It was not necessary to look far beneath the brighter growth headlines this week to be reminded that there is still a stark regional imbalance in the UK, with almost half of all job vacancies now reported to be in London and South East England.

While the detailed vacancy figures are more PR puff than hard-edged research – it makes no sense to look at local authority figures in isolation without taking into account job opportunities in the broader travel to work area – the wider point about the disparity in growth rates between London and the rest cannot be ignored.

An argument put forward this week was that we should accept the UK’s skewed economic geography and acknowledge the limits of public policy in addressing these deep set regional inequalities.  There is a lot of truth in this argument: the economic forces driving London’s success are strong and…