It has been a couple of weeks since the publication of the levelling up white paper. The initial reaction involved some piss-taking at references to ancient Jericho and Medici Florence, together with scepticism about how the 12 perfectly laudable “missions” can be achieved without additional funding. But it is worth looking at the whole document, all 300 pages of it, because it says many sensible things

The document is the work of Andy Haldane, who gets joint billing on the preface with Michael Gove. He is a former chief economist at the Bank of England, and his analysis of the problem is spot on. The solutions are perhaps less convincing, but then again that is because they are not easy.

The joint preface says that “while talent is distributed evenly across the UK, opportunity is not”. The authors consider levelling up to be a mission “part economic, part social, part moral – to change that for good”.

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