Lincolnshire - Home of the New Berlin Wall

I have just watched an excellent programme on BBC4 called Timeshift: The North-South Divide which sought to examine if a north-south divide still existed in England. One contributor argued that it did but that the line of the divide had shifted over the last 20 years or so with Grantham and most of Lincolnshire now in the South with the divide starting at the Severn Estuary and ending just south of Grimsby. The programme said that England is more regionally unequal than any other country in Europe and you have to go back to Germany before the Berlin Wall came down to find anything equivalent.

There appears to be no conception of 'being a southerner' amongst people from the South that is close to being comparable to the sense of 'being a northerner' amongst people from the North. This may not be surprising because that sort of sense of identitiy is often a defensive mechanism stemming from being the underdog - for example, there is also more of a Scottish identity than an English one.

The programme reminded me of the controversial report published by the think tank Policy Exchange in the summer of 2008 which argued that a decade of regeneration policies has failed to stop the inequality of opportunity between towns and cities in the North and those in the South East from increasing. The report recommended a series of radical proposals that would reverse the trend and inject a new momentum into regeneration policy. The key recommendations from the report were to increase the size of London by allowing landowners the right to convert industrial land into residential land in areas of above average employment; expand Oxford and Cambridge dramatically, just as Liverpool and Manchester expanded in the 19th century and for the Government to roll up current regeneration funding streams and allocate the money direct to local authorities - controversial stuff and not everyone agreed!

If you get a chance to watch the programme, I recommend it!