Yer what? Lots along the A1 (Wittering, Cottesmore, Leeming, Coningsby) lots in the Midlands and places like Oxfordshire and Wiltshire, quite a few in Scotland. The one place you don’t tend to find them is the actual south-east, although a lot of the non-flying centres are here, close to, well, the MOD and the politicians. The Eurofighter, of course, is built in Lancashire and flown out of Lincolnshire. If it could speak it would definitely have flat vowels.

This is all a result of the threat to the UK shifting round from France to Germany to Eastern Europe until it’s basically just the Russians popping over the top of Norway and down the North Sea. Obviously you’d want your planes in Scotland and the East Coast for that, rather than Tunbridge Wells.

One aspect that needs to be addressed is the decline in scientific and technical education.

Top grades in maths and science A levels are largely being obtained by those attending public, grammar schools and a few comprehensives which are largely outside the North and particularly the industrial areas. Historically, northern grammar schools produced most of our top scientists and engineers. Has the creation of comprehensive education destroyed the production of World class scientists and engineers from the North and therefore hampered it’s industrial development? How many pupils from northern comprehensives in industrial areas are reading sciences or engineering at Russell Group universities today ,compared to the 1960s? In the 1960s most of the industrial companies such as ICI were run by grammar school boys.
If we want pupils to read engineering or science at Russell Group Universities and in particular at Oxbridge, UCl, Imperial, from comprensives in the industrial north, are the teachers good enough? In order to for a pupil to enter the top universities they will need at least 3 A Levels at grade A. How many comprehensives in the industrial north have teachers of Maths, Physics, Chemistry , Biology and Geography/Geology with degrees in these subjects from top universities and preferably with higher degrees
?
How may Nobel Prizes have been won by Northern universities in the first and last 20 years of the twentieth century?

When it came to engineering,many left school at 14 or 16 and started their training with an employer. The problem is that we no longer have polytechnics which offer degree level education in the evenings. Therefore a craftsman in their mid twenties with financial responsibilities may not be able to spend three years studying at university. Often the best engineers were those who had first completed an apprenticeship and then through evening study, attained Chartered Status of their engineering institution. .

Has the ending of grammar schools and polytechnics geared to scientific and engineering education through evening study ,made a major contribution to the decline in social mobility?

The problem with Labour is that they are happy discussing quantity, not quality. If one looks at the Industrial Revolution in the UK it was largely due to the activities probably of not more than 50 people over a period of 150 years. How many people have been responsible for the major developments in computers and the internet? How does one quantify innovation? As they say a camel is a horse designed by a committee.

A blogger would probably have at least googled the name

This point is rather irrelevant. Its obvious to anyone that PE only publish stuff that agrees with their line of thinking and ideology. Can’t imagine them publishing anything otherwise, so the point isn’t whether a Libdem MP was involved. The point is how quickly and in what disguise this will become Cameron policy.

Tim Leunig defends himself as an independent academic and has done an amazing job to provoke debate with this discussion paper, so it would be a little more helpful to address the issues he raises.

The motor of economic development is proximity to markets.

So because many people are attached to a model of centrifugal market forces there is a common assumption that our capitalist model collects wealth and power close to London.

My feeling is that Leunig is actually making a case for an alternative model of decentralised development based on creating new markets, by enabling him to provoke attacks on the old-fashioned model of conservative capitalism by the association of PX to the neo-conservative tories.

Anyone who thinks there is a flat progression of wealth and power southwards would be shocked by the levels of real poverty that exists across the south. The appearance of relative inequality between the north and south hides the real deprivation in places like Brighton, Portsmouth, Southampton, Swindon, Reading, Slough and Watford. Equally the rise of the BNP in Essex and Kent among working class sections of society shows how Labour is failing them in its model of development. And I don’t think I need to mention how London suffers, considering there is a map to look at above.

I find Prescott’s defence of Labour orthodoxy cynical in the extreme considering he is the principle agent who promoted the Thames Gateway scheme.

It shouldn’t be amazing that the prejudices of both left and right-wing are so easily exposed by smart liberal politics, but it is.

Agriculture is another industry heavily subsidised, and many of these large Land Owners live in the South. Duke of Westminster for example.

This is still a large part of the reason why new industries are clustered around the South-East, and a better transport infrastructure would go a long way to addressing the problems that the report mentions.

This is a joke, right?

If not, then you are an idiot who knows nothing about politics.

Yes, the line to Manchester is still slow at the weekend, until the new timetable comes in at the end of this year. Luckily, tickets at the weekend are less expensive, making it cheaper than driving (£62 return / 15p per mile) even if you can’t get really cheap advance ones.

Much better, then, to look at the official punctuality figures, which show a steady rise in punctuality for several years now. In point of fact, the London-Manchester route in particular is seriously bothering airlines due at least partly to being far more reliable than air travel (which is rubbish, although doesn’t get the same publicity).

It’s also highly misleading to conclude from the experience when there *isn’t actually a rail service running* that the service isn’t particularly good. It’s reasonable to conclude that it isn’t particularly good at the weekends, and I suspect John would agree.

During the week, of course, London-Manchester rail times are about 2h 15, and if you can beat that in a car you’re the Stig, and I claim my five pounds. That’s an average speed of somewhere over 90 mph.

Finally, if your best option is to go via Leeds and Doncaster, that rather suggests the East Coast is, er, working, so getting to Leeds is about comparable to Manchester and Newcastle is about another 80 miles for a smidgen under three hours by rail. Again, I don’t think either are quicker by car without excessive speeding. On the other hand, Sunderland and Bradford are both nearly an hour further, and thus correspondingly less accessible.

