Boris Johnson made raising prosperity beyond London a central goal (Image: Getty)
Labour is accused of backing major investments in the South of England while neglecting the North and abandoning Boris Johnson’s goal of “levelling up” the country. Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s spring statement has been denounced as a “slap in the face” for Britain beyond the Watford Gap.
Sir Keir Starmer’s Government has swung behind a third runway at Heathrow, a rail link between Oxford and Cambridge and the Lower Thames Crossing.
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Sir Jake Berry – the former minister for the Northern Powerhouse – accused Labour of “showering attention on London and the South” while “leaving us to fend for ourselves”.
He admitted that Rishi Sunak’s decision to axe the northern leg of HS2 had been a “gut punch” but said Sir Keir’s commitment to upgrade the Transpennine Route was “a reheated version of a Conservative plan”.
Sir Jake, a former chairman of the Conservative party, said Mr Johnson’s 2019 victory in traditional Labour seats across the North was “about smashing the Whitehall mindset that treats the North as an afterthought,” adding that the “Treasury’s spreadsheets always seem to justify splashing cash in London and the Southeast”.
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Conservative MP Aphra Brandreth MP shared his frustration, saying: “The emergency budget had nothing about levelling up, supporting our rural communities, and only platitudes about connectivity. In my constituency of Chester South and Eddisbury, if a bus comes to a village it’s like Christmas has come early.”
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Fellow Tory MP Matt Vickers, who represents Stockton West, said: “Labour is turning its back on the North... Under the Conservatives, Teesside saw real investment, from a world-leading freeport to new transport and healthcare funding.
“Now, with Labour in charge, the taps have been turned off for the North.”
And John Stevenson, a former chairman of the Northern Research Group of Conservative MPs, said the Government is “pursuing a southern growth agenda which will probably fail”.
He said: “We need to reconnect and build a northern agenda which is good for the North but also good for the whole country.”
A Reform UK spokesman added: “We need investment across the whole of the UK to deliver opportunities and restore our left behind towns. It seems like Labour are once again taking their voters in the North for granted.”
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Shadow Treasury minister Gareth Davies said he wanted to see growth-generating investment in all parts of the country.
He said: “There’s certainly no investor who would say we don’t need more infrastructure and I absolutely think that’s the right thing to focus on if we want to grow our economy. But what we were elected on in 2019 – and what I think we still believe now – is you can’t have really impressive, competitive economic growth unless we tackle the regional disparity of productivity that we have in the country.”
Labour was invited to comment.