Wealth & Money Quote by John Prescott

There is a practiced blandness to Prescott's phrasing that functions as political camouflage. "In a sense" is the classic softener: it lowers expectations, pre-emptively disarms critics, and signals that what follows is more defensible as aspiration than as measurable pledge. By the time we reach "resources", the sentence is already insulating itself against the accusation of waste or failure. Who could object to giving regions tools to identify "deficiencies" and "address themselves" to them? The language turns a contested policy instrument into an obvious act of care.

The subtext is managerial, almost technocratic: regional inequality is framed less as the product of national choices (industrial policy, infrastructure spending, London-centric finance) and more as a set of local "deficiencies" awaiting diagnosis. That word matters. It nudges responsibility downward, implying the regions need help fixing themselves, while Whitehall generously funds the mirror and the clipboard. Even the bureaucratic reflex of "regional areas" (a redundancy that sounds like committee minutes) reinforces that this is governance by category, not by lived experience.

Contextually, Prescott was one of New Labour's most visible champions of devolution and regionalism, pushing institutions like Regional Development Agencies as a modernizer's answer to post-industrial decline. This sentence sells RDAs not as a power shift but as a rational upgrade: targeted, evidence-led, non-ideological. Its intent is to make intervention sound inevitable and modest, while quietly claiming credit for "doing something" about structural imbalance without naming the structures that caused it.