On the other hand, Leeds, Manchester and Newcastle enjoy excellent frequent fast electric services to the capital

Unless it’s a day with a ‘y’ in it and the whole thing happens to be closed or delayed!

Moreover, those areas which can seriously be considered to have a serious violent crime problem Boris lost (Lambeth, Enfield, Newham…).

Rob’s right, education is vital, and neither party is exactly inspiring here, Labour with its overly-target orientated exam-to-death structure and the Tories with their loony fringe of academia-hating morlocks who think universities are an ideological battleground against the mythical ogres of the Left. Mind you, the North’s not exactly short of good universities (I went to one) and the best seem be in the best performing cities already.

However, the main point against PX here is a complete lack of understanding of how the world works – postwar UK policy is littered with examples of governments Doing Something Bold Somewhere and cocking it up. Concreting over Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire begins to look a bit stupid when, as a wild guess, Kent becomes a massive growth area due to fast rail links to London, Lille, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Frankfurt…

This point isn’t entirely irrelevant – Oxford and Cambridge are both on branch lines from London (albeit well served by commuter trains). Sunderland and Bradford are both off the mainline map a bit. On the other hand, Leeds, Manchester and Newcastle enjoy excellent frequent fast electric services to the capital. Coincidence? There are a stack of places who think that sort of thing matters, and it’s a damn sight easier than relocating 3m people. After all, PX are advocating that because you can’t do anything about the geography of the north, you should alter the geography of the south. That’s nonsensical.

The best any government can offer is flexibility and a willingness to realise its own limitations. Labour offered neither, a PX-influenced Conservative Party isn’t going to either on this evidence.

It’s a lovely idea…if is wasn’t for all the research money heading down south:

Scientists from the universities of Liverpool and Manchester and the Daresbury laboratory have spent the past seven or so years designing a new photon facility that would allow researchers for the first time to see how molecules interact. The facility, named the Fourth Generation Light Source (4GLS), could have shed light on questions as diverse as how drugs work in the body and how to improve the performance of engines. Dr George Neil, a physicist at the Jefferson lab in the US, described the project as “exciting, forward-looking and ahead of its time”.

But in October last year, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), which funds physics and large research facilities in the UK, decided to cancel the project. Then, early this year, it announced it was to launch a new project to design a light source facility led by a scientist from Imperial College London. It also said it will set up a virtual institute for photon science, made up of five researchers from Oxford University, Imperial College and University College London. Where the new light source facility will be based has yet to be decided but it is unlikely to be near Manchester.

The worst part of the RDA system is that it encourages grant-seeking rather than genuine innovation. When you start a business up, there is a legion of ‘advisors’ waiting to help you, each waiting to get their forms signed at the end of a consultation so that they can prove how much they’ve helped to ‘develop businesses’. Have they helped? Rarely. Would business owners pay for their service? Absolutely not! The effect of regeneration can often be quite stifling on the very creative industries that it’s meant to promote. These are not just my views but the views of plenty of people within the industries affected. The report makes numerous good points in saying that this funding isn’t working, and there needs to be a re-think, particularly to devolve control to a democratic level as opposed to a bureaucratic level. What’s wrong with this?

On the point of people moving south, well… the solution to that is simple: invest in education. Not just more technical colleges, but building some genuine world-class facilities in the North. Expecting to replicate Oxford or Cambridge in Blackburn or Hull is of course a silly idea, but the major universities of the North could do more to generate the human capital necessary for high-tech industrial growth. This requires a relentless focus on quality rather than quantity. What’s great about silicon valley isn’t the number of techies in one place, it’s the fact that they’re the smartest group of techies in the world. If this doesn’t happen, if the critical mass needed to sustain high-tech hubs isn’t reached, you can hardly blame people for following the money (and it’s not just the money – some of us just want to work doing something interesting) and going south.

New Labour could be rightfully called many things but “radical”? Get thee to a dictionary.

LFAT: On the staff -

Anthony Browne – Director of Policy for Boris Johnson and ex PE Director
Nick Boles – Transition chief for Boris and ex PE director
Munira Mirza – Chief cultural advisor for Boris and contributor to PE
Kate Hoey – Sports advisor for Boris and contributor for policy exchange

On the reports

Million Vote Mandate – A blueprint Boris’s administration
Replacing the Routemaster – the blueprint for Boris’s campaign

and the Trustees:

Charles Moore: chair of the board of trustees. He is a former editor of the Daily Telegraph and Spectator columnist.

Rachel Whetstone: former-Conservative leader Michael Howard’s chief of staff while he led the party. She is Godmother to David Cameron’s son Ivan.

Theodore Agnew: donated £50,000 to Conservative Central Office in February.
Richard Briance: deputy chairman of Hawkpoint Partners, a leading city corporate finance advisory firm and has donated £11,900 to the Conservatives since 2002.

Richard Ehrman: special adviser to the Employment Department in the 1980s and was chief leader writer at the Telegraph in the 1990s.

Not joined at the hip at all then.

Seriously, how far to the right of Genghis Khan do you have to be to believe this government was anything other than an ideological continuation of John Major’s, just with less corruption at first, a more appealing leader at first, and slightly higher taxes?

WTF? It’s absolutely clear from the Mayoral results that in all areas that could plausibly be described as containing “those that Labour have failed”, Boris lost.

To those who think Policy Exchange isn’t a Tory think-tank – yeah, and Sinn Fein was a legitimate political organisation without links to terrorists.