Send the Guardian back north. That should be Labour's policy for provincial cities. Everything else is 1980s re-tread. What is needed is a real shift in the nation's cultural focus, out of London to points north and west. If the BBC can go to the quays of Salford, the Guardian can return to Manchester.

A start might be made next door in the Liverpool neighbourhood of Welsh Streets. Its planned demolition by the council is subject to a bizarre public inquiry in the old first-class Cunard terminal building on the waterfront. One of the doomed streets, Powis Street, has been boarded up for years, painted black for humiliating use as a film set. Round it lie 440 Victorian terrace houses, empty and decaying.

These houses could be prize exhibits in a ghoulish museum of old Whitehall policy failures. They are victims of what John Prescott and Yvette Cooper called Pathfinder slum clearance, a title justly echoing Bomber Harris's campaign to smash German cities. Desperate for subsidy, Liverpool city council valued the houses at £500 each, removed their residents, destroyed their community and sent in bulldozers. It cynically saved a handful round Ringo Starr's birthplace in Madryn Street, for fear of outrage.

These restored houses are now valued at £80,000 each. The council has spent millions in fees to destroy them, just to get a rebuilding grant from a crass central government policy. Yet this echo of 1980s urban desecration is in a city whose 42-acre renewal project near the docks, Liverpool One, is the most sensitive urban renewal in Britain. It is a heart-breaking contrast of tomorrow's policy and yesterday's.

Ed Miliband today introduced a report by Lord Adonis on "rebalancing" England's cities. Scotland and Wales can apparently look after their own. The document is of unimpeachable worthiness. It sees cities as needing more industry, more innovation, more apprenticeships and more quangos, and has the usual pledge to reform local government and local finance. George Osborne produced almost the same message last week. There must be an election coming.

Adonis's city regions have been around since Derek Senior's abortive addendum to the 1969 local government commission. The idea comes and goes over time, emerging as metropolitan areas, regional development authorities or local enterprise partnerships according to taste. This time Adonis wants them to share a £30bn infrastructure pot of business rates, allocated "without strings". This sum compares with Adonis's pet project, HS2, whose £50bn budget he would never allow near a local politician.

Miliband has indicated that the £30bn is not new money but just central grant repackaged. There is no suggestion of the litmus test of localism, an end to rate capping. Under Labour, English cities would remain under Treasury control, unlike cities anywhere else in Europe or America.

Without tax-raising powers, local democracy is mere local administration. No amount of "investment pots" and "three-fold rises in apprenticeships" will make a difference to the much-vaunted growth and enterprise. David Cameron and his local government secretary, Eric Pickles, dislike local discretion as much as did Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. It implies loss of control and a possible threat to London's pre-eminence. Even today Londoners still get £800 a head in annual economic aid from Whitehall, while some northerners get just £500.

The narrative is all wrong. Both Osborne and Adonis evoke a provincial England redolent of manufacturing industry, horny-handed apprentices, canny businessmen and know-all quangocrats. It is a land of Coronation Street and railways, muck and brass, from which they hope Victorian-style "regional economic powerhouses" can emerge at the flick of a political switch. It is deeply old-fashioned.

Last month I sat round a table in Manchester with a lively group of local executives. They needed no lectures from London on industrial revival. They did not see themselves as heirs to Gradgrind and Bounderby. Their obsession was simple, how to stop their brighter employees, not to mention their own children, vanishing to the bright lights of London. Their problem was not industry, it was image.

No southern policymaker associates "the north" with excitement or beauty. Osborne and Adonis make no mention of fine buildings or countryside, let alone good restaurants, tourism, theatre, art or fun. Such words associate with "the south". The media takes the same view. The only story about Manchester in today's papers was of a police chief warning people off the city centre at midnight for fear of drunken violence.

The same passes for culture. Today's annual report from the Arts Council promised a radical shift in grant aid to the provinces, which turned out to mean a rise from 49% of the total to a majestic 53%. This bias towards the capital is patently unfair, yet nothing ever seriously dents it. The golden city on the hill must have its pinnacles further gilded at public expense, and the rest of the country must pay. London's "national" museums and performing companies may "travel" more than of old, but they are not truly national. They assume the nation comes to them.

An English provincial revival will never lie in pre-election promises of half-hearted localism. The wealth and subsidy gap between London and the rest is now ludicrous and impossible to defend. The cliche, implied again by Miliband today, that the provinces make widgets while London makes money, will not close it.

If Miliband were as radical as his aide, Jon Cruddas, wants him to be, he would set aside Adonis's worthy mercantilism and ponder how genuinely to re-energise the old industrial cities. This should go beyond subsidies, grants and "powerhouse" rhetoric. These places must acquire some of the glamour that is attached to York, Oxford, Winchester and Brighton, cultural magnets for young and old. Cities must fizz or die.

That means big government should move itself out of town. Big art should disperse if it wants subsidy. Big media should become geographically pluralist. During the war, the Manchester Guardian removed the word Manchester from its Cross Street office block "to baffle the enemy invaders". The word was later also removed from its title, presumably to baffle everyone. Since then the Guardian has gone global. Perhaps now is the time for it to return home.