Is it just that they're not allowed to say the quiet part out loud? Because that statement is surely Tory 101.
Yes, an while it may not damn his eternally in this contest, winning the next one will be more more difficult. Those marginal seats in the 'red wall' certainly don't like getting shafted. Like this is just another side effect of the Tories not having an idea why the 'red wall' and 'blue wall' are behaving as they are presently (which is in turn a side effect of lingering in govt), combined with a membership electorate that does not exactly reflect these future marginals.
He is talking about Blair-era channelling of funds into very inner-city areas, primarily in London. These continue to be places where Labour weighs votes. This has nothing to do with Red Wall seats.
The so-called Red Wall seats aren't inner-city urban areas that had money thrown at them by Blair. They tend to be peripheral suburban sinkhole estates which were ignored in the Blair years. That's why C2DE participation in elections cratered during and after the Blair era, only to make a slight comeback during the EU referendum.
Nobody in the Red Wall is going to be complaining about all that money they never got in the first place being taken away by Rishi. They tend to resent those inner city areas just as much as the bankers of Tunbridge Wells.
The Left doesn't understand the Red Wall, that's why they left you.
I'm sorry but I'm not sure this is right.
The fund he introduced as Chancellor was the towns fund. This was talked about & sold as the flagship levelling up fund.
The real point which is very obvious by where his audience is located is that the new funds that were bought in by the post-2019 Conservatives were sold to the public as being about levelling up e.g helping areas with historically bad outcomes.
Yet the funds in reality where written & delivered in a way that ensured that a large amount of funding went to affluent seats (often those with Conservative Ministers) to use- take a look at the brownfield release fund for just one example. I mean places like Tonbridge would not be high on the list when you think of areas needing to access a towns fund- but he is boasting that the rules were rewritten to benefit affluent seats!
If he was saying to a red wall association in say Darlington or Redcar 'I changed the treasury rules to get funding into areas based on regional inequalities' it would be make sense! But no he isn't doing this- he is telling a southern association 'don't worry, we talked about levelling up, but who was the one who kept the tap running?'
Don't take my word for it- the Public Accounts Committee did a very good report which revealed that the funding criteria was only made after they received the bids which would suggest some reverse engineering no?
LOL. I'm glad you edited the first line to be a bit less certain...
He literally says;
"...we inherited a bunch of formulas from the Labour party that shoved all the funding into deprived urban areas..."
So yes he is definitely talking about Blair/Brown era funding for inner cities. It's got nothing to do with the red wall which was ignored during this time and contributed to its changed political allegiance we now see.
For the rest of your point, which isn't really a rebuttal but more "But the Tories aren't helping the red wall!", I'm not saying the Tories (and especially Sunak) are committed to levelling up the red wall. Personally I'm no fan of Sunak, but his comments are not related to the red wall and post-referendum 'levelling up'. The red wall and inner city Labour strongholds are two completely different places, it is the lefty twitterati that confuses them. I guess largely because for people on the left the only deprived parts of the country are particular inner city estates, everyone else is 'rich' regardless of reality.
It also makes no sense for him to claim that the funding provisions he inherited were some sort of 'evil New Labour inner city dogma' when they had been the same funding provisions used by the Treasury under George Osborne & Philip Hammond.
It makes plenty of sense if you are a Tory member in Tunbridge Wells, who may feel not enough was done to overturn these parts of Blair-era policy earlier. You aren't the audience.
