All your north/south crap.

Only if they're really necessary/worthwhile, otherwise you're just wasting money.

The only way to create jobs is to somehow encourage the large companies to set up here rather than somewhere else in the world, and that's difficult given that labour is cheaper elsewhere, and sadly our standards of education are slipping to the point that these companies won't come here because they know they'll have trouble recruiting people with the right skills.

Any job is better than nothing for the individual and the economy as a whole. These jobs could be construction of wind farms and home insulation installers. This would reduce our dependency on energy imports and make us less vulnerable to an energy price shock. Insulation could save money for all concerned.

Relying on large companies is a foolish objective. They are fickle and will move depending on where the subsidies are. While they might create a lot of jobs in one go, over all they barely create any jobs elsewhere locally. What would be better would be to concentrate all job creation efforts on small businesses. There should be National Insurance holidays and even council tax breaks for start ups. In the US the big firms created almost no jobs over the last decade. Only small firms created jobs there. I am sure that the same would apply here.

A better option is to take apart one of the state owned banks and create a whole raft of new banks, including a bank that is banned from mortgages and targeted to support businesses. That might push more funds towards small businesses who simply cannot get bank loans at sensible rates at the moment.

The government are giving tax breaks to companies who employ staff anywhere but the south-east. IIRC it is a reduced rate of NI.

Only to small firms for the first 10 employees outside London and the South East.

Can anyone tell me exactly why it's so grim up north? How exactly are people in Corby for example being helped in ways that people in Grimsby are not?

Could it simply be that northerners are all miserable gits?*



*that's tongue in cheek btw. Please don't shoot me.

Corby had a huge British Steel plant which when closed devastated the employment in the town. Many thousands of local jobs also went as a result because they depended on the money spent by the steelworkers.

That's not really helping with the "Why is Corby so much better off than the north"

For those who don't know, Corby is a few miles from me. It's in the allegedly prosperous Midlands.

That's the risk you take with towns dependent on single employers - if they go out of business, then what happens?

Yep, it is a big problem here as well.

The big employer in Osnabrück, Bielefeld and Herford was the British Army. The engineers pulled out of Osnabrück last year...

It's a well-known, well-quantified phenomenon that has been repeatedly subjected to rigorous academic study. The dividing line has been identified down to Commons constituency level (and runs roughly along the line of the Fosse Way. It affects employment prospects, university prospects, mobility prospects, general health, life expectancy, rates of life-limiting terminal illness esp. cancer, earning prospects, police funding, prison numbers, divorce rates and voting fairness...

... but yes, it's crap.

'Cos Nick said so.