Writing in the Guardian, Will Hutton says “This may come as a surprise, but I think the Tories’ levelling-up policy has got it right”. “It is a new transformative moment” he says.

The news last week that January inflation hit a 30-year high of 5.5% to produce the biggest cost of living squeeze for 60 years is the backdrop to a mounting social crisis. The pressure is reflected in a falling birth rate and stagnating, even declining life expectancy, desperately unfair life chances, disempowerment, justified post-Brexit economic pessimism and social neglect, all alongside phenomenal private wealth. Labour, for the first time in 15 years, has the chance to command the agenda and do to its opponents what was once done to it.

“Levelling up” is the talismanic policy that brings all this together. Boris Johnson, for all his glaring deficiencies, had the wit to see that. It was not his alleged campaigning genius or what the deluded Europhobes think is the compelling case for Brexit that won the 2016 referendum and 2019 general election. Rather, it was the massive disaffection of millions of working-class voters with the status quo. There had to be change and levelling up, whose need is reinforced by the lethal unfairness of Covid, represents his personal commitment to deliver the change.

 There’s quite a bit to unpack there. As it happens, I don’t think he is far off the mark in saying that Brexit was not won on the back of a compelling case for it. Though the debate leading up to the vote was wide ranging, it was incoherent and confused and I don’t think either official campaign managed to get their message over. It was always going to come down to which camp was the least repellent. When the remain side ended up a rabble of celebs fronted by Eddie Izzard and Bob Geldof, and the worst of parliament’s virtue signalling oafs, the remain campaign sealed its own fate.

Since then, there has been a concerted effort in think tankery and academia to blame Brexit on austerity rather than their own failings and the many failings of the EU. But if we did throw them that bone and it really was “massive disaffection with the status quo” then the EU still takes the lion’s share of the blame. If not a lion then a large creature of the panthera genus. After all, the EU underpinned that economic status quo. The single market brought with it unending low wage competition and round the clock shift patterns, while the EU energy policy drove up energy bills (LCPD). We did not get to to this point by accident.

The EU also brought more subtle changes to the structure and functioning of government, all of which have contributed to the quangofication of the state (that Hutton complains of) – and subjected to EU competition and procurement policies, and environmental policies that delay or prevent renewal of infrastructure. Hutton should count his blessings that a compelling case for Brexit was never heard or we’d have left by a far larger margin.

In any case, the vote most certainly did call for a major overhaul to the functioning of the state and the economy. Nobody is disputing that the vote to leave was a demand to depart from that dysfunctional status quo. This, says Hutton, is where Labour could pick up the thread.

The country is ready to rally behind genuine levelling up. Money? Issue 100-year or even perpetual bonds to finance the vital capital spending. Create the institutions that will work with newly empowered mayors to revitalise our economy and society. Around the drive to net-zero, England from the Tyne to the Humber could reindustrialise around manufacturing windfarms, turbines, electric cars and batteries.

Get back into the single market and export those green manufactures into the EU. Economic prospects for the next few years are dire: a shrinking working population, diminished trade, squeezed demand and stagnating investment together with the risk of falling house prices as interest rates rise. Against that outlook, Britain cannot let that potential £2.5tn of extra output go begging. The narrative, the foundational framework and the prize are there for the taking. All that is required is the chutzpah and vision to go for it.

And there you have it. The “solution” to that “massive disaffection of millions of working-class voters” is to put things back more or less exactly as they were before Brexit with the same spending priorities, only with metro mayors that nobody wants and nobody voted for, and they were foisting on us anyway. Genius!

There’s more than a few problems with Hutton’s vision. The UK’s waters are home to more offshore wind farms than anywhere else in the world but this concentration has not translated into the jobs and manufacturing boom envisaged in the years since the first one came on stream 20 years ago.

In his last year in office in 2010, then Labour prime minister Gordon Brown said the UK’s leading position in offshore wind meant the sector could support up to 70,000 jobs by 2020. But in reality, direct employment and supply chain jobs stand at an estimated 11,000, according to RenewableUK, the industry lobby group. “It’s a con,” said Gary Smith, secretary of the GMB union in Scotland, which includes BiFab workers among its members. “What the UK is, is the biggest offshore wind sector in the world and the only expertise is about how we offshore jobs.

