The North Was Never Broken. It Was Designed This Way.

Twelve years. Six secretaries of state. Three manifestos. One expensive lie.

This month, the Labour government quietly hit the brakes on the electrification of the Midland Main Line – a flagship infrastructure promise that dates back decades.. No press conference. No statement. No apology. Just another promise absorbed into the growing wreckage of failed commitments to the North.

The headline may be about rail.
But the real story is systemic.

The North isn’t broken. It’s operating exactly as designed: underpowered, underinvested, and structurally excluded.

Take HS2. Announced with fanfare in 2009, it was meant to be the spine of a 21st century economy – linking London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds in a network that would rebalance the country. What we got was something else entirely. The leg to Leeds was scrapped. The route to Manchester abandoned. And now, even the surviving Birmingham-London section is billions over budget and running on fumes.

Meanwhile, London’s Elizabeth Line – a £19 billion feat of modern engineering – is fully operational. Thameslink has been upgraded. Crossrail 2 remains on the table.

In the North, we still debate whether it’s possible to run a train from Leeds to Manchester without delays, diversions, or replacement buses.

This is not just transport policy gone awry. It’s a deliberate economic structure that rewards the South and restrains the North.

For decades, public spending per capita has skewed dramatically in London’s favour. The capital receives more than double the transport spend per person than many northern regions. In education, health, innovation, and culture – the pattern holds. The results are as predictable as they are damning.

Life expectancy is lower in the North. Mental health outcomes are worse. Suicide rates are higher. Wages lag. Investment trails. Opportunity shrinks. And still, the solution offered is the same: another bid round, another consultation, another bus station.

Bradford, a city of immense potential, was recently gifted a new bus interchange. It doesn’t need a bus station! It needs a ten-year economic transformation plan – with real capital, leadership, and autonomy. But regeneration, it seems, is easier to reduce to a press release.

And all the while, we are told that devolution is the answer. But this isn’t devolution. It’s decentralised management – with no real control over tax, spending, borrowing, or industrial strategy.

Power is retained. Blame is outsourced.

Even the language has become dishonest. “Levelling up” was never defined because it was never meant to deliver. It was another slogan, not a strategy. A cover for inertia. A distraction from a system that was never designed to be level in the first place.

So what now?

The polite version of regional advocacy has failed.

Playing the game – submitting bids, attending briefings, waiting for trickle-down progress – has left the North poorer and angrier than it was a generation ago.

We need to stop clapping for crumbs and start demanding control.

Stop celebrating the arrival of a Greggs as proof of regeneration.

Stop pretending this is about fairness. It isn’t. It’s about power and who holds it, who benefits from it, and who is systematically denied access to it.

If the North were a startup, successive governments would be the investors who took the IP, fired the team, stripped the assets, and left it pitching for scraps.

The North doesn’t need sympathy. It needs sovereignty – over its own economy, infrastructure, and future.

I’m tired of waiting for London to notice us.
Is anyone else?