Rishi Sunak’s promises of levelling up is a case of blatant ‘pork barrel’ politics - Yorkshire Post Letters

So Rishi Sunak is at it again. He is promising to use 'levelling up' cash to buy votes: blatant 'pork barrel' politics. Of the 30 towns he has recently promised £20m only eight are in Labour held constituencies, though Labour held seats tend to be in more deprived areas.

He has done it before; Tory Ministers previously granted funding to each other's constituencies, funds went predominantly to constituencies with Tory MPs and even Rishi Sunak's relatively wealthy Yorkshire constituency was given money whereas more deprived areas were not.

The game was given away less than two years ago when in his speech to Tory activists in wealthy Tunbridge Wells, Rishi Sunak said: “I managed to start changing the funding formulas to make sure that areas like this are getting the funding they deserve, because we inherited a bunch of formulas from the Labour Party that shoved funding into deprived urban areas and, you know, that needed to be undone. I started the work of undoing that.”

Of course, we should just call it out for what it is: corruption. Would you really want to vote for a candidate who supports this government?