MICHAEL Gove last week published the UK Government’s keystone document, the Levelling-up white paper. It is an extraordinary read. Weighing in at more than 300 pages, it is a monumental piece of work, which ranges across diverse fields of economic and social policy, from devolution to housing and from job-creation to sustainable transport.

It is strikingly non-partisan. Indeed, if you did not know who had written it you would think it was published by a centre-left think-tank, not a centre-right government. It is long on data, full of graphs and maps and charts and analysis, and its message is at once bleak and urgent – yet also depressingly familiar.

It paints a well-known picture of just how unequal Britain is – in particular, how skewed both our economy and our culture are towards London and the south-east. John Prescott spoke about all this when Tony Blair put him in charge of New Labour’s regional policy. Gordon Brown has been writing about it all his life. George Osborne and Nick Clegg put it front and centre of the coalition government’s ground-breaking City Deals project, with its “Northern Powerhouse”.

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Britain’s geographic inequality is not exactly news. But Michael Gove’s analysis of what is wrong – and his suggestions as to how levelling-up can be harnessed as a solution – make for arresting reading nonetheless.

First and foremost, the Levelling-up white paper buries free-market conservatism – at least, it does for as long as the current administration survives in office. Michael Gove is astonishingly candid, for a Tory, about market failures and about the need for government intervention to fix them.

There are market failures, he says, both in areas of the country that are doing well and in areas that are doing badly. Prosperous areas suffer from unsustainably high house prices and dire traffic congestion, whilst struggling areas suffer from chronic poor public health and skills shortages.

The market has proved itself incapable of fixing problems such as these – indeed such problems have oftentimes been created by market forces – and it is the role of government to intervene with targeted policies to address them. This modern-day conservatism sounds remarkably like social democracy, does it not?

If Mr Gove’s diagnosis of the problem is strikingly non-partisan, his proposed solutions are striking in their ambition. There is no aspect of domestic policy that does not fall within the white paper’s sights. Dominic Raab may be deputy prime minister in name, but it is Mr Gove who has the policy ambition to match a title as grand as that.

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Levelling-up means four main things. Any one of them could be the defining mission of a government. Mr Gove wants to achieve all four. They are: boosting productivity, spreading opportunities, restoring communities, and empowering local leaders. The white paper is right to be ambitious. For the truth is this quartet comes as a package. You cannot have one without the others. As Mr Gove has seen, improving physical capital (infrastructure), human capital (skills), social capital (communities) and institutional capital (leadership) go hand in hand.

And here’s the rub: none of these, if they are to be successful at achieving the redistribution of wealth and opportunity that levelling-up is all about, can be delivered by central government. Funded by central government, for sure, but delivered by others. This will require power to be driven down – not for its own sake, not because some quasi-federalist blueprint says so – but because it is only by delivering growth locally that meaningful growth can be achieved at all.

More than anything else, then, levelling-up is about devolution – driving power down. It will take many institutional forms and shapes. Expect to hear a lot more about freeports, enterprise zones, innovation accelerators, clustering, the new economic geography, agglomeration effects, and varied spatial performance.

Levelling-up has a whole dictionary of jargon for us to enjoy. But all this blizzard of phraseology means the same thing. It means that places will have to have the powers to decide for themselves how they are going to grow. The champions of levelling-up will not in the end be ministers. They will be the mayors, of Teesside, the West Midlands, and Greater Manchester.

And yet again Scotland risks being left behind. When Whitehall wants to deal with Manchester, there is a mayor’s office to work with. Same for Birmingham. Same for Liverpool. Same for the north-east. But what happens when Whitehall wants to deal with Glasgow?

We are the third-biggest city in Britain with a need as great as any to level up in terms of skills, digital connectivity, transport and housing. South of the border all of these policy areas fall under the responsibility of directly elected mayors. But in Scotland, we are not even at the races, never mind backing a winner.

This is not Mr Gove’s fault. Local government (and, in Scotland, its decay) falls squarely under the responsibility of the Scottish Parliament, as it has since the dawn of devolution more than twenty years ago.

Here, unlike in England, there has been no equivalent of the Localism Act (which transformed the law of local government in England). Precisely no steps have been taken towards directly elected mayors. And even city deals arrived in Scotland late and, only then, over the heads of SNP ministers who, to start with, wanted nothing to do with them.

I do not know if levelling-up in England will be any more successful than its forebears in cracking the systemic inequality of opportunity that blights modern Britain. Prescott, Brown, Osborne and Clegg all failed to move the dial. Mr Gove may suffer the same fate. But at least he is trying – the one thing you cannot accuse him of is a lack of ambition.

But in Scotland we can already say that levelling-up will struggle. Levelling-up requires growth. Cities drive growth and, to do that, they need leadership. Unless and until our cities start to benefit from the devolved leadership that is already evident –and successful – south of the border, it is hard to be optimistic about Scotland levelling-up.

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