BLACKPOOL in its pomp was everything a mill worker or clerk could wish for in a holiday resort. There were the piers and beaches, the outdoor dancing stages and the music halls, ludicrously extravagant Moorish and Indian follies where entertainers from Laurel and Hardy to Frank Sinatra delighted the crowds. And there was the Tower, modelled on Eiffel’s in Paris, with its lights, ballroom and mighty Wurlitzer organ. One in five Britons holidayed in the town. So the memories of those years lived on long after the dawn of mass foreign tourism in the 1960s. The recent success of “Strictly Come Dancing”, a televised ballroom-dancing contest, is testament to a lingering national soft-spot for its old blend of sequined razzmatazz and Victorian politesse.

Today the memories are almost all Blackpool has left. Abandoned for the Costas, it failed to find a new role, became one of the ten most deprived towns in Britain and is now almost cinematically bleak: Coney Island meets Detroit. The town centre is a smelly (urine and fried food, with notes of cannabis) patchwork of charity shops, nightclubs with fading playbills and unloved tourist emporia flogging boiled sweets in saucy shapes. In the back streets scrawny men loiter outside terraces of peeling boarding houses, swigging from cans and glaring at the seagulls. “People aren’t usually in Blackpool if they have somewhere to go,” says Brian, an unemployed waiter outside the job centre.

His comment reminded Bagehot of a song by Morrissey in which the gloomadon-popping Lancastrian evoked “the coastal town that they forgot to close down”. The lyric captures something of Blackpool’s sadness, but also the economic transformation under which it is falling yet further behind and which was advanced by George Osborne in his budget. The chancellor of the exchequer is curbing efforts to limit the decline of struggling places like this. Where previous governments, to varying degrees, tried to prop them up, his (tacit) message to their residents is: get on your bike. Move to those places with the connections, industries and profile needed to make it in a globalised economy. Places like Manchester, today a creative- and financial-services boomtown and the crane-dotted pivot of the “Northern Powerhouse”, his grand plan to integrate the big northern cities.

What is Mr Osborne’s game? He wants the state to concentrate less on solving problems and more on creating the conditions in which places and people succeed in the first place. Think of his increases to the minimum wage, his infrastructure spending, his sugar tax and his wave of devolution to cities (none more than Manchester, which he announced would gain new control over its policing). Sometimes, such policies disproportionately boost the growth of places that are already doing well. For example, the chancellor announced that by 2020, councils will raise all the money they spend: “If you want local communities to take responsibility for local growth, they have to be able to reap the rewards.” Likewise, his small-business tax cut does more for municipalities that can fall back on big, profitable companies for their revenues, while his transport investments are unabashedly metropolitan: a new underground railway through London, a new tunnelled road linking Manchester and Sheffield and a high-speed trainline connecting the northern cities. On the eve of his budget speech the Manchester Evening News carried an artist’s impression of the extension and swankification of the city’s main station (from which the 200-mile trip to London, at 68 minutes, will be quicker than the 50-mile, bone-rattling ride to Blackpool).

The corollary of all this is that failing places will be given more latitude to fail. For example, through cuts to welfare and local government, Mr Osborne is dismantling the Zimmer frame built up by Labour to keep decrepit towns on their feet. Blackpool is the local authority which has lost most per person under austerity, because it is so reliant on public spending. Its private economy is weak and seasonal and its people are relatively poor, unhealthy and troubled: one in four claims welfare benefits, life expectancy is five years below the national average and the town has acute crime, drug-abuse and alcoholism problems. Removing the Zimmer frame was always going to send it toppling, and so it has toppled: public-sector employment has fallen and, unlike in much of Britain, the private sector has not filled the gap. Blackpool’s economy shrank by 8% over the five years from 2010.

Heaven knows I’m miserable now

All of which is making a grim situation worse. The council has trimmed street-cleaning, business and social-care services. New cuts from Whitehall mean some leisure centres and libraries may have to close, warns Simon Blackburn, the Labour council leader. And Britain’s geographical polarisation is self-perpetuating: as Blackpool slides, its most mobile citizens leave for the big cities (254 well-educated youngsters left between 2009 and 2012, one-third for London) while down-and-outs attracted by low house prices move in (bedsits rent for £70, or $100, per week). The result is a downward spiral towards a future as, in Mr Blackburn’s words, “a refuge for the dispossessed and the never-possessed”.

Mr Osborne’s metropolitan revolution responds to the harsh realities of the modern economy and is thus welcome. And it is a wise use of public money to extend the success of places that have what it takes to grow and be prosperous, and help people elsewhere relocate to where the good jobs are. But one can hold these views and simultaneously regret Blackpool’s fate. Voters there feel left behind and (like their counterparts across the West) are turning to populist political outlets: last year the UK Independence Party’s share of the vote more than tripled to 15% and 17% in the town’s two constituencies. And contrary to Brian the waiter’s assertion, plenty of people in Blackpool love its tawdry shimmer and do not want to leave. “It’s seen better days,” admits Jill, a permed pensioner admiring the grey Irish Sea from the prom. “But we get lovely sunsets.”

Economist.com/blogs/bagehot