Geography and crime

One of the issues touched on in my current novel-in-progress, the fourth Lake District Mystery, concerns the way in which rural communities are being damaged and even destroyed by the lure of the city. I’ve often been told by people in Cumbria that they are concerned about the drift of young people to the south. There are sometimes economic reasons for this movement, although many people – and I am one of them – would argue that the quality of life in the rural north of England is often more attractive than that in some other parts of the country.

The subject of ‘economic geography’ has been front page news in Liverpool, Manchester and elsewhere this week, following the publication of a highly controversial report by a right-wing ‘think tank’ that recommends people from places like Liverpool and Bradford to move to London, Oxford or Cambridge. Predictably, the reaction to the report, especially in Liverpool, a city that’s always high on emotion, has been hostile and derisive.

But leaving emotion to one side, the ‘think tank’ seems brain-dead to me. If British society is indeed ‘broken’, as the leader of the Conservative party argues, how can it be healed by some sort of economic evacuation of the north of England? I’d like to think this is something on which most of us can agree, whatever our political views.We need more cohesion, not less, and stronger communities in all parts of Britain, not a crazy imbalance between one corner of the country and everywhere else.