“…However, enormous programmes of detailed data construction by the OECD and Eurostat (Carrascal-Incera et al, 2020) have recently allowed for a much deeper reconsideration of these issues, and it is now widely accepted empirically (Davenport and Zarenko, 2020;McCann, 2016McCann, , 2020aRaikes et al, 2019) that the UK exhibits amongst the highest interregional productivity inequalities in the industrialised world. Moreover, these high inequalities are evident over very short distances, such that it has been argued that the country appears to have been decoupling (McCann, 2016) and partitioning (Venables, 2021) internally on many levels over the last four decades (Rice and Venables, 2021). Furthermore, there are now powerful arguments and evidence which suggest that alongside the UK's specific geographical features and the asymmetric impacts of modern globalisation, the ultra-centralised and top-down nature of the UK governance system has itself also been a major contributor to these inequalities (Carrascal-Incera et al, 2020), in that nationwide policy-design and decision-making has been especially indifferent and insensitive to these interregional differences (McCann, 2016).…”