While campaigning in nearly fifty seats up and down the country over the course of this campaign, one thing has become very obvious to me: an almost unbridgeable gulf has emerged between the different parts of the United Kingdom.

Today, we are the most regionally unequal of all the advanced economies, bar Ireland and Slovakia. London is an international megacity, a playground for wealthy elites from all over the world, while some regions of the UK have similar levels of output to parts of Eastern Europe.

The root causes are clear. Thatcher decimated the Midlands and the North with her assault on industry and the country’s labor movement. Many places still have yet to recover from the recession of the 1980s. Tony Blair’s election did help to arrest the decline in the regions, largely by replacing industrial with white-collar public-sector employment, but more problems were being stored up for the future.