The economy as it exists outside the M25

Most national commentary still treats “the UK economy” as a single machine with its control panel in London. It is not. Productivity, pay, house prices and inactivity are geographically lumpy. A Bank Rate that is merely restrictive in Canary Wharf can be punishing in a labour market that never overheated.

Scotland has its own fiscal machinery, and 2026 is a year in which that machinery is being tested. The fiscal framework with the Treasury sets the borrowing caps, the Scotland Reserve, and the block-grant adjustments that make Holyrood’s tax decisions real. The Scottish Budget for 2026–27 was written inside those constraints. A government that would like to issue its own bonds still has to live with annual and stock limits agreed in London. More tax devolution has, paradoxically, made Holyrood more exposed to the timing of UK fiscal events.

South Lanarkshire, where this desk sits, is a useful corrective to both Edinburgh and Westminster narratives. Hamilton is not a distressed outlier and it is not a boomtown. It is a place of public-sector pay, logistics, retail, and commuting into the Glasgow economy. When national media discuss “the housing market”, they usually mean prices in zones 2 to 6. When they discuss “the labour market”, they mean vacancies in professional services. Those are real markets. They are not the only ones.

The North of England has spent another year being promised a strategy. Some of the transport and research money is real. Some of it is a press release attached to a project that was already happening. The industrial towns that still have mills on canals also have some of the cheapest housing and some of the weakest measured productivity in western Europe. You cannot interest-rate those facts away.

Regional policy fails when it is asked to be a substitute for national supply-side repair: planning, skills, energy costs, and a tax system that does not punish hiring. It also fails when the only regional story permitted is a London-versus-the-rest morality play. The useful work is more boring. It is about travel-to-work areas, about which public services still function, and about whether a young person who stays has a wage path that is not a dead end.

We will keep writing from Hamilton because it forces the sentences to be specific. If a policy only works in the Greater South East, it is not a UK policy. It is a regional one that has not admitted it.