“Everyone knows that talent and energy and enthusiasm and flair are evenly spread across the country … It is opportunity that is not and it is the mission of this government to unite and level up the whole UK.” Thus Boris Johnson, in the summer of 2021, outlined how his flagship policy would help the country to recover from the pandemic “like a coiled spring”.
The familiar rhetorical flourish may trigger unhappy flashbacks to a period of politics conducted in the style of Mr Johnson’s former Daily Telegraph column. But Sir Keir Starmer was accurate – if opportunistic – last week in saying that much of the analysis behind levelling up was “good”. Brexit itself was a disastrous act of economic self-harm. But the seismic shock it delivered to the body politic opened up a necessary debate about regional inequality in post-industrial Britain. Sadly, Sir Keir was also right to point to the abject inability of Mr Johnson’s government, or its successors, to do anything meaningful about it.
