{"id":10631,"date":"2025-07-20T14:02:24","date_gmt":"2025-07-20T14:02:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/10631\/"},"modified":"2025-07-20T14:02:24","modified_gmt":"2025-07-20T14:02:24","slug":"is-northern-ireland-an-economic-basket-case-like-richard-madeley-said","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/10631\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Northern Ireland an economic basket case, like Richard Madeley said?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Clearly Northern Ireland is not in that league so “basket case” is instead seemingly being used as a rhetorical shortcut to describe a persistently underperforming regional economy with structural weaknesses.<\/p>\n

Speaking on Good Morning Britain, Madeley said the UK state “pays in a huge amount of subsidies” to Northern Ireland, meaning the place is “running at a loss”.<\/p>\n

That is correct but the same analysis applies equally to all regions of the UK outside London and the south east of England.<\/p>\n

Every year the Office for National Statistics produces an analysis of “net fiscal balance for the countries and regions of the UK, external<\/a>“.<\/p>\n

This estimates how much each region pays in through taxes and how much it receives in public spending.<\/p>\n

In 2022, London and the south east paid in \u00a362bn more than they got back. The deficits in all other regions ranged from \u00a334bn for the north west of England to \u00a32bn for the east of England with Northern Ireland’s at \u00a314bn.<\/p>\n

This is characteristic of what is known as a “transfer union” – an arrangement where economically strong parts of a country subsidise, or make transfers, to weaker parts.<\/p>\n

Conceivably, critics of UK regional economic policy could argue that it shows that a situation has developed where the UK economy everywhere outside the south of England is a basket case.<\/p>\n

This subvention need not necessarily be a problem for Northern Ireland as no one is suggesting it will become a standalone state.<\/p>\n

It does however feature prominently in the debate about the economics of Irish unification.<\/p>\n

The economists John Fitzgerald and Edgar Morgenroth suggest it means that absorbing Northern Ireland into the Republic of Ireland would put “huge financial pressure”<\/a> on the citizens of the state. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Clearly Northern Ireland is not in that league so “basket case” is instead seemingly being used as a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10632,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,1294,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-10631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10631\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}