forgotten the implied message.
Sadly, we can’t all be Fiona Hill, but we should take seriously her account of the obstacles, from sheer poverty to accent-discrimination (she retains her Northumbrian accent). The recent pieces I’ve written about industrial policy are, in fact, sketches for regional economic policy, and they start: ‘industrial policy is hard’.
One of the things Fiona Hill’s tale highlights is the immense power, both for good or ill, of reputation, morale and the historic experience which breeds them. The feedbacks of morale and reputation have, I believe, a powerful influence on outcomes in many fields, including regional economics.
Let’s take a look at how that works. As a sighting shot, I have attempted to illustrate the multiple ways they affect outcomes, by looking at education. Educational attainment is, after all, one of the factors determining productivity, so this model is merely one factor feeding into wider models of regional success/failure.
I have used Systems Dynamics software to illustrate some of the feedback relationships, so I need to apologize to any Systems Dynamics modellers reading this. This is merely my attempt to illustrate what I believe to be some of the relevant dynamics.
Feedbacks Between Reputation, Morale, and Educational Attainment
How to read this chart. You can start anywhere, but just for illustration, follow the arrows starting at History/Background. History/Background feeds into Reputation, which in turn feeds into Morale (and back again), and Morale feeds into performance of both Teachers and Pupils, who both affect each other, and who together are two major inputs into Educational Attainment. This is only one pathway of feedbacks described in the chart - there are plenty of other pathways and feedbacks at work. Nonetheless, this nexus of History/Background, Reputation and Morale is clearly central to Educational Attainment.
And that’s fine if your historic background is success and prosperity, because your reputation and morale is likely to be high, and that in turn will attract motivated and high-quality teachers to teacher the motivate and high-quality pupils, and the result will likely feed into superior educational attainment.
But if you’re from, say, Dewsbury? Or Oldham? Or Hartlepool? Or Hull?
‘There’s nothing for you here’.
Which brings us to the success of Katherine Birbalsingh’s Michaela Community School, which she founded in 2014 as a non-selective school taking in children often from classic disadvantaged families, and which has become one of the top performing schools in England academically.
Lucky the child who has a place at Michaela Community School. But equally, lucky the teacher who has a job at Michaela Community School.
And that, really is the lesson. Katherine Birbalsingh’s approach seems from the outside to have been to tackle with the most direct and even draconian methods issues of morale and reputation, with no regard whatsoever for excuses of History/Background. By reversing these feedbacks from reinforcing failure to accelerating success, the crucial change is made.
What made the difference was not funding, computers in the classroom or pupil selection. All those may be important, but if morale is low and reputation is bad, they won’t result in educational attainment. What is illustrated here is not the extraordinary impact of Ms Birbalsingh’s personality, but rather the extraordinary impact of recognizing the key role that morale and reputation has in generating results.
Remember, education is only one input involved in developing and widening Britain’s regional inequalities. Industrial policy, regional policy, is hard.