I think I’ve made it clear on here over the years how much I like living in London. For the past thirteen years or so, I have lived in a vast, exciting, multicultural metropolis where you never know what will happen next. I love trundling around the city in my powerchair, getting on and off busses and tube stations pretty much at will, enjoying the culture of one of the world’s greatest cities, the same as anyone else. Having said that, I still see myself as a northerner: I grew up in a fairly small Cheshire town where pretty much nothing ever happened. I still have an affinity for the North-West, and would like, sometime soon, to pop back up there to visit – due to the pandemic and other factors, it has been a while since I went ‘home’.

I was therefore quite appalled to hear Andy Burnham, mayor of Greater Manchester, talking on BBC Breakfast TV this morning. From the way Burnham described it, it sounded like the North has fallen tragically far behind London and the South East in terms of infrastructure and public transport. He said the rail network was still victorian, with vast numbers of services being cancelled at the last minute.

As he pointed out, that will have a hugely detrimental effect on the Northern economy. If we want the the rest of the country to achieve any form of parity with London, vast amounts of money need to be redirected and invested outside the capital. As I wrote here a few days ago, this imbalance really troubles me, particularly as a disabled guy and powerchair user. I can rely on public transport to get around London quite comfortably – it isn’t perfect, but it’s slowly yet steadily getting better. From what I hear, in the North-West, I would have to wait hours for a bus to get me anywhere; then, when it arrived, it might not have a ramp, and if it did the driver would need to get out of his cab to fold it out manually. How are disabled people expected to live rich, full lives with such poor services?

I suppose I have become a bit London-centric in the last few years, but this really gets to me. I know I’m bloody lucky to live where I do. A short bus or tube ride will take me almost anywhere in this vast, labyrinthine world city. But while London is flourishing and ever bigger sums of money are being spent on it, the rest of the country is being left to go to ruin. To be honest, not having been up north for so long, I find the picture Burnham drew of the sheer disparity between the quality of services in London and the rest of the country rather difficult to believe. It bothers me to think how I would be faring had I never moved here – would I still be pretty much confined to that quiet little town in Cheshire? More to the point, when is ‘levelling up’ really going to begin, so that we start to see the kind of expensive, world-class infrastructure commonplace in London appearing elsewhere in the country?