There was a really terrifying programme on the BBC the other week.

It wasn’t Doctor Who or the latest Scandinavian thriller - it was much scarier than that.

It was a programme on Radio 4, fronted by Professor Alison Wolf. A few dissenting comments aside, its premise was that the UK’s regional development policies were a total failure.

They had failed miserably in the past and there was very little hope that such strategies could ever be successful. They were the economic equivalent of King Canute trying to halt the tide. In this case, the tide was the market. Spending millions trying to buck economic forces was a hopeless cause, simply throwing good money after bad subsidies.

Although the programme focussed on the north-east of England, Linwood and Ravenscraig were cited among the examples of well-meant but costly failures, doomed from their inception.

They were doomed because you can’t oppose the market. If the market in the UK determines that business flourishes best in London and the south-east, and that’s therefore where employment is buoyant, then we have to live with that. Any attempt to do otherwise is a wilfully reckless attempt to distort economic reality.

For those of us living outside the south-east of England, this is an alarming hypothesis. But, the contributors argued, it’s a hard truth which has to be faced up to. Anything else is delusional.

But what about those unfortunate people living in the north?

“We should help poor people, but not poor regions,” said one of the experts enigmatically. I suppose this is what planners call "managed decline." It wasn’t spelled out what the best help for poor northerners would be, but I got the impression it would involve encouraging them to feel the fear - then get on their bikes and pedal southwards.

Scary stuff for us northerners. But Professor Wolf’s realists went further. Rather than throwing good money after bad in doomed regional strategies, UK government spending should follow success. The inevitable problems caused by the concentration of enterprises and people in London and the south-east should be addressed by investment in infrastructure and housing in precisely those areas.

Moreover, in this situation, is there any place for national pay structures in the public sector? For example, does it make any sense to pay teachers and nurses in the south-east the same wages as their colleagues in the north where housing costs are only a fraction of those in the south? Not if we want to attract and retain workers where they are needed most, the argument went on.

Professor Wolf also helpfully pointed out that public sector workers in the north might be earning relatively too much, making it hard for private employers in these areas to recruit talent and keep their labour costs down.

Is there any hope for the north of England and the outlying Celtic regions? Only if the market dictates it, the experts suggested. After all, in the nineteenth century, the north-east of England led the world in coal mining, engineering and shipbuilding. Market forces might bring about a similar resurgence in the future. No suggestion of what these changes in market forces might possibly be but the Nissan car factory in Sunderland was held up as a beacon of hope.

Then again, the market itself might bring about a balancing readjustment. Businesses and families might begin to get fed up with the traffic, crowds, high house prices and all the other problems encountered in the congested south. They themselves might decide to move north to seek a better quality of life.

But, hang on a moment. What would they be moving to? Isn’t the market moving most of the jobs to the south?

Well, I was in a cold sweat by the end of that programme, I can tell you. It’s frightening to realise how deep-rooted now is the Thatcherite orthodoxy that market forces are wholly good and state action wholly bad.

But when I calmed down, I began to think that maybe the programme had a point. When you look at the UK, its geography, its ever–increasing dependence on London’s financial services and the dominance of the London political, business and cultural establishment, perhaps regional development strategies in the UK will always be half-hearted and always doomed to fail.

A more radical re-arrangement of economic structures is maybe what’s needed. If Scotland the UK region is doomed, then maybe we should give a try to Scotland the sovereign state.