Britain’s inequalities are growing and levelling up is difficult. Here’s why

Radcliffe in Greater Manchester. ‘Only in Britain would it be imagined that deep structural schisms could be closed in a single parliament.’ Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

The idea that governments should act to level up Britain is nothing new. For at least a century there has been an acceptance that something needs to be done for those parts of the country initially hit by the long-term decline of cotton, coal and shipbuilding, and subsequently at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s.

But only in recent years has regional policy become sexy, and for that we have Brexit to thank. The EU referendum was a wake-up call to Britain’s political class.