Levelling up will only work if the establishment embraces it as earnestly as it values opera - David Behrens

Of all the world’s advanced economies, ours was the most regionally divided, said the report. What’s more, the disparity was an outcome of decision making, not of circumstance. Investment here had been lower than Slovakia and Hungary.

But while this is irrefutable it is only part of the story. Underpinning the statistics is an ingrained prejudice within the Establishment that plays out in every round of funding. Time and again, the northern half of the country is dismissed as if it were the below-stairs quarters of a grand old country house; crucial to the smooth running of the institution but subordinate to the more important business going on upstairs.

Usually this is not acknowledged but just occasionally the mask slips. Last week saw such a moment when the head of English National Opera – an organisation at the heart and soul of the established order – lamented the possibility that his troupe would be moved lock, stock and barrel to somewhere with “no culture” as part of a superficial levelling-up pledge to move it out of London.

It spoke volumes about the level of condescension towards provincial towns, or as Stuart Murphy of the opera company called them, “places who don’t have much culture at all and [where] we would be the main people in town”.

It is also an arrogance worthy of Marie Antoinette for funding bodies to believe that communities dying on their feet can be revived by the arrival of an opera company. I guarantee you, no-one is walking around Featherstone thinking to themselves, what this place needs is a new production of Carmen.

Mr Murphy, who as a native of Leeds should know that regional punters don’t all think that Carmen is a make of heated hair roller, later apologised for not choosing his words more carefully – but his meaning was already clear.

He was not the first person in the arts to react badly at being relegated to an out-of-town run. For years, BBC staff refused to migrate to Manchester when their departments were shifted there; and Channel 4 was not best pleased at having to uproot its HQ to Leeds.

The fact it has now made a success of it serves only to demonstrate how narrow-minded it had been in the first place.

Those and other sops to the North were consequences of the Hunger Games-style lotteries through which successive governments have chosen to dispense their droplets of disbursement – forcing local bureaucrats to waste countless weeks trying to out-do each other for their slice of whatever cake is on offer.

Some councils are clearly better at this than others. This week, Robbie Moore, the Conservative MP whose constituency takes in Ilkley and Keighley, took the unusual step of publishing his correspondence with Bradford Council over the standard of its failed bids for funds.

A minister had told him they “did not meet the quality required”, Mr Moore said, highlighting what he called the “staggering scale of incompetence at Bradford Council”.

This view was compounded when the council, along with those in Leeds and Rotherham, admitted they didn’t know the government had changed the rules for two of its funding pots and that bids for them had been doomed from the start.

Yet Bradford has been successful in one area of investment: it is to be the nation’s capital of culture in 2025, even if its thunder has been stolen by this year’s self-proclaimed festival next door in Leeds.

That’s something, I suppose, but another report this week made plain just how far the city has to go before it can truly consider itself cultured. A report to the local fire brigade revealed an epidemic of so-called “payback” crimes in which people’s cars are deliberately set ablaze. In the last nine months there have been 171 such incidents, among well over 1,500 other cases of arson. In other words, people are taking revenge on their neighbours by setting alight their homes and property.

It’s symptomatic of a wider climate of lawlessness, which is in itself a consequence of the chronic lack of investment in areas where it can really make a difference – more jobs and better housing.

Squabbling over penny pots of funds won’t address the root causes of the decay. If we are to avoid our own Greek tragedy the Establishment will have to embrace levelling-up as earnestly as it values opera.