Learning from the UK

Read in The Independent of 29 May 2015:

So that was reveiling news. In The Independent of 29 May 2015 Jon Stone wrote on poverty in London and Great Britain. Its message: "The most wealthy areas in Wales and Northern Ireland are on average poorer in terms of disposable income than the most deprived areas of London." The Office for National Statistics had released figures for household disposable income in different regions of the UK. Barking, Dagenham and Havering in London showed a disposable income more than double poorer the richest area in the capital, but the wealthiest areas in Wales and Northern Ireland still had lower incomes than London’s poorest areas. Of course, housing costs in London are significantly higher, so higher incomes here go to expensive rental and property markets. So how inequal are Great Britian and London then? It’s difficult to say. The picture gets disturbing, inequality should be judged more and more locally. So here it is: “The Government has brought forward plans to devolve power to cities and metropolitan areas in a bid to give regions more control over their local economies.”

In the Netherlands the same process of rising local and regional disparities is discernable. Poverty in Amsterdam is not the same as poverty in Groningen or Drenthe. Even without powerful global cities like London or New York the economic landscape of the Low Countries is showing traits of the same growing spikyness. Even though the Dutch love sameness, which they think is democratic, (and the Dutch always used to fight differences), they can no longer deny its existence. What the Dutch government therefore should do is radically decentralise the fiscal system. That’s what also Jaap Modder, Jeroen Saris and Wouter Veldhuis pleaded for in De Volkskrant of 2 February 2015. “The main spatial issues are no longer national, but European and local.” Regional VAT, they wrote, would give city-regions the means to invest in their own economy, more than in the existing system where the Dutch state distributes huge amounts of money according to principles that are no longer just. The regional disparties have grown already too big, the power of the Dutch state too weak.