The “Golden Triangle” is another destructive fantasy

The alchemists of old sought ways of turning base-metal into gold. Today, there’s a persistent delusion that the rich agricultural counties north and north-west of London can be turned into commercial gold.
Recently, the “Golden Doughnut”, “Silicon Fen”, “the Oxford-Cambridge Arc” etc. have been joined by “the Golden Triangle”, an arbitrary chunk of English countryside with London, Cambridge and Oxford at the points of the triangle, blessed, allegedly, with fantasy productivity levels.
It was sad to see Will Hutton reference this in in an otherwise thoughtful Observer piece about the UK’s economic woes caused by Brexit. By tying his piece to myths about productivity, Hutton walked straight into neoliberal traps about creating “a new Palo Alto” – in something that looks horribly like the Arc.
This allegedly forms part of north-west Europe with “the golden triangle of London-Oxford-Cambridge at its heart”. He concedes this “spikes up to Manchester, Leeds and Glasgow, west to Bristol and also south to Paris, Amsterdam and Antwerp” – most of north-west Europe, in fact.
This area, says Hutton, boasts 40% of Europe’s fast-growing tech businesses, though he admits the sector is dominated by US companies.
But the ancient universities still weave their myths, especially round their network of graduates. In reality, most of the Arc isn’t an area of especially high productivity. There are islands of it in Cambridge, Oxford, MK and around the M4 corridor. But tech isn’t what dominates the vast majority of the Arc.
The vital industry that dominates is agriculture. The five counties of the Arc are a massive part of the UK’s bread basket – you know, that bread basket that can already only help provide a little over half of our population’s food in an increasingly uncertain world. Hutton cites defence as a key industry for European co-operation, but food is as key a part of our national security as steel or armaments production.

The Golden Triangle is already dominated by a vital industry – farming

Much of that area is already water-stressed – and not just in the eastern counties. There are serious issues in the Chilterns, parts of Thames valley etc.. Climate change will exacerbate that and power-and-water-thirsty data centres will tip the area over the edge.
Some compare the Arc to the Randstad area in the Netherlands, but about the only similarity is both areas face significant inundation by the sea when Antarctic ice sheets begin to fail, as they will in the not-too-distant.
So really, do we want to hand a vital part of our land to Californian tech-bros, to damage and destroy as they wish? The new “Palo-Alta”, like perhaps the old one in California, faces many serious challenges in the years to come.
We ignore them at our peril.

Jon Reeds