Events in the US following the murder of George Floyd are an object lesson in what happens when policing is ripped out of communities. From Minnesota to Seattle via San Francisco, the progressive fetish of slashing police numbers in reprisal for bad law enforcement – both real and politically expedient – has been disastrous for poor communities and businesses in particular. A quiet reversal is in progress. Local legislators drunk on retribution have sobered up in the face of near anarchy. Reality has dawned – public safety is an inequality issue too, one on which all other prosperity (not to mention political survival) rests. 

What’s this ideological volte-face got to do with the Government’s long-awaited White Paper on Levelling Up? Plenty. Five minutes of research on the huge amount of open-source data available shows that in the UK, areas with the highest levels of social deprivation, in metrics ranging from life expectancy to benefit take up, map onto areas with high levels of violent crime and antisocial behaviour. Outside town centres, people in places very similar to where I grew up are marooned in islands of incivility and impunity. It’s going to be very hard to feel levelled up, however much cash pours into communities for infrastructure improvement, if you can’t enjoy any of it after dark or if the only person in authority you ever see is a parking warden. 

Our own ‘defund the police’ moment was another form of vindictiveness – this one wasn’t delivered by left-wing wonks, but by the disastrous cuts to our criminal justice system in 2010-16. Most Tory politicians, and not a few ministers I’ve spoken with, now recognise the criminal stupidity of this policy. The Prime Minister has even alluded to post financial crisis ‘mistakes’ that resulted in entrenched inequality – an implicit repudiation of the Osborne legacy.