By some measures, the UK has Europe’s worst regional inequalities. Government investment in public transport, for instance, overwhelmingly favors London and the South East. Over half of all foreign direct investment flows straight into the same regions. Regional disparities in educational attainment, income, and life expectancy are all growing.

The government’s flagship “leveling up” paper, meant to overcome these gaps, doesn’t make for easy reading. It’s over 300 pages long, parts are copied from Wikipedia, and others exude strong “we’ve got to hit the word count” energy. But worse, the policy measures it advances are woefully inadequate. On the day of its launch, a government watchdog concluded that the department responsible had “a poor understanding of what has worked well in previous local growth programmes.”

That Boris Johnson’s party will fail to tackle such inequalities is hardly surprising. These are the same Tories who have institutionalized reliance on volunteer-staffed food banks over the past twelve years; their austerity cuts disproportionately targeted deprived areas and resulted in sleeping on the streets increasing by 250 percent. This is a party that remorselessly whips up anti-immigrant hatred and, under Johnson’s tenure, has been described as the UK’s most corrupt administration since 1945. It is almost beyond parody, but even the government’s much-boasted-about leveling up funds (a new ministerial title was even created to disburse them) disproportionately flow to richer areas.