The late Liz Truss put “leveling up”, the balancing of the enormous wealth gap between poor and rich regions in Great Britain, on hold. The new prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has embraced this motto and the approach is high on his list of priorities.

The regions where things are not going so well are to be strengthened with a financial injection worth billions. And this is necessary, experts say. Take, for example, the life expectancies of the different groups. Men living in the wealthiest regions of Britain live on average about six years longer than men in the poorest regions.

“This gap is about as big, if not a little bigger, than that between the most prosperous regions of England and parts of North Africa,” Philip McCann, a professor of productivity at the University of Manchester, told IPS. news hour.

He sees that there is a gap. For decades, the poor northern regions have felt ignored by the predominantly affluent south and the capital, London.

And that gap isn’t that easy to close, says Bart van Ark, who is director of the Institute for Productivity at the University of Manchester. “Certainly too little has been invested in these regions in the last fifteen years,” he says.

If he wants to tackle this problem, Sunak has to give up his idea of ​​the free market, Van Ark is convinced: “The idea that if you boost the strong side of the economy, the rest of the economy will also benefit, that shows that you are not working for these regions .”

For example, more public money still flows to affluent London than to underprivileged regions. The budget difference for public transport, for example, is large. In London, this amount per inhabitant is almost three times higher than in a city like York.

Sunak, the richest British Prime Minister of all time, wants to present himself as the Prime Minister of all Britons. But there are doubts about his sincerity. In Sunak’s first debate, opposition leader Keir Starmer accused him of saying in a secretly recorded conversation this summer that he was diverting money from poor regions to more affluent areas.

“He pretends to be on the side of the working people. But in private he says something very different,” Starmer added.

“No Eye for Us”

The British in the north of the country are also critical. The problems in his “own region” are immense. “The Conservatives don’t care about us at all,” says a volunteer at a soup kitchen in Northallerton, Yorkshire, where food is being given away.

The place is about an hour’s drive from Sunak’s country house. In the kitchen they see whole families coming to eat. It is best to already be prepared, because energy for heating up is expensive.

The man who needs to close that distance is Michael Gove. He was ‘Secretary for Levelling’ under Boris Johnson, disappeared when Truss arrived but is now making a comeback. His task is to bring this difficult task to a successful conclusion in times of budget cuts.

A fishmonger at the Wakefield market, where prices are rising week by week, is gloomy. He says they are “two different countries”. The north and the south. “In the ’60s and ’70s we were important here with the factories, but now in London it’s all about the money.”