Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

At the end of the twentieth century, of England’s ten administrative regions only three (London, the South East, and East Anglia) reached or exceeded the national average wealth per capita. All the rest of the country was poorer, sometimes very much poorer indeed. The North East of England, once the heartland of the country’s mining and shipping industries, had a gross domestic product per head just 60 percent that of London. After Greece, Portugal, rural Spain, southern Italy, and the former Communist Länder of Germany, the UK in 2000 was the largest beneficiary of European Union structural funds—which is a way of saying that parts of Britain were among the most deprived regions of the EU. The country’s modest overall employment figures, a much-advertised source of pride for Thatcherites and Blairites alike, were skewed by the disproportionate size of the thriving capital city: unemployment in the North of England remained much closer to the worst levels in continental Europe