Peter Jackson column

Nov 25 2004 By Peter Jackson, The Journal

I recently saw the North/South divide vividly illustrated - an impoverished and backward South sustained by the generosity of a thriving North.

This was not, however, the UK, but Italy, where I went to visit a friend living temporarily in Palermo, Sicily.

Palermo is a fascinating city, where beauty and squalor live cheek by jowl. You can see some glorious Norman, Moorish and Baroque architecture, but around the next corner you'll find a World War II bomb site. There are ugly blocks of flats, festooned with drying laundry and narrow winding streets potholed and ill-drained. It has markets I thought only existed in the Third World, where skinned goats' heads and sheep's intestines hang on the stalls of bellowing traders.

There are, needless to say, no real parallels with the North-East, but Sicily makes an intriguing case study in regional regeneration, or non-regeneration. Unemployment runs at around 20pc, but it is impossible to put any reliance on the figures as the numbers working in the black economy are anybody's guess. Interestingly, those unemployed are among the most educated in Europe, for Sicily boasts an extremely large proportion of graduates among its young people. Here is evidence that education does not necessarily lead to prosperity.

Of those in employment, about 20pc work for the state and this is clearly having a distorting effect on the economy. Despite the poverty, the cost of living is not cheap, with restaurant and accommodation prices being comparable to those in the UK. I assume this is because of those on national public sector wage rates driving up prices.

The road network leaves something to be desired and, as in the UK, is largely paralysed by permanent roadworks.

In Sicily nothing gets done. It has taken them 25 years to complete one motorway and, over many decades, they are still only talking about a road bridge over the Straits of Messina to the mainland - a distance of only two miles. I bet we dual the A1 before it gets built.

The Mafia, although severely weakened in recent years, are still a force, presenting another drag on the economy.

There are no real lessons for the North-East in Sicily, except that the island makes it clear that however much central government does for a region, its future lies ultimately in its own hands. In fact, a study of the Sicilian experience should leave a North-Easterner with a spring in the step, in the knowledge that we really do have a great deal going for us.