MANY of us are about to get poorer. This is the unnerving suggestion made by the new Centre for Cities’ report about the impact of Brexit.
It says that while EU withdrawal will mean all UK cities will experience a fall in economic output, those such as Aberdeen, Edinburgh, which have large high-skilled service sectors, will be hit the hardest because of the likely downturn in trade caused by an increase in costs.
The downside effects will be worst with a so-called hard Brexit but, notes the report, there will also be negative consequences even with a soft Brexit. But it also points to a silver lining; that the cities which will be most affected by the Brexit downturn will be the ones best-placed to bounce back.
The flip-side, of course, is that those places, which initially can expect not to be hit so hard by EU withdrawal, places like Barnsley, Hull, Luton and Burnley, will not have the capacity to recover so well. By and large, it is these areas that voted to leave last year.
So, the irony is that in the years following Brexit it will be those cities which opposed leaving the Brussels club, the likes of the Scottish cities as well as London, which will be the ones to recover the best and enjoy, if it turns out to be the case, a Brexit dividend.
But this could take years to materialise. In the meantime the disproportionate hit taken by cities like Edinburgh and Aberdeen, the latter already struggling because of the downturn in the oil and gas sector, means the UK Government must take heed of the calls for a more tailored approach to Brexit to enable different places to cope with the specific challenges posed by withdrawal.
Last week, a House of Lords report spoke of the UK Government allowing “differentiated arrangements” for Scotland, notably on immigration. For some it has always seemed not only unfair but also impractical that, on the one hand, Whitehall is demanding a bespoke Brexit deal from Brussels, but, on the other, is denying the possibility of a bespoke deal for Scotland, or any other part of the UK.
On immigration, the UK Government has thus far insisted there has to be a one-size-fits-all UK-wide policy. As has often been argued the problem in Scotland is not that there are too many migrant workers but that there are too few to fill important vacancies.
Theresa May and her colleagues have decried the monolithic thinking with which the media approaches what they regard as the golden opportunities thrown up by Brexit but then adopt the same monolithic thinking when it comes to addressing the different needs that exist across the UK.
Surely as the Brexit process gets underway it is time for the Prime Minister and her Government to practice what they preach; to recognise some parts of the UK will themselves need bespoke solutions to specific problems.
Flexibility has to be the UK Government’s Brexit watchword if cities like Aberdeen and Edinburgh are not to suffer disproportionately over several years from a process they never supported in the first place.
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