Politics & Power Quote by John Prescott

Prescott’s line lands like a shrug, and that’s the point. “In the north east, there” is a politician’s double-locative: it signals regional attentiveness while keeping the speaker safely at arm’s length from anything concrete. Then comes the passive, bureaucratic fog: “they have had quite a bit of government offices moving in.” Who decided? Who benefited? Who paid? The sentence carefully avoids agency, which is where political accountability usually lives.

The real work is done by the final clause: “It’s not a new policy.” That’s a defensive sentence disguised as a neutral fact. In the context of British regional inequality and the long-running attempt to rebalance the economy away from London and the South East, Prescott is trying to inoculate himself (and by extension, his government) against the charge of last-minute pork-barrel politics. If critics frame relocations as cynical electioneering or a flashy headline meant to appease the North East, he preempts: relax, this has been underway.

There’s also a quiet management of expectations. “Quite a bit” sounds substantial while remaining unmeasurable; it invites agreement without inviting scrutiny. The subtext reads: we’re doing something, we’ve been doing something, and you shouldn’t demand either a timeline or a ledger. It’s classic retail politics in a technocratic register: reassure the region, deny novelty (and therefore opportunism), and keep the details pleasantly out of focus.