By Mike Emmerich

There is a view that after its post war flirtation with Morrisonian nationalisation and then Thatcherite privatisation, British industrial policy has settled into a new and desirable norm. As I write this blog, Janan Ganesh’s latest piece for the FT is staring at me. “The quiet success of Britain’s anarchic economic model” reads the headline, setting the tone for an argument to be heard often in parts of Britain that we have moved beyond the rigidity of our more doctrinaire past, and in doing so past our old rivals in France, and maybe even in Germany too, in creating a model that has fixed the generations-old British disease.

By Mike Emmerich & Irene Guillet

When there’s a beer named after a Government initiative, something unusual is happening. Thus it is with the Northern Powerhouse. What’s more, the beer in question, a first joint concoction of the Bradford and Leeds Breweries, is a deliberate homage to the spirit of intercity cooperation. And yet to a lot of people the Powerhouse is a failure (because the North-South gap remains) or a con (the work of a Chancellor bent on devolving cuts to gullible local politicians). A little over eighteen months after it was launched, this idea is consumer product, a failure and a conspiracy, or so some would have you believe. There is evidence to sustain only the first of these.

The Great Western Cities released its report ‘Britain’s Western Powerhouse’, authored by Metro Dynamics, last Friday. The launch of the report has received widespread press coverage at both a national and local level, reflecting the level of interest in devolution more broadly across the country.