Flickr/ Stacey MacNaught. Some rights reserved.So far at national level the Northern Powerhouse has been about fractious national debate around how to pull the North closer to the capital. It has been about the great railway-building of HS2, like this was the mid-19th century all over again. But in the globally competitive digital 21st century, the reverse challenge is the one we should actually be talking about: not how to pull England’s North closer to the capital, but how to pull the capital closer to the North.
I mean pulling capital as in money, investment, up to Manchester. The Northern Powerhouse needs actual hard cash to power it up. And it needs that cash for the right uses. Manchester has been in a five-year frenzy of building studios, office buildings and media centres - the safe assets that accountants and bankers can easily value on a balance sheet. The buildings to make stuff in.What’s really needed now is serious money for the creatives and the imaginers to make stuff with. That’s where the Netflix’s global TV drama hits and the breakout computer games, will come from. That’s how the real 21st Century growth will be turned on.
The North’s market opportunity
