Automation Will Deepen England's North-South Divide

Around the world, people are wondering nervously what automation might mean for their jobs. In Britain, it may have a striking, distinctively local twist. It won’t just eliminate some jobs and create others—it also risks heavily exacerbating the country’s north-south divide.

That’s one of the key findings from the blockbuster Cities Overview 2018 report, released Monday by the British urban think tank Centre for Cities. According to the report, the gulf between the largely ex-industrial cities of Northern England and the skills-rich post-industrial economy of the South will only widen as automation eats away at currently dominant employment sectors. (The picture is more mixed in Scotland and Wales.) There’s also a political dimension to the findings. Many of the northern cities most likely to lose jobs to automation voted to leave the E.U. in the Brexit referendum, a trend widely seen as expressing frustration with falling living standards and growing poverty. The report suggests that unless the state stages a major intervention to turn things around, the causes of this perceived frustration will only get worse.