BEING attached to declining Britain carries many penalties for the north: no, or slow income growth, growing child poverty, lack of investment, poor infrastructure, declining value of welfare benefits, to name but a few.

There’s also the centralised nature of UK government, with handouts from the Treasury like the one doled out last week.

The north has no agency in its own prosperity because unionists refuse to exercise self-determination.

The north can’t elect a government or play any role in one, so people here have no say in how this sub-polity is run. Stormont just doles out what’s doled out.

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The Resolution Foundation, an economic think tank, notes that the British economy hasn’t been growing and isn’t growing (0.1% in the last two quarters), and reckons that average UK incomes will rise by only 0.3% per annum until 2029-30.

Low-income families will be worst affected, as they have been since the mid-2000s. Incomes here are below the UK average, as they always have been.

The National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) found last year that Britain’s poorest 10% of households are worse off than the poorest in Slovenia and Malta, confirming a study by the Financial Times two years earlier.

People in Britain might have more cash, but the cost of living is........

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