Poverty isn’t just a Northern issue Andy.

[SummerSummerSummertime]

Caught the Prime Minister on a podcast this week and he’s really stuck on a constant, hyper-focus on the North. Ok we get it, things are bad up there (former industrial heartlands etc) but as PM for the whole country, he needs to remember that hardship doesn't stop at a regional border if he wants to maintain national support.
Severe deprivation is happening right across the country, not just in northern heartlands:

London: The capital holds some of the highest actual poverty rates once astronomical housing costs are factored in.

Coastal Communities: Southern seaside towns face deep, hidden deprivation, low wages, and crumbling infrastructure.

The South & Midlands: High living expenses, struggling high streets, and insecure work hit low-income families everywhere.

He also claimed on the podcast that past governments just saw the North as "different" and forgot about it. But by constantly banging on about the North, isn't he just fuelling that exact same fire?
If he keeps treating the North as a special case, he's actively reinforcing a regional divide. Moving focus or power from Whitehall to Manchester might sound great on a podcast, but it does absolutely nothing for a struggling family in a southern coastal town who feel just as invisible to this new government as they did to the last one.
Poverty is a national crisis, not a regional identity.

If Andy wants to keep broad support, his messaging needs to acknowledge and support struggling communities everywhere.

It's only about an hour from Blackpool into Manchester, which we meant to believe is the new utopia.

I am not really understanding the point you are making. Many people commute to London from Hastings, yes you can get to Manchester or Liverpool from Blackpool but not London. There are more oportunitoes in London it is more open to kids from Hastings or Essex or bits of the West Midlands than those in the NE, the SW or Wales.

North of Inverness?

There are rich and poor areas all over the country but one of the most deprived counties is Cornwall and it is not possible to go any further south on the mainland than Cornwall. Outside of the tourist areas, the poverty is more acute than virtually anywhere else in the country.

Since I moved north my rent has just about halved, there are brilliant money saving shops like Heron, and little community cafés in most of the villages where I can go for a coffee, natter and warm up (or cool down at the moment). In London I just couldn't get out of debt.

Labour as a party seem to pick on a slogan & then repeat it at any opportunity.e.g working people & as you say the forgotten north.
They need to realise that any slogan breeds division and alienates some sections of the population.

All the rest of his cabinet not just him.
It nauseating and revolting that they also don’t realise that they can’t tax the country out of poverty without growing the economy through supporting British businesses and not tax them to the eye balls. Employment is on the decline because British businesses can’t afford keeping employees or replacing them. I’m referring to jobs which haven’t been affected by AI yet. Businesses have no appetite to spend an extra penny if they can spare it. The morale in the country is low.
Sad thing is that the this Labour government, regardless of the leader, does not represent the hard working Brits, who in their dictionary are privileged ( earn anything above minimum wage). They want to penalise everyone who is not on the dole. I am done with socialism. I want a centrist government who speaks to everyone and for everyone. Labour, the Champaign Socialist party, can do one.

Agree. Though ‘Downing street North’ is also a long way away from the Houses of Parliament where the seat of democracy is supposed to lie. How are all the ministerial MPs, spending a fortune and wasting time travelling back and forth to Manchester, able to attend debates and committees and listen to their parliamentary colleagues (including those of other parties)? Or represent their constituents in parliament? AB doesn’t seem to think Parliament is important.

@SpidersAreShitheads London is a world city and is amazing. It produces the lions share of wealth for this country and the most tax paid. It keeps other places afloat and our services going. It’s a vital cog. Burnham and others like to spend the money Londoners generate whilst vilifying them. It’s also true many high paid jobs are bailing out of the uk.

People like Burnham backed hs2 but did not have the nous to start it in the north! They just wanted a quick link to London. If they really wanted the north to improve they would have championed the hs2 sections in the north. The northern politicians saw it as a quick route to London with someone else footing the bill, and their tickets.

So you define deprivation as meaning living more than an hour and a half by train from population centre that is bigger than Liverpool and Manchester and associated towns combined? That would taking in large areas of the south and nearly all of Scotland.

Forget H2S, having electrified lines to the North would be a start.

