Keep doing the arithmetic until you get the answer you want

 Big scandal in the Graun about levelling up and the promise to replace the EU money for the regions in GB

‘An outrage’: Tories’ post-Brexit fund will not match EU grants until 2025

Well -- not a very long time to wait in the circumstances you might think but fair enough, they did promise, and apparently, the shortfall 'will leave English regions tens of millions of pounds worse off than when Britain was in the EU'

So scandal! No funds for regional development until 2025? Not quite...

The Department for Levelling Up insisted that it was “delivering on the UK government’s commitment to match the average spending of EU structural funds” by matching the EU’s £1.5bn in 2025. It said areas would continue to receive EU funding until the end of 2024..

Then a strange objection by those outraged (the Director of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership it seems)  I really do not understand:

However, regional leaders and policy experts accused the government of using “smoke and mirrors” by counting old EU money over the next two years....Henri Murison, the director of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, said: “We were promised that no nation would be worse off post-Brexit but, when you take out the smoke and mirrors, the data doesn’t lie.

But why would you 'take out' this 'EU money'? Why is it smoke and mirrors? It is still being provided. (NB see the endless argument that this is NOT actually 'EU money' anyway, but GB rebated money). Is there a real cut or is this an accountants' cut using figures projected on estimates of what the Government should have been providing had there been no 'EU money' until 2024 which is what the various 'regional leaders and policy experts' seem to have expected? An expectation that there would be more money after Brexit, which was opposed,  leads to a feeling of being worse off because it is only the same as when we were in Europe?

Neil O’Brien, a levelling up minister, took to Twitter on Thursday to defend the scheme, insisting that the government was “matching in real terms what each place got on average from the [2014-2020] programme”.

 But the outrage shifts ground again:

Whereas EU grants were delivered over seven years, the Shared Prosperity Fund model is for only three years....a “serious blow for levelling up” that would stifle ambitious long-term investment

Whatever the precise pros and cons, we are actually a long way from the simplicity of the headline, of course.