ON MY MIND

WHEN a Tory Government White Paper talks about dealing with inequality, the inadequacy of market forces and a contemporary Medici model from the Renaissance, you might want to ask about the strength of the Downing Street Prosecco.

Michael Gove’s recent Levelling Up Paper uses the analogy of the Florentine innovation in finance, technological breakthroughs, strong civic leadership and its cultivation of learning and artistic endeavour. Its aims are creditable but not innovative. It’s what the Opposition have always worked for: ending geographical inequality; giving everyone the opportunity to flourish; improving productivity, economic growth; creating good jobs; enhancing educational attainment – for everyone.

With its 12 levelling up missions the document, called a “twentyfirst century recipe for a new Industrial Revolution”, is an impressive read, but is regarded as mostly aspirational since it comes with no new money and little new thinking. Lisa Nandy described it as a shuffling of the deckchairs, a recycling of existing pots of money. It’s a bit like gently tilting a snooker table which can only reorganise the balls.

The cynic might see it as slogans daubed on the red walls of the northern constituencies rather than more substantial and sustainable strategic investment and better paid jobs. Certainly, Wales won’t have many of the snooker balls – it will lose much of what it had from the EU (£1bn worse off by 2024). Vaughan Gething, with an interesting mix of metaphors, talked about “halfbaked, incoherent funding pots hatched in isolation in Whitehall”. But we get the message.

Interestingly, UK Government ‘levelling up’ money allocated to Carmarthenshire in last autumn’s budget suffered from a lurch in the billiard table resulting in the Carmarthen area pocketing £16.7 million for the Tywi Valley Path and £19.9million for a Carmarthen and Pembroke Hwb project.

Doubts about the level of the snooker table were raised when the Tory seats in Wales received over 60% (£73.2m) of the ‘levelling up/down’ cash. Throw in the failed electrification line to Swansea and the sinking of the Tidal Lagoon and we may need a Savonarola ‘bonfire of vanities’ to purify the Medici experiment.