Defining day for Rishi Sunak and North – The Yorkshire Post says

Today’s Spending Review provides another stern test of Mr Sunak’s mettle as he begins to confront the first of the difficult decisions that he’s had to defer because of Covid-19. Indeed the current circumstances make the global financial crash of 2008 look mundane by comparison.

Inevitably Mr Sunak’s desire to help the public sector, and country, through this crisis needs to be tempered by the fact that current spending is unsustainable and will have to be repaid by the private sector once it is back on its feet. Even the Chancellor, whose political stock has gone up markedly this year, now accepts that he can’t keep writing blank cheques and wants to tear up the PM’s credit card. What he can do, however, is signal how he intends to put the Government’s levelling-up agenda at the heart of Britain’s economic renaissance.

Central to this is the much-promised rewriting of the Treasury’s Green Book rules that have left Yorkshire and the North so disadvantaged when it comes to infrastructure’s investment – the detail of this will be critical and indicate both the seriousness, and sincerity, of the Government’s desire to ‘build back better’.

But the public won’t just be fixated by ever more eyewatering numbers as Mr Sunak juggles competing pressures – they will want a better understanding of what Ministers mean by ‘levelling up’, an agenda that has taken on added importance as a result of Covid, and precisely how they intend to be judged. So far that level of detail has been opaque, hence why the Chancellor should also use today’s speech to begin to define ‘Sunakism’.

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