Illustration by John Sadler www.johnsadlerillustration.com 

• IT’S really quite astonishing that we are still expected to believe that our government’s “levelling up” agenda is anything but a tactic to divide and rule different areas of the country.

People in the north are told that it’s the bloody southerners getting all the gravy and people in the west country are riled up by the idea that they are part of the wealthy south.

The divide that needs levelling up has nothing to do with geographical areas and everything to do with social class.

There are plenty of poor neighbourhoods in the south and south west – as well as in the north. Just as there are also plenty of rich enclaves in all of those areas.

The poorest area in England is Jaywick, a seaside village in “loadsamoney” Essex. Seven out of 10 of the poorest income areas for the elderly in England are in filthy rich London.

And remember that our “caring” prime minister in his pitch for the job boasted how he, as chancellor, had taken funds from deprived areas and funnelled them into better-off places like Tunbridge Wells?

Social justice doesn’t come into it. It’s all about class self-interest. And setting one set of deprived people against another.

KW HOWARTH, NW1