Mrs Marr freeps again

How many non sequiturs can you cram into one short article? Jackie Ashley seems intent on setting a new benchmark in her CiF article on the North-South divide.

It's coming again. It will overshadow Labour politics, and national politics, in the years ahead. It's the fault of an unbalanced economy and an unbalanced political system. "It" is that jagged and violent borderline division across England that appears on no Ordnance Survey map or AA atlas but which any traveller across Britain can see, smell and sense.

Well then, it's not coming again, is it? It's here already and has been for decades.  

The divide marks a kind of boundary between affluence and growth on the one side, and joblessness and decay on the other. It can be effectively disguised, of course. The city centres of Manchester, Leeds or York can offer consumerist affluence to rival London, while there are areas of deprivation in Bristol or Plymouth as bad as anything in Liverpool.

How is that a disguise? What does "consumerist affluence" mean? Where is there non-consumerist affluence?

"Picking winners" or helping manufacturers survive international competition – industrial policy itself – became forbidden. Bracing free-market winds would howl and a new economy somehow emerge by itself.

Were winners being picked before the practice was forbidden? Did not the decline of the heavy industries of the north in fact take place when "industrial policy" was government dogma, regardless of which faction was in power? Did not a new economy "somehow" emerge after those failed policies were abandoned?

On many indices of deprivation – teenage pregnancy, alcoholism, mortality – the old industrial areas are back where they once were.

Where they once were before what? Was it when the old industries were flourishing? Was it back in 1960, when Mrs Marr's father made a documentary that found local people humiliated by having to live from government hand-outs? Or before they all became accustomed to the cornucopia of hand-outs that the last government poured into Labour party rotten boroughs?

All of this in anticipation that the partisan spending of the Blair-Brown regime will be reversed. God forbid that the Coalition government should cease to maintain all those statist Potemkin villages. Why, the last time that happened - as Mrs Marr herself concedes - some of the people her father interviewed, "who had seemed so bemused and angry, moved on to get jobs, one even becoming a millionaire".