Anger is brewing in the north of England. From Manchester to Newcastle, via Liverpool or Sheffield, this vast, poor and populous region refuses the treatment that London has in store for it, which is preparing to impose a virtual confinement on it while the infection rates are again there started very strongly on the rise.
At a joint online press conference on Saturday 10 October, Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester (Greater Manchester), Jamie Driscoll, Mayor of North of Tyne (a region to the east encompassing Newcastle), and Dan Jarvis , Mayor of Sheffield, rejected outright the financial support plan made public the day before by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak. The latter proposes that employees of businesses forced to close by the government be compensated up to two-thirds of their salary, while Boris Johnson could announce on Monday the closure of restaurants, pubs, cafes in the north of England.
“This device is insufficient to protect our communities. If you work in a bar or a pub, most often on minimum wage, how can you live on only two-thirds of your income? You can’t pay only two-thirds of your rent and bills! “, protested the very media Andy Burnham, who has become in recent months one of the main spokespersons of “Northerners”.
Slingshot of Conservative MPs
“We do not accept this financial package”added the Labor Party member, who also threatened to take legal action against the government if Mr. Sunak’s operative part is not amended in the House of Commons. Steve Rotheram, the mayor of Liverpool, had estimated that the compensation should be“At least 80% of people’s income” and that the government in London cannot impose a re-containment ” cheap “.
These elected officials are all the more worried that their cities and regions, the country’s industrial lungs until the 1980s, today depend a lot on the hotel sector and that a new confinement, without adequate compensation, risks causing dozens of thousands of job losses. “Manchester has completely transformed over the past twenty years. Before, we used to go there for football, it has become a city centered around tourism. The number of hotels in the agglomeration has tripled in ten to fifteen years ”, underlines Thom Hetherington, organizer of several trade and artistic fairs in the metropolis (NRB Manchester or McArtFair).
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