Does Rachel Reeves really care about London?

Then she needs to prove it in the Budget-here's how I'd do it

- George Osborne

I was born in London and spent the first 20 years of my life assuming that if it wasn’t happening here in the capital — and preferably inside the Circle line — then it wasn’t happening anywhere else in Britain. I was very wrong about that. I went on to spend 16 years as an MP near Manchester, where people lived their lives in that cauldron of cool creativity and felt almost completely disconnected from what was happening in London. There was a sullen resentment about the capital: why was this vampire squid sucking in talent and taxpayers’ money?

I tried to persuade Mancunians and others that this was just as mistaken as the Londoner arrogance of my youth. It was to the huge benefit of our northern cities that the most international, global city in the world was just 200 miles away. So when I chaired the Northern Powerhouse Partnership I would refuse to let us issue press releases complaining when some road scheme or science project in London got funded, and when I edited the Evening Standard I made sure we covered events across the whole of the UK.

I’m not sure how much success I had in changing attitudes. For today those false assumptions remain entrenched. When the HS2 railway line was cancelled, that massively short-sighted decision was greeted with despair in Birmingham and Manchester but largely ignored in the capital. When some of London’s great cultural institutions, such as the Royal Opera House and National Theatre, got their budgets squeezed in the name of “levelling up” a couple of years earlier, this act of levelling down was cheered in some regional quarters — without understanding the damage it did to the national ecosystem of the performing arts.

Don’t level down