Oxford-based consultancy Aurora Energy Research has said Boris Johnson’s vision for offshore wind to power every home in the UK by 2030 would require almost £50bn in investment and the equivalent of one turbine to be installed every weekday for the whole of the next decade. But there’s a rather large problem. Wind energy is a wholly unworkable means of generating power for a modern grid (unless you’re prepared to throw billions on mitigating the problems it creates). The grid is being redesigned around the inadequacies of wind power rather than reliable baseload technology.

But aside from the absurdity of Net Zero (killing more jobs than it creates through rising energy costs) the way in which remainers casually bleat about re-joining the single market betrays a galactic ignorance. The single market is largely contingent on low wage exploitation. From food and manufacturing to hospitality, it simply wouldn’t be a viable model without an endless supply of cheap labour. Britain and the EU realised this during Covid. Having exhausted the supply of cheap workers within its own borders, it now looks to Ukraine for farm labour, the Philippines for truck drivers and trawlermen, and Ghana for vets to plug holes in its creaking veterinary system.

The EU was already facing a skills shortage in the meat industry and the shortage of truck drivers is a problem of its own making. Ultimately there can be no conversation about the sustainability of supply chains without first addressing the labour issue, where even Eastern Europeans won’t work for the rates on offer.

Even without Covid, the single market was eventually going to have to address its structural imbalances. It can only be sustained for as long immigration from the developing world can be politically sustained – and after that, you’re looking at a surge of inflation as markets play catch up.

Any new deal, be it levelling up or Net Zero has to take into account the inherent stresses that brought us to this point to begin with. Mass immigration isn’t politically sustainable, and is causing the “liberal order” to collapse. Eric Zemmour won’t win in France but sooner or later a man like him will. The failure to address the invasion of illegal immigrants at Dover will again bring immigration to the fore in Britain. Put simply, Europe has to wean itself off the cheap goods its become accustomed to. Business cannot look to immigration to solve its problems. It will have to improve pay and conditions and start training the people it needs.

Further to this, we can kill two birds with one stone. Western politics is in the grip of rampant wokery by way of its overproduction of elites. We need to completely reverse Blair’s revolution in the university system and restore the polytechnics. We then equip our economy with the skills it needs, while dramatically reducing the number of social sciences grads with a head full of Critical Race Theory.

Ultimately there is no levelling up and no jobs bonanza unless we get to grips with energy costs. Net Zero, as envisaged by Hutton, is a massive programme of state directed capitalism (eco-fascism), betting the farm on high fantasy green technologies. Building back worse. There certainly is a case for investing in green technologies with a view to exporting them, but that focus should be on small modular reactors coupled with nuclear desalination plants, with a view to providing clean water for people and agriculture – not least as a means to curb global migration.

Instead of seizing the opportunity that Brexit offers, Hutton and his fellow travellers want to restore a collapsing order to its former glory, without acknowledging the need for change. Free of the EU we are now free to redesign our competition, environment and procurement policies, all of which can bring about balanced and fairer trade, white taking expensive statutory obligations off local authorities, freeing them up to source infrastructure projects locally.

It is now generally understood that levelling up requires more devolution of powers to local authorities, but if we are again to be enmeshed in the legal frameworks of the single market then there is no devolution of power. The single market isn’t just product standards and food safety rules. It’s an entire system of governance, more or less set in stone, and anything broken stays broken – which is a big part of why we ended up leaving.

The key to unlocking economic potential in Britain is to free people economcially and give them the skills to exploit that freedom. Consequently, any levelling up starts with an overhaul of our embarrassing university system, driving down taxes and a drive to make energy too cheap to meter. Old fashioned ideas about reindustrialisation simply haven’t panned out. Net Zero boondoggles won’t do it.

The EU already had a target to reduce emissions by 80% by 2050 when we were in the single market – and successive governments have doubled down on windmills and EVs, yet this failed to prevent Brexit, failed to create jobs, and it certainly didn’t bring down our utility bills. The public voted for change, but Net Zero is same old failed agenda repackaged as the next big idea. Time after time, they take us all for fools.