Rachel Reeves to Announce Billions in Regional Spending: Pie in the Sky Doesn’t Feed the Whippets

Another Day, Another ‘Levelling Up’ Lie: Why the North Keeps Getting Shafted

Pie in the sky doesn’t put bacon on the table, clothes on the kids’ backs, or food in the whippet’s bowl. And no matter how glossy the announcements from Westminster, people in the old industrial heartlands are sick to death of being sold shiny illusions from behind a London desk.

Here we go again. Next month, Chancellor Rachel Reeves is expected to announce “billions” in extra capital spending for areas outside the South East. We’re told this will follow a review of the Treasury’s infamous Green Book, the bureaucratic bible that tells bean-counters how to judge public investment.

Reeves promises this review will ensure “fairer treatment” for the rest of the UK. Critics have long argued the Green Book is systematically rigged in favour of the richest parts of the country, where economic returns are already stratospheric. So this is being sold as a “big shift.” A rebalancing. A levelling.

But it’s more about running scared from Reform…

Sound bloody familiar?

It should. Because we’ve been here before. Multiple times. This isn’t policy-making, it’s political Groundhog Day, with each government promising to break the cycle while perpetuating it.

Rishi Sunak made identical promises five years ago when he was Chancellor. Boris Johnson built an entire election campaign around “levelling up”, a slogan that, like HS2, derailed long before it ever reached the North. Sunak’s Green Book review was supposed to consider social and environmental impacts and boost investment in neglected areas.

What actually happened? Money earmarked for northern projects was quietly siphoned back to London. When Sunak axed HS2’s northern leg, he had the brass neck to rebrand it as “Network North”, then funnelled hundreds of millions into projects between London and the South East. It was cynical even by Westminster standards.

Labour’s Same Old Playbook

Reeves’ approach isn’t remotely different. Her much-vaunted “growth plan” prioritised Heathrow expansion and infrastructure connecting Oxford to Cambridge, the golden triangle where the elite live, work, and congratulate each other. Now, with Reform UK breathing down Labour’s neck in former Red Wall seats, there’s suddenly renewed interest in remembering the North exists.

We’re supposed to believe this latest review is transformative. Liverpool mayor Steve Rotheram called it “wonky but impactful”, the kind of technocratic waffle that means precisely nothing to communities that have been abandoned for decades.

Working-class communities don’t need impact assessments or algorithmic tweaks to Treasury spreadsheets. They need jobs that pay decent wages. They need transport that actually works. They need industry that hasn’t been shipped overseas or killed by neglect. They need actual investment, not just the promise of a marginally less unfair formula for calculating theoretical future returns.

Starmer’s Nervous Breakdown

Meanwhile, Starmer is touring the media circuit looking increasingly panicked about Reform UK. At a glass factory in St Helens, chosen, no doubt, because someone in his team thought it looked authentically northern, he launched an awkward attack on Nigel Farage: “Unlike Farage, I know what it’s like growing up in a cost-of-living crisis.”

The spectacle was revealing: a Prime Minister with a 404-seat supermajority looking genuinely nervous about a man with five MPs and a talent for pub theatrics. Starmer’s attempts to “take on” Farage only highlight how disconnected Labour’s leadership has become from the communities they claim to represent.

The working class can see straight through it. They recognise performative politics when it’s this obvious. And the harder Starmer tries to sound authentic, the more artificial he appears. He’s shadowboxing with phantoms while the real problems, unemployment, crumbling infrastructure, industrial decline, remain untouched.

The Pattern Never Changes

Here’s the truth about these reviews and announcements: they’re designed to manage expectations, not transform realities. This is another knee-jerk at the threat Reform brings to Labour. Every few years, Westminster discovers the North exists, promises to rebalance the economy, commissions some reports, makes some announcements then quietly returns to business as usual once the headlines fade.

