The real motive of Tory “ levelling up ” is now clear.
It’s not about shifting prosperity from the wealthy South to disadvantaged towns and cities in England.
It’s about taking back political control from local councils through metro mayors imposed by Whitehall.
Nobody has asked for this revolution in local government – indeed, when asked, people voted against it.
But the Tories ploughed ahead, and they intend to accelerate the process.
The price for giving back half the money they’ve taken away from councils since 2010 is to demand directly elected regional bosses.
They think they can win those elections with candidates like ambitious, loud-mouthed Ben Houchen, mayor of the traditionally Labour area, Teesside.
Metro mayors have limited powers over transport and suchlike, but as Manchester’s Andy Burnham found during the pandemic, they are largely illusory. Westminster still rules.
The combined voices of West and South Yorkshire mayors failed utterly to save the Leeds-Manchester Northern Powerhouse Rail route, or the HS2 high-speed rail link to London.
Michael Gove, the Grovelling-Up-To-Boris Secretary, talks airily of better local transport. But the Tories have halved the “bus back better” fund.
They wasted more money on unusable PPE in six months than they propose to give poorer regions in the years to 2030, when this dog’s breakfast of a blueprint for Britain is designed to mature.
Levelling up is a classic Conservative trick, to wrest back and retain control over millions of voters in provincial England.
Scotland and Wales chose their own form of devolution. They don’t need or want these newfangled regional gaffers. The trick won’t work there.
Metro mayors are fake devolution. They get saddled with responsibility for things like buses they haven’t the money to put right, but no real powers to make life better for the people they are supposed to represent.
Don’t be fooled.
Kids' jabs going missing
The understandable fixation with jabs for Covid has unwelcome side effects.
The number of children having vaccinations against measles has dropped off, leaving one in 10 new kids in school without protection.
Health chiefs fear an outbreak of this highly infectious, potentially deadly disease if they’re not inoculated. This grim news comes as the Government does a screeching U-turn on mandatory Covid jabs for all NHS staff, on pain of dismissal. On balance, this is the right thing to do. But I fear the decision will strengthen the nutcase anti-vaxxers campaigning for an end to all jabs.
Health Secretary Sajid Javid, who called off the sacking threat (mostly for his own political purposes), has a big job restoring public faith in vaccination.
Is he up to it? I wonder.
Break this spell
Salford University students are warned that scenes in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations might upset them. Even more incredibly, at Chester University “trigger warnings” were issued about the risks of reading Harry Potter. Crazy.
I spent much of my first year at university reading Russian novels such as Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. They would give the little dears a nervous breakdown.
But fiction that accurately reflects reality prepares you for life better than a whole library of woke warnings.
