Economic Development
Recent work by the Centre for Cities has forensically unpicked what we already know: there is an economic gap between London and the rest. And it is widening. This is no post-recession anomaly. Quite the reverse: this is the long term settled economic geography of the UK – unequal, unbalanced and divergent.
In the first of a series of essays on Poverty in the UK, commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Prospect magazine, Maurice Glasman argues for a new kind of statecraft which incentivises virtue and vocation
The debate around poverty, its causes and remedies, defines a political consensus. By making a distinction between necessary and unnecessary suffering it permits or forbids certain kinds of state action. If it is the case that redistributing wealth worsens the conditions of the poor and merely brings relief to educated administrators then to persist with such action would be perverse. If, however, it can be shown that redistribution creates flourishing individuals capable of participating in society then it is rational and desirable to pursue these ends. The distinction between necessary and unnecessary suffering thus defines the limits of political rationality. In delineating a domain of pain which is amenable to concerted public amelioration from a sphere of grief that is immutable, it defines the power of society to respond to the miseries of life.