The Green Book gets tweaked. A few million gets shifted around on paper. Some pilot schemes get launched with great fanfare. Then London wins again. The City gets its infrastructure. The South East gets its investment. And the rest of us get another review promising that next time will be different.

Rachel Reeves may rewrite the Green Book’s methodology, but the North has read this story too many times before. We know how it ends. Glossy press releases give way to quiet climb-downs. Grand intentions get strangled by Treasury orthodoxy. Revolutionary reviews become evolutionary tinkering.

Power to the People

The brutal reality is that these communities remain not just neglected but deliberately sidelined by a political and economic system that treats them as extractive colonies for talent and resources. London hoovers up the brightest graduates, the biggest investments, the best infrastructure, then acts surprised when everywhere else falls further behind.

A cosmetic review of Treasury guidelines won’t change this fundamental dynamic. Neither will another round of promises from politicians who’ve never lived the reality they’re claiming to fix. The same people who created this mess aren’t going to solve it through bureaucratic reorganisation.

Real change requires power shifting from Westminster’s ivory towers to the communities that have been abandoned. It means workers having genuine control over their economic destiny, not just better spreadsheet formulas for calculating their continued exploitation.

Build Something Real, Not Another Review

Here’s a radical thought: instead of Labour recycling failed policies and chasing Reforms tail, why not build something real? Something magnificent? Something that actually matches the scale of Britain’s challenges?

Imagine this: a new city rising from the heart of our former industrial heartlands, strategically located between Rotherham and Doncaster. Not just any city, a metropolis purpose-built for the 21st century. A city that harnesses both AI’s analytical power and human creativity to create something unprecedented in British history.

The location isn’t random. This area already boasts motorway connections, rail infrastructure, and airport access. It’s surrounded by communities desperate for economic revival. What better way to bridge Britain’s north-south divide than by building its future right in the middle?

This wouldn’t be just another soulless development. We’re talking about a living laboratory for sustainable urban living, where every building, every street, every public space is designed with the next hundred years in mind. Solar panels wouldn’t be an afterthought, they’d be the architecture. Green spaces wouldn’t be squeezed in, they’d be the foundation.

The economic impact? Transformative. Think hundreds of thousands of jobs, not just in construction but across every sector. Electricians, plumbers, architects, engineers, artists, designers, all working to build not just buildings, but a new vision of what Britain can be. The ripple effects would rejuvenate industries nationwide, from steel production to sustainable technology.

This isn’t just another housing project, on a wing and a prayer, it’s an industrial strategy made real. While Labour checks its Green book and hoping for a think tank to actually do some thinking, we could be training a new generation of skilled workers, reviving British manufacturing, and showing the world what genuine innovation looks like.

The message to Labour is clear: you were elected to deliver lasting change, not to tinker, not to triangulate, but to transform. Your supermajority wasn’t a reward for safe hands; it was a demand for bold vision. A new deal for Britain requires more than fine-tuning old frameworks, it needs a government willing to think at the scale of the country’s crisis.

A new city won’t solve all Britain’s problems overnight. But it would send a message louder than any press release: that Britain still knows how to build, to imagine, to lead. It would prove that we haven’t lost the ability to dream big, to build big, to be big. In an era of managed decline and diminished expectations, that might be the most revolutionary act of all.

We don’t need more platitudes about “levelling up” or another pivot to market led initiatives. It needs vision, courage, we need vision with steel behind it, a national mission that fuses ambition with action, and leaves something behind for our children to be proud of.

Instead, Britain keeps getting the same menu: empty promises about “levelling up”, timid market-led solutions that change nothing, and reviews that substitute process for progress. The willingness to build something genuinely transformative that fuses ambition with action, and leaves something behind for our children to be proud of, seems entirely beyond our political class.

So the cycle continues. The old Labour heartlands keep getting token gestures polite words, paltry investment, and another generation forced to leave home for opportunity or stay and watch decline managed like a hospice.

The North doesn’t need another review. It needs a renaissance. It needs a revolution.

Paul Knaggs