It's so weird to listen to the government bang on about "levelling up" without mentioning the seismic economic shift happening under their noses which could actually help - the shift to remote/hybrid work. https://www.ft.com/content/eb0a8169-30cd-4764-bde0-9a010abdcd7e

This leads us to a different set of "levelling up" policies - instead of tax breaks to lure companies to poorer areas (free ports, etc, never really worked anyway), invest in repairing public services/social fabric, more local autonomy, superfast broadband.

Of course the government should have been doing this anyway as a necessary precondition to any sort of levelling up, but instead they've actively hollowed out already-struggling places via austerity cuts.

The North East gained 21 low-tax enterprise zones since 2010, but it also took a 30 per cent spending cut per person. This was the wrong mix then, it looks even more like the wrong mix now.