Of all the promises made by Conservative politicians over the past 14 years, the pledge to convincingly reduce the UK’s regional inequalities has turned out to be the most empty. George Osborne came up with the idea of the “northern powerhouse”. Theresa May talked about somehow getting “our great cities firing on all cylinders to rebalance our economy”. Boris Johnson enthusiastically inflated the same ideas with his trademark brand of hot air, and tantalisingly floated them over the kind of post-industrial places that switched from Labour to the Tories in 2019. But beyond a few promising spurts of devolution to metro mayors and tiny pots of regeneration funding, hardly anything changed. That so many councils are now facing bankruptcy compounds the sense that the “levelling up” drive was something close to a scam.
This does not, of course, invalidate the basic idea. The UK – and England in particular – remains absurdly centralised and riven by a yawning economic gap between London and the south-east, and just about everywhere else. If a new government is going to create a new kind of country, this is where a lot of its focus should fall. My advice to them is as follows:
