When the post-punk hero Mark E Smith intoned, more than 40 years ago, “the north will rise again”, he probably didn’t have in mind a constitutional commission chaired by Gordon Brown. But a lot has changed since 1980. Now even Britain’s political class in Westminster seems to have realised that the gaping socioeconomic divide between England’s north and south can be tackled only with root and branch reform.
Labour’s Report of the Commission on the UK’s Future is a genuinely radical set of proposals for combating regional inequality, and contrasts sharply with the Tories’ rather pitiful strategy for levelling up. Replacing the House of Lords with a democratic alternative, devolving control of transport, infrastructure and housing to local government, plans for moving large numbers of civil servants outside London – all these ideas suggest that Keir Starmer might just be serious about thoroughgoing reform of the most regionally unbalanced advanced economy in the world.
