By Ben Lucas

This is a moment of great risk and opportunity for British cities.  Post EU referendum, post Cameron and Osborne, the stakes have never been higher.  Cities have patiently and persuasively made the case for rebalancing growth and power, and for devolution to combined authorities with Metro Mayors.  They now face some big challenges, as we set out in Adieu: the impact of Brexit on British Cities - on EU funding, trade, investment, universities and the progress of their devolution deals.

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.

By Mike Emmerich (with thanks to Helen Pidd) 

This week's Economist newspaper carries an article on the BBC's move to Manchester under the heading "Not So Grim Up North" for which I supplied a couple of quotes. Judging from the messages I've had and (by my standards) significant feedback on Twitter, one quote in particular seems to have struck a chord, namely that the BBC is a handful of moves away from retrenching from the significant relocation it made in Salford Quays.

By Kevin Fenning

Last week saw the release of the Interim Report by Sir Charles Bean on the state of the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The headlines that accompanied the release mostly focussed on the Report’s assertion that the ONS’s move from London to Newport has been detrimental to its performance.

This is unfortunate for two reasons:

Firstly, it unfairly maligns the idea that high quality, highly technical public services can be delivered from outside London. Given the need for the UK to develop alternative hubs of economic strength that complement London’s global city strengths, and the ongoing process of devolution of political and fiscal power to the UK’s other great cities, this is a very troubling message.