From
The Guardian - "Without the Beeching report there might not have been Brexit"
An interesting read. Amongst elements ...
Research by economists at the Centre for Economic Performance at the LSE shows why. The 20% of places most exposed to rail cuts between 1950 and 1980s (some of which occurred before the Beeching report) have seen 24 percentage points less population growth than the 20% least exposed. There has also been a brain drain of young and skilled workers, and an ageing of the population.
No great surprises there, but what were cause and effect - was the rail service lost because the areas weren't performing well, or did the areas cease to perform well because of the rail services being lost? Asking another similar question, isn't it natural that growth in more recent times has been in places where transport if in place to support that growth?
The cut-off state of once thriving industrial towns was well described by Andy Haldane, the chief economist of the Bank of England, in his capacity as chairman of the government’s Industrial Strategy Council, in a recent speech in Newcastle upon Tyne.
Haldane described how he arrived in the former mining community of Ashington, 15 miles north of the city. “When I visited Ashington, I arrived from Morpeth by taxi fairly late at night. This was the only way to get to the town. It was too late for the buses. And I had narrowly missed the last train from Newcastle by around 55 years, courtesy of Dr Beeching. He has been neither forgotten nor forgiven.”
Indeed. Though I note that the "blame" on their being no buses seems to be based on the thought that buses don't run in the evening even if trains do!
