As the phrase goes, I will take no lectures from the right hon. Gentleman, who served on the Treasury Bench while I served on the Opposition Front Bench. He was there when the OBR confirmed that the UK was suffering the slowest recovery of any major advanced economy, with GDP at the end of this year further below 2019 levels. That was on his watch. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor do not have the self-awareness to acknowledge it, saying it is everybody else’s fault, as the right hon. Gentleman just repeated. The blame game starts and there are the usual tactics of diversion.
What is the latest diversion? Well, unlike Nelson, the Prime Minister sees ships everywhere—preferably French ones. “Vive la France!” he whispers under his breath. What about his handling of the pandemic? The time is not right, he says, to hold anyone—that is, him—to account through a public inquiry, as he needs to get on sorting out the pandemic, yet in the middle of that pandemic he initiates a major reorganisation of the NHS, so clinical and support staff, who are under huge stress, are being distracted from the real job at hand. That is the perversity of this Government.
The Prime Minister seems to forget that, in cahoots with the Chancellor, he implemented a massive cut to aid to the poorest nations during a pandemic. So much for global Britain.
How are the Government going to sort out the country’s economic travails? Another slogan will help out: levelling up. I am not sure whether the Prime Minister shared the levelling-up speech with the Chancellor; if he did, the Chancellor obviously did not bother to read it. In fact, I am not even convinced that the Prime Minister bothered to read it before he delivered it. In his levelling-up speech in July this year, the Prime Minister referred to the scale of the task that faced the German nation on reunification. Does he know the scale of the problem in this country? The Germans actually did something about it: they invested over decades. I suggest that the Prime Minister checks out what they did. Rumour has it—it is a rumour—that he is not a details person, but on this occasion he may want to make an exception.
If the Prime Minister is going to mention German reunification, he would be well advised to look at the scale of the intervention that was undertaken. The Centre For Cities analysed what putting the words of his levelling-up speech into action might mean. The analysis was entitled “What can German reunification teach the UK about levelling up?”; the answer, as it happens, is a great deal. The cost of this scale of levelling up would be at least £1.7 trillion today, which is around 75% of a year’s UK GDP. Closing the north-south divide would cost hundreds of billions of pounds over decades, if done properly. The Government have come nowhere near that level of investment or commitment.
England’s biggest cities, including Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, have the lowest productivity and life expectancy in western Europe—on the Prime Minister and the Chancellor’s watch. In Liverpool, life expectancy is four years below the European average. All major cities outside London are at the bottom of the western European league table for productivity, after 10 years of Tory control. The evidence of social and economic inequity across the country in terms of health, education, region, environment, cities, towns, countryside, age and gender is there for all to see.
What is depressing is the insouciant—there’s the French again—attitude of the Chancellor to it all. The scale of the task that faces the country is in inverse proportion to the Chancellor’s lack of action. In sum, on the bridge, the Prime Minister sees ships everywhere; meanwhile, below decks, the Chancellor is scuttling HMS UK.