Lord Sainsbury’s little think tank tells us that it’ll cost lots and lots of money to level up the UK if we follow the same plan and method as Germany did with the Eastern Lander after 1989. The useful conclusion from which is let’s not do it that way, let’s not try to level up the way Germany did with the Eastern Lander after 1989.

‘Levelling up’ cost will be close to £2tn price of German reunification, says think tank

Centre for Cities says schemes proposed by the Government for Boris Johnson’s flagship plan so far are a ‘drop in the ocean’

£2 trillion is around and about UK GDP. That is, everything produced and or consumed by everyone in the country in a year.

Centre for Cities said the schemes outlined so far by the government were a “drop in the ocean” and that closing the north-south divide would cost hundreds of billions of pounds over decades if done properly.

In a stark analysis shared with the Guardian, the non-partisan research group said England’s biggest cities, including Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, have the lowest productivity and life expectancy in western Europe.

The first and most obvious question is whether the people of Britain are interested enough in this problem to willingly give up an entire years’ worth of their economic life in order to solve this problem. We’d venture that the answer is probably no.

“So, Sir, or Madam as the case may be, would you like to live on nothing for a year to help Birmingham?”

“No” would only be the shortest of likely answers to that question even if the meaning wouldn’t change much, only the emphasis.

It might even be true that we should all do something to aid Birmingham all the same. Clearly though it’s not this. Not simply unloading those sheds of cash - as Germany did - in the hope that something nice will happen.

Our own view is that the necessary changes are already underway. This combination of working from home and the internet is making economic geography disconnect from physical geography anyway. Being on the network matters - and will only grow in importance - far more than precisely where one is. At which point economic activity will spread out across that physical geography entirely naturally.

We can see this happening already in prices. London rents and house prices are falling, those in the regional cities are rising. As is so often true we’re getting the political demand to spend fortunes just as the market unadorned solves the problem anyway.