Abstract
Covid-19 is a threat, but it also creates opportunities for serious thought about the future. Given deep structural problems which have enabled populism to become embedded in England, there is a need to think of a longer-term transformation: not whether but how and where the state comes back in, and how relations between state, markets and planning, city-regions, innovation and universities are reconfigured. Historically, the two major populist movements in the advanced world (American in the late C19th and Germany et al in the 1930s) occurred as a consequence of massive technological changes; the movements were not primarily located in the big cities, and they involved those in previously established but now declining occupations. Populism only disappeared as those populations reduced in size and as those areas changed function or declined much further. Responding to the ICT revolution, populism in England (the subject of this paper) locates today in Rodriguez-Pose’s ‘places that don’t matter’ (PDMs), and is reinforced by the deep educational/residential segregation of contemporary society with 50% higher education participation and graduate-intensive big cities. But England seems stuck here and major ‘pathologies’ in the neo-liberal framework are responsible. These include higher education as a competitive market, the separation of cycles and growth in macroeconomic policy, and the reliance on markets with arms-length regulation and de facto absence of government from a shareholder-value maximising private sector. Policy is still short-term and largely made in Westminster despite city-regions. A long-term policy transformation is necessary to restart the ‘transmission belt’ of the ICT revolution. We need developing long-term plans based on city-regional agglomerations, into which core city networks linking knowledge-based companies, research universities and city-regional administrations are integrated; with expanding travel-to-work areas incorporating the ‘places that don’t matter’; and supported by a research-oriented economic policy.
Highlights
Redistribution will again be on the agenda; the privileges of the elderly and wealthy in question...As western leaders learnt in the Great Depression, and after the second world war, to demand collective sacrifice you must offer a social contract that benefits everyone. (Financial Times, The Editorial Board, 2020 April 4)
Transformative Strategies? Blue Skies Thinking We argued above that some governments have over-relied on markets and that this has led to the decline of certain regions, which have become vulnerable to populism
Major increase in higher education participation: Two levels of tertiary education Higher education participation needs to increase in the long-term, and with this growth of graduates we need a corresponding growth of graduate jobs
Summary
It allowed a partial dismantling of the unionised, Fordist-Chandlerian economy, which had involved nationalised industries, capital controls, protected financial systems, and state intervention While it may have been initially necessary, the major pathologies within the neo-liberal framework have taken effect over the last three decades, as a result of the dominant position it took in policy making in England.. Some of the framework’s elements are valid: it is clear that knowledge economies flourish with competitive markets in innovative technologies and high value-added industries, especially when provided with access to high-risk finance and reservoirs of highly-educated workers This has created the illusion that there always efficient market solutions to problems, with the consequence of down-playing the role of government. 2. Integrating PDMs into the Manchester travel-to-work area, while constructing networks between research universities, city-regional government, and knowledge-based companies. ‘More generally, as Angus Deaton has said: “This BA/non-BA divide just comes up again and again”’ [8]
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