Northern lights: Seven steps for levelling up Britain

If you ever need a reminder of what northern Britain has achieved, I’d recommend a trip to York. The National Railway Museum brilliantly evokes the local creative energy that produced Stephenson’s Rocket which ran on the world’s first inter-city passenger railway and ushered in the railway age. Just over the River Ouse is the chocolate museum, which celebrates York’s chocolate-makers and their entrepreneurial legacy.

It’s easy to be scornful about Boris Johnson’s talk of ‘levelling up’. Real levelling up would mean that for the foreseeable future, the North will grow faster than London, which seems almost unimaginable to Whitehall and in the City. But whatever the cocktail of culture and genes needed, northern Britain is evidently endowed with it, and, as I’ve argued in The Future of Capitalism, it simply must be done. Healing the economic and cultural divergence between London and the rest of the country is existentially important for British society, but it requires guts and an irreversible reorientation of public policy: power has to shift from Whitehall to the provinces.