Funding betrays promises to Leave voters - The Yorkshire Post says

One of the central pillars of the campaign for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union was that it would make us better off as a nation.

Those in the Leave camp, correctly, pointed to the vast sums it cost Britain every year to be a member state and argued that we could spend that money better at home on domestic matters.

Such a pledge drew widespread support across Yorkshire, with the vast majority of the region backing Brexit in the hopes of delivering a better tomorrow for themselves and their children.

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Speaking just last year, the Chancellor Rishi Sunak pledged that the new Shared Prosperity Fund the Government created would “at a minimum match the size of EU funds”. However today we learn that the sums involved pale into insignificance when compared to what Britain received while a member state.

Pic: PA.Pic: PA.
Pic: PA.

To take the Sheffield City Region alone, £38m has been promised over a three-year period. Under old EU rules this figure would have been closer to £900m.

The figures pledged have predictably provoked outrage in the region, with South Yorkshire Mayor Dan Jarvis saying the sum “drives a coach and horses through the Government’s Levelling Up agenda”.

With Levelling Up increasingly looking to be little more than a slogan, and a raft of promises made to Yorkshire already having been watered down or broken, the Shared Prosperity Fund was an opportunity for ministers to make good on the promise of Brexit.

Instead we are left with a hollow sham which betrays the millions of people who voted to leave in hopes of a better, fairer future.