No I was just making the point that people can and do commute to London from Hastings which you can't do from the NE, the SW or Wales.

Hastings, Jaywick and Thanet ARE deprived but it is not because the population cannot acess centres of employment.

I think he has the advantage over the London Labour MPs like Keir and Corbyn. They are in the London left echo chamber, of middle class do-gooders. Its not so much the poverty up north as the lack of opportunity. And that is absolutely the same as places like the seaside resorts. Mind you, the North has those too, e.g. Blackpool - which is poorer than Clacton overall.

Much of the population live in a wide belt around the M6 corridor between London and Liverpool/Manchester, with Birmingham and the Midlands in the middle. There is a large belt of educated, capable people in the axis from Liverpool to Leeds/W Yorks, who could be doing more for the UK economy if given the chance. It's geographically near by international standards, yet poorly connected at present.

If you could join up that population belt more effectively you could bring that population into the economy properly.

I think he mentioned coastal areas in his first PM speech, and has said, “every postcode” in all of them. Londoners may see Northerners as chippy, but there’s a bloody good reason for that!

Every postcode so long at they don’t start with IV or AB? A reminder that Aberdeen (which is about 5 or 6 hours drive north from Manchester) is struggling hugely under Labour’s Net Zero policies of buying oil from the North Sea from Norway rather than extracting it from the North Sea ourselves as somehow the CO2 doesn’t count if the Norwegians extract it. Plus of course all the taxes on oil firms in the uk making it uneconomic to extract.

I’ve copied this for those determined to ignore what AB has said about every postcode.

AB has said it, it’s been all over the news, it was explained earlier on this thread and posters are still determined to believe he is focused on Manchester and no where else.

Its becoming really obvious that this is your issue, if you can’t hear what he’s saying and read what people are telling you and you insist all he cares about is Manchester then the chip on your shoulder is showing.

It strikes me that half the problem is that people say the South when they mean London, and possibly the South East. Several posters have commented their experiences between NW England and "the South" but it takes longer to get to North Devon or West Cornwall from London than most of Northern England. Even Newcastle is more accessible. And don't get me started on the lack of public services. Over 2 hours drive to the nearest maternity ward from the 7th largest town in Devon for example.

Sorry but that's quite funny. So many slogans from the last 14 years of Tory rule!

You haven't mentioned Scotland! Or Wales or Northern Ireland!

See, we can all do whataboutery based on vibes.

I agree. I live in London, I'm on a 0 hours contract on nmw and I get scheduled maybe 5 hours a month if I'm lucky. I fall foul of the benefits cap, so not all of my rent is paid by Universal Credit and I don't get personal allowance from them. I'm struggling to live. I'm borrowing money from my dad, which is insane at 58, but otherwise I'd be starving and homeless. And I still have to pay that back.

Yes, totally agree! Sorry if that wasn’t clear from my post. I know London very well - and even lived there for a while - but I’m autistic, and middle-aged now, and never been more grateful for my rural, quiet life a long way away from the city and the south-east 😂

London is a fabulous city and often unfairly demonised by people from elsewhere with a drum to bang. But it’s cripplingly expensive and along with the affluence, also has plenty of areas of real poverty.

Also worth mentioning here again here that AB may well have said he intends to elevate “every postcode” but his actions so far aren’t matching his words. A throwaway sound bite oft-repeated is meaningless unless his actions match. We’ll see.

Two bad communication strategies doesn’t make it a good way to keep people on board.
The Tories didn’t get it right & Labour aren’t doing any better.
Get your communications right & it’s half the battle.
My point wasn’t a political party one rather a communications one.

Climate change anyone? We need to be investing in cleaner energy and better insulated houses not wind the clock 100 years back and go back to drilling out dinosaur juice that is limited anyway. Oil companies love mentalities like yours.
There’s been countless fires, extreme temperatures everywhere, all linked to climate change. Wake up smell the fire.

I agree with that but it's quite funny to say "Labour as a party seem to pick on a slogan & then repeat it at any opportunity" and talk about how divisive that is, like it hasn't been the norm in politics!