This story sums up the problem with the deeply flawed way the Tories have tried to do ‘levelling up’.

A short thread 🧵👇

theguardian.com/politics/2023/… Hastings and coastal towns like it across the UK are in desperate need of investment after 13 years of neglect by the Conservatives.

But they’re forced to bid for partial refunds on the money that’s been taken from them via an opaque system of competitive funding pots.

Tory MPs have just voted to cover up why the government made the astonishing decision to block a fully independent investigation into the serious allegations made about the Teesside steelworks, and instead choose to hand-pick the terms for their own review… It is disgraceful that the Conservative Party has voted to deny people on Teesside the answers they deserve about the use of hundreds of millions of pounds of public money and the transfer into private hands of 90% of an asset that is a vital part of Teesside's civic inheritance.

Labour has been doing some digging into the Levelling Up Fund, the government’s flagship programme to deliver on its central election promise.

This is what we’ve found, and it’s not very encouraging…

🧵👇 A Freedom of Information request found that as of last month, £392m of the Levelling Up Fund has been spent.

To put that in context, that’s just 8% of the total fund.

This is a new level of incompetence.

The Levelling Up department is set to spend nearly £2.5bn less on regeneration projects this year than planned, including (in the middle of a housing crisis) £1bn earmarked for new affordable homes this year.

🧵👇

ft.com/content/bcf0a0… This will only exacerbate the housing crisis and make homeownership a more distant dream for thousands of families.

From a Chewing Gum Task Force to diagrams showing what a good park looks like, this is the story of how the government in Whitehall micromanages thousands of tiny decisions every week, while failing to do its actual job properly.

🧵👇 Britain is one of the most centralised countries in the developed world, with power hoarded at Westminster and local leaders and communities lacking a say in most of the decisions that affect their daily lives.

In 2021 the Conservative PM was clear: “The most important metric is wage growth - that is what I mean by levelling up.”

This week we learned that real wages have fallen in every region of the UK since 2010.

By their own metric the Conservatives are utterly failing ❌

Mini🧵👇 In October 2021, Boris Johnson said this to @BBClukewalton:

“I’ve given you the most important metric which is – never mind life expectancy, never mind cancer outcomes – look at wage growth… that is what I mean by levelling up.”

WATCH it here 👇

Liz Truss thinks that national growth should be prioritised over redistribution.
 
But the only way to get growth, is to get the economy working everywhere.
 
That means levelling up.

Thread 👇

https://twitter.com/BBCPolitics/status/1566345285919510528

This low growth, high tax economy of the Conservatives is a problem that has been turbocharged by their failure to reduce inequality.

Let’s look at the Tory record on levelling up…

We’ve been told over and over that Levelling Up is the government’s number one priority.

How many times did Rishi Sunak mention it in his #SpringStatement?

Answer: 0️⃣

And it gets worse…

A brief 🧵 You can’t level up when you’re taking money out of people’s pockets.

That’s money taken out of our high streets and local economies.

Promising tax cuts in 2 years’ time doesn’t help when he’s hiking taxes in less than 2 weeks.

It’s a welcome change of tone and some good steps forward, but the Government’s promise to fix the building safety crisis is unravelling in front of our eyes ⬇️

https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1480569699058466819

It’s now clear Gove doesn’t have permission from the Treasury to raise taxes on developers. So how will he get them to pay up? He can’t say.

1/ The Foreign Secretary seemed keen to dodge the hard questions when he appeared before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee – but here’s what we managed to learn anyway… ⬇️ 2/ He doesn’t know how many British nationals have been left behind in Afghanistan. It could be 100. It could be 400. He isn’t sure.

1/ Today Parliament decides whether to boycott the Beijing Winter Olympics. The Government talks tough about China but when it comes to the crunch, they have no values and no strategy.

Let’s take a look… Former Chancellor George Osborne became the first British Minister to visit Xinjiang, hailing a “golden era” of Sino-British relations while turning a blind eye to the human rights abuses taking place right under his nose... bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-pol…

The Conservatives are asleep at the wheel when it comes to national security. Let’s have a look at just how careless they’ve been this year… In February, the Home Office admitted that more than 15,000 records were wrongly deleted from the Police National Computer theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/f…

1/ Boris Johnson's record of failure threatens to derail the most important G7 in a generation. How has he managed to get us in such a mess? Broken promise 1️⃣: Negotiated the “ingenious” Northern Ireland protocol and then called it “unsustainable” and refused to implement it. theguardian.com/politics/2021/…

Let's have a look at the man Boris Johnson is welcoming into Downing Street Described refugees as “Muslim invaders” politico.eu/article/viktor…

18 months after receiving the Russia Report, the government still hasn’t implemented any of its recommendations

In that time, the Tories have taken more than £1m in donations from Russia-linked sources

The report called for action to clean up dirty money & protect our democracy Alexander Temerko has given more than £700K to the Conservative Party.

He ‘forged a career at the top of the Russian arms industry and had connections at the highest levels of the Kremlin’ and spoke of how he would ‘plot’ with his friend Boris Johnson:

reuters.com/investigates/s…

The Integrated Review is riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions. There is a yawning gap between this government's words and its action Russia: the government says it’s the most acute threat to Britain’s security, so why has it failed to implement any of the recommendations of the Russia Report?

https://twitter.com/lisanandy/status/1351534061597155329?s=20

I have spoken for many years about declining high streets in our towns. A declining high street is a visible symbol of a town's relative prosperity and people feel that decline very deeply. @BBCPanorama If the local population is ageing and/or struggling to make ends meet, the high street responds accordingly by replacing flagship retailers with discount stores.

I have just read the PM's Brexit plan, and it has changed…. For the worse. Here are the big changes. 1) Workers rights binned: the key protections in clause 34 now dropped entirely. No clarity on when or what rights workers will have in law by December next year.

Today’s Guardian editorial focuses on a rapidly aging nation and work from @centrefortowns which shows the division this has caused between our towns and cities theguardian.com/commentisfree/… One major (and growing) crisis this has created is in health and social care. In recent years politicians and NHS commissioners have chosen to concentrate those services in major cities, but the older people who most need them don’t live there centrefortowns.org/reports/the-co…

Take a look at where the Revoke Article 50 petition has got the fewest and most signatures. These are two Englands with differences in experience and outlook that run much deeper than the current divisions over Brexit Views on major issues have been diverging in rural and urban areas and it’s been happening unnoticed for decades, as @drjennings and Gerry Stoker first wrote back in 2016
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111…

I've been handed emails showing that Ministers and DfT officials were warned about Northern rail chaos 2 years ago. They show utter contempt for Northern passengers. #PMQs DfT officials describe key routes as 'not really valued' and discuss giving a "sop" to campaigners.