A few weeks ago, one or two of the nationals ran pieces suggesting that the economic downturn would hit the south as hard as, if not harder than, than the north.
The logic was that, this time around, those in the financial, technological and professional classes would bear the brunt of the downturn.
My suspicion, at the time and now, was that these pieces were probably sparked by one or two friends (lawyers, bankers or whatever) of management-level staff on the London-papers being layed off.
Those papers then made the mistake of confusing the (true) claim that the south would also be hit with the (false) claim it would be worst hit.
The figures said otherwise a little while ago, and they say the same again now.
I’ve been messing around with the unemployment statistics out today and produced this map. It shows percentage unemployment increases (in red) or decreases (green) in each region in the last quarter:

The northern economy, together with those of Scotland and Wales, will still suffer most from any downturn. There are a number of reasons for this, including (a) residual dependence on manufacturing in those areas, (b) the fact many old mill towns were already struggling to transform their economies, so their new technology- and service-based economies are still small and fragile; and (c) national and multinational companies tend to withdraw from the north before they withdraw from London and the south.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 17th, 2008 at 2:46 pm and is filed under And in other news.... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.