In a country with 4.3 million children living in poverty, a cost of living crisis and rampant inflation, every sensible person in Britain will be relieved to hear that the government is going for growth. It’s funny that no one thought of this before. But wait a minute: didn’t the Cameron government have a plan for growth – a “northern powerhouse”? Wasn’t Johnson’s big policy levelling up? If you live in a “left behind” area, this continual invocation of growth as a panacea can feel a bit desperate. That’s certainly how Liz Truss sounded last week as she trotted out yet another growth plan.
It’s the places that have not only been left behind, but kept behind (many of which voted Tory in 2019) that will undoubtedly be feeling decidedly rattled and a lot worse off after the chaos of the last few weeks. In the short time that she has been prime minister, Truss has managed to jettison both the government’s economic credibility and what little was left of a plan for tackling the UK’s spiralling regional inequality.
