Matthew Holehouse, our British political correspondent, suggests that Labour will engage with levelling up by focusing on cities and the advantages of agglomeration
“Levelling up” the fortunes of Britain’s small towns outside the south-east of England was meant to be the signature policy of Boris Johnson’s ill-fated administration. Sir Keir Starmer promises to succeed where Mr Johnson struggled. In the past month there have been signals as to how a Labour government would approach this task.such as Brexit ) when such places feel overlooked. It reflects the notion that the job of policymakers is to ensure people should not have to travel from the place they were born to get well-paid work.Andy Street in the West Midlands . But it has also doled out cash to smaller places under the “Towns Fund”, typically for projects such as revamping the local shopping arcade. But there are trade-offs: money can only be spent once. Most obviously, Rishi Sunak has cut back HS 2 , a large intercity rail project, and redirected the funding towards less transformational projects such as road maintenance. The Tories have often revelled in the politics of cultural resentment which portrays townsfolk as “real voters” and city-dwellers as privileged metropolitans.MP for Wigan, a former coal-mining seat halfway between Manchester and Liverpool. She criticises an approach that “sees cities as engines of economic growth with surrounding towns at best anchored to them and pulled along in their prosperous wake.” Given that Labour’s political strategy has been focused on smaller towns, rather than the cities where it is already electorally dominant, it would have made sense if Ms Nandy’s approach prevailed.
