“Everybody thought the EU was about people coming into the country … no-one told of us the benefits”.

The question - no calculators - is would you rather have 100% of something, or 99.5% of something that is 10% bigger.

(No everyone I have worked with since 2016 has got that).

There is no such thing as EU money.
And sooner or later you run out of it.

Where do you live @thechaseison71?The decline of those "crappy towns" is often due to deindustrialisation. Industrialisation created huge wealth which the whole country enjoyed. The government does have a responsibility to help them or should we just all move down to the south east? How would you like that?

If the government had a long term growth and business strategy we’d prosper as a nation but successive governments have made short term decisions which have killed manufacturing and skills, diminished our farming and food security, and essentially sold us off to the Chinese. I’m amazed we are still punching as high as we are tbh.

Yes, so the fact Durham is getting £10m less means:

The UK government is deciding to distribute its money with different priorities to the EU
and/or
There’s less money to go around overall, even with the £6bn extra

The general ‘less to go around’ might be in part due to Brexit trade rules - as well as Covid, energy prices, wars, mass migration, older infrastructure reaching end-of-life etc, but it’s a lot more complicated to unpick.

I’m just disagreeing with “we used to get free money”.

Because if you buy into the idea of "society" you recognise how dedicated these areas were by the demise of particular industries, in this case, coal. It's fair enough that time and progress means things come to a natural end but nothing effective has been done to replace that industry.

Westminster thinks the North stops at Birmingham or maybe Leeds at a real push but you only have to look at HS2 to see how few fucks they give. They should have started construction at the northern end and see how far south they got before running out of money...who wants to bet they'd have found a way to get it all the way down so southerners reaped the benefits?

The Northern Powerhouse and leveling up initiatives have done virtually nothing for villages like Horden. We need large industries, factories, car manufacturing to be encouraged to come here. We need employment policies to make it feasible for all employers to offer jobs to 16+ who don't come from traditionally academic backgrounds and want to start earning and learning skills on jobs. Apprenticeships look great on posters but actually getting one is a different story. Supermarket jobs are found (or not) through anonymous portals that screen out using AI anyone without x qualifications so unless you know someone with a business or trade it's v v difficult.
That's why.

Because it benefits everyone in the UK? Do you think having areas becoming more and more deprived, towns going to rack and ruin, more and more people turning to crime due to the lack of employment and opportunities is good for anyone? Not everyone lives in London.
It is a moot point anyway. The money doesn’t exist anymore, due to our economy shrinking as a result of leaving the EU. So even if we wanted to fund them we couldn’t, as the money isn’t there.

The money hasn't "gone" anywhere. The economy is just much smaller than it would have been if we hadn't left the EU so there is less money to spend on everything.

Do you think it has though?

We were told of the benefits but those people saying how great it would be if we left just shouted louder and didn't care about lying.

The key issue was closing down, and permitting the closure of vast amounts of the countries manufacturing industry.

Relying on subsidies from the EU or more locally is not the answer, does not move the country forward, does not give growth.

The economy has to be sufficient to give the people a good standard of living, and pay for services - sadly many decades of mis management coupled with a shift in manufacturing towards Asia has caused us to get into a spiral of terminal decline.

EU or no EU we should have re-positioned ourselves from mass production of goods into, high end, low production, high return, high technology goods decades ago - but in stead we chose the service sector route, which will evaporate with AI.

Its nothing to do with Brexit, that's an easy excuse, it all started long before in the 1960s, accelerating through the 70's, 80's and 90's.

Its too late to reverse it now - we are doomed, even if we re-join the EU, we will be propped up by them with the worst of deals.

People will always want change when they feel they are treated unfairly.
People were told the money spent on EU membership could be put to better use improving deprivation

The projects weren't funded by the EU, they were funded by member states using tax payers money and including an extra layer of expensive bureaucracy. Some countries paid more than others and the UK was one of the top contributors. The funding was then allocated across the EU. A lot of things have happened since Brexit and money has been used on other things. There are quite a lot of regeneration projects across the EU that are in a very sad state. A place that has no jobs can be propped up by outside funding but it won't thrive in the long run.

I'm not a Brexit fan and I do think the EU benefited us in many ways. However, I don't think it offered value for money on this kind of thing.

I agree. But that is democracy, I guess.

The way the world is right now "ever closer union" looks very attractive. We are a minnow. The US giving NATO the boot makes our position even more vulnerable. The negatives of Brexit keep on multiplying.

i was recently in the Canaries and some of their buses are EU funded - and it’s literally painted on the bus.

Oh, the irony ...

I live in a former mining area which benefited from large chunks of EU funding yet still a large number of people voted for Brexit and now Reform. Apparently bewitched by the 'charisma' of grafters like Farage. Are we better off now we have some Reform councillors? Absolutely not, just more divided.

It used to be done quite frequently. Tax to Bootle, BBC to Salford. The area the article is about is quite remote though. It does say they got a station built in 2020 and that there are possibilities in renewables.

Oh thank God someone said it. The magic EU fairy didn’t benevolently give away free money to prop up British shit holes. We paid for it. You need to be asking your MP where that money has been redirected to. I would bet it’ll have been sucked up into the national debt.

Quote
"But some pale stale males..."

As ever on mumsnet racist language is fine as long as it is directed at White people.

I don’t completely agree. The leavers deceived people - Farage deceived people. But the Remainers didn’t. Lots of remainers tried hard to make people listen, but just got shouted down. People preferred to listen to easy to understand lies rather than complicated truths.

They directly lost funding from a third party. Was it not obvious the UK wouldn't replace it? Presumably if we could have afforded or wanted to spend those sums on those areas, we would have! Instead we essentially used German taxpayers' funds on it.

Why should they keep being funded though?

We all knew the benefits of the EU

it still makes me angry now

Well, we’re quite a small island and not everyone can live in the south-east, there’s not enough water. With good transport infrastructure and good tax breaks it should be possible to bring large employers north. But for some reason it seems to be beyond us.