Labour will pick up the levelling up agenda and make it happen, Sir Keir Starmer promised today in an exclusive interview with The Northern Echo, and he demanded an immediate general election to enable his party take power and stabilise the economy.

“We need a change of government,” he told The Northern Echo. “If it’s a choice between the utter chaos and damage of continuing with this government or the stability a Labour government would bring, it is very clear we need a general election.

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The Northern Echo:

“The problem they have is that you can change your chancellor but you can’t reverse out of a car crash.

“Frankly, at the moment it is impossible to say what the Government strategy is. We have no idea, and they have no idea. They simply have no economic policy and 12 years into government, to be without an economic policy is unforgiveable.”

He said that in the North East, following the former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s “mini-budget”, the increase in the average mortgage for those not on fixed rates was £327-a-month.

“They gambled, not with their own money, but with the money of readers of The Northern Echo,” he said. “We all understand that world events have impacts on our economy but this was a kamikaze budget that did direct harm to our economy.”

He was speaking just moments before the new Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, made his extraordinary statement and so Mr Starmer did not know that, before the hour was out, his party would be the only one to remain committed to cutting the basic rate of Income Tax from 20p to 19p.

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“We’ve been very clear that we’ve got fiscal rules that we will stick to,” he said, denying that there was a hole in Labour’s budgets as well. “We agree we have to grow the economy – but everywhere across the UK. We’ve seen a failure of growth for 12 years, and where we have seen it, it has tended to be in London and parts of the south-east.”

He said his “green growth” plan, based around the creation of a state-owned Great British Energy company, would mean lower energy prices because it would not be exposed to the international market and would also provide a new generation of jobs in places like the North East.

The Northern Echo:

“We will pick up the challenge of levelling up and deliver it with a credible plan,” he said. “For Johnson, it was always an empty slogan. Many people are frustrated because in the North East in particular the argument for levelling up is so powerful.

“But if you don’t stabilise the economy, a plan for levelling up is not going to work, so we have to do both.”

He said that as well as addressing jobs and energy, his version of levelling up would tackle the North East’s child poverty figures.

“To give a human sense, I want thriving businesses, well paid secure jobs, and I want people growing up in the North East not to feel that they have got to leave the place they were born and brought up in order to get on,” he said. “To get on, you don’t need to get out, so there will be jobs based in the locality.”

A big part of his vision of levelling up is devolving more powers downwards, on economic growth and skills, to combined authorities and mayors.

“I don’t want new levels of infrastructure but I want decision making to be held locally,” he said. “I don’t want an incoming Labour government to just sit in Whitehall to decide what’s best for the North East, I want it to have the courage to say that the people who know best about the North East are the people who live there and have skin in the game.”

However, his main message of the moment, about the need for a general election, came with his soundbite for the moment.

“The government is in a complete mess,” he said. “There’s no getting away from the fact that this is a crisis made in Downing Street and is being paid for by working people in the North East.”

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