Matthew Endersby

Is it a good time to remind people that Britain successfully used price controls during WWII and that this, alongside other price targetting policies, are part of the reason Britain managed to sustain the war for so long?

I guess this is end game of Thatcherite housing policy - sell of the best council housing, drive the rest into managed decline. Blame municipal socialism & migrants for its decline & then demolish it for luxury flats. The Welfare State dream of council housing gone

EXCLUSIVE: Jess Phillips, safeguarding minister, resigns from govt. “The desire not to have an argument means we rarely make an argument..."

In Doncaster, the minimum wage is now 82% of the median local salary. In Sunderland, it's 80%. In Wigan, roughly the same. A person in Doncaster who has been in the same job for fifteen years, who did the training, got the qualifications, turned up every morning and did it properly - that person now earns barely more than someone who first walked through the door on Monday. The gap between the floor and the middle has been quietly compressed until there is, for practical purposes, no middle left. There is the minimum wage and there is something fractionally above it, and that's it. If you're a hard-working Brit ready to make something of yourself in the 20s, that is the offer. If you're in, say, Reading, the minimum wage is 53% of the local median. There's a bit of a ladder there. The rungs are spaced apart; you can see the next one from where you're standing. In Doncaster the ladder has been sawn off at the second rung and what remains is a stepstool. The North East pays its workers £200 a week less than London. One in five local areas across the North East, North West, and Yorkshire sits in the most deprived decile nationally. That figure - and this is the bit that should grieve anyone who has ever used the phrase "levelling up" without laughing - has not moved since 2019. Five years. Five years of levelling up, which was a slogan the Conservative Party invented because it tested well in focus groups; and five years of its Labour successor, which dropped the slogan but kept the strategy of doing sod-all and hoping the media would keep to its decades-old pact of not giving a toss about the North and not investigate the numbers. That's fine, as it turns out, because the numbers are exactly where they were. Raising the minimum wage every April and calling it economic policy is the equivalent of painting over damp. The wall looks fine for six months and then the stain comes back and the hazard is even worse, because the problem is structural, and you haven't touched the structure. You move the floor up because you've given up entirely on building anything above it; and the people who pay the price are precisely the ones who did the right thing - who trained and grafted and stayed in their town instead of leaving for London - and are now watching the distance between their fifteen years of experience and a first-day wage compress to a couple of quid an hour. There is a word for what happened to these towns, and the word is deindustrialisation, and it was a policy choice, a deliberate strategy. The mines closed. The factories followed. The skilled trades dried up. What replaced them was logistics, care work, and retail - sectors that pay at or near the legal minimum because the market for that labour was flooded, deliberately, by two decades of unchecked low-skilled migration that meant employers never had to raise wages because there was always somebody else who'd do it for less. I want to build Prosperity Zones all across the North and Midlands - special economic zones with lower taxes and lighter regulation, designed to anchor real industries with real skill requirements, not to attract another distribution warehouse or a spurious spot of gig work. Technical colleges running a dual apprenticeship system on the German model, training people in Doncaster and Sunderland and Wigan, Rhyl and Greenock and Mexborough and Grimsby, for the work that exists where they live. And a permanent reduction in low-skilled migration, so that the labour market is tight enough to force wages up on its own, without the government having to legislate another 20p increase every April so that they have something to call progress. We all know that 'progress' just isn't enough. Only Progress wil do. I think the North has been promised enough. I think it's time it got its own back.

A Chinese student created a website that maps British Museum artifacts to their countries of origin.