The response of the political and regeneration establishment to the Policy Exchange report on inner city regeneration – Cities Unlimited – has been profoundly depressing. It is not that those who have been most vociferous in their condemnation are those who have generally not bothered to read the report, it is that the questions raised have now been lost in the general tabloid furore about a report calling for the Northern cities "to be abandoned".

As we report in Bulletin, Cities Unlimited said no such thing. However, this did not stop an unspeakably stupid assistant editor from the Daily Mirror appearing on Radio 5 and gibbering that this report was yet another example of the "toff" David Cameron and his "toff" friends having contempt for the North.

To his shame, Cameron also sought to distance himself from the report, despite again having clearly not actually read it.

It is almost as if the child who noticed that the King was wearing no clothes was subjected to a concerted attack by the King's courtiers.

Rather than look at the facts for ourselves we accept this mindless nonsense. Shooting the messenger while ignoring the message.

Once again the assorted placemen, timeservers and hangers-on who make up much of our bloated regeneration industry avoid the questions they cannot answer. The obvious one being that if all the evidence shows that regeneration does not work, or at least does not work as well as is claimed, then why persist with it?

The answer is quite obviously because the only well-paid jobs that inner city regeneration creates are in the regeneration industry itself – and these rarely go to local people.

That the report – one of a series of three that should be taken as a single effort – should so comprehensively demolish the claims of the regeneration establishment, using its own figures, only to be ridiculed over ideas that it never put forward is depressingly familiar.

When the second report, Cities Limited, was published, the Wigan MP Ian McCartney – an idiot in search of a village – came out gibbering in the local press that the Government had "rebuilt Wigan brick by brick", as if this was a cogent refutation of the report’s proof that this money had actually helped Wigan to fall further behind the rest of the country than before.

Ask anyone who lives in Wigan (or indeed any other town that has been "regenerated") if the town has improved economically over the past decade and they will assert what the Government's own figures show so clearly: it has not.

As the report points out "people on the ground know the reality of success and failure far better than any policy maker or analyst can hope to." And looking at population flows, northerners, particularly the skilled ones, are voting with their feet.

The use of selective statistics and a kind of anti-logic underpins the efforts of the regeneration lobby to convince us of the success of the current model – which has, it ought to be said, been followed by Governments of various colours.

Take individual programmes – as the report does. The Government, and its cheerleaders, have been endlessly reminding us of the success of its flagship coalfield regeneration programme. This has generated 16,000 new jobs since 1996.

Journalists to their shame have simply parroted the figures provided; the authors