Peter Lazenby
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NORTHERN Labour MPs have slammed Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Tory MPs for “daring to show their faces” as they met in a South Yorkshire town which was wrecked by pit closures and the run-down of the steel industry.
Mr Sunak was in Doncaster earlier today at a conference at which jittery northern Tory MPs were expected to raise concerns over the success or otherwise of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s much-lauded “levelling up” plan which was targeted particularly at northern parliamentary constituencies.
But one Yorkshire Labour MP said that “levelling up” in northern communities which had been destroyed by Tory de-industrialisation was “a joke.”
Another dismissed the levelling up project as “just rhetoric,” and said Northern Tory MPs are “scared stiff that they’re going to be swept out at the next general election.”
Labour MP Jon Trickett represents Hemsworth constituency which borders Doncaster.
He told the Morning Star: “I don’t know how they dare show their faces in a place like Doncaster.
“Speaking for former mining communities, in my opinion what they did will never be forgotten — de-industrialisation, closing the pits, what they did to our communities.
“And levelling up is just a joke.”
The conference was organised by the Northern Research Group which was set up by Tory MPs elected to northern “red wall” seats in the 2019 general election.
Leeds East MP Richard Burgon said: “Their so-called Northern Research Group doesn’t need to do much research to discover that voters in the north have had enough of the Tories and are looking forward to the chance to boot them out at the next election.
“People have seen that levelling up — a bit like the Northern Powerhouse — is just rhetoric from the richest Prime Minister in British history, whose government always sides with the super-rich rather than working-class communities, whether in the north or anywhere else.
“No amount of special conferences for the cameras in Yorkshire can hide the fact that this Tory government has subjected people to the biggest attack on living standards in living memory and has run public services — including our NHS — into the ground.
“It seems that all the Tories have left in their back pocket is the policy of scapegoating and division — and it just won’t wash, in the north or anywhere else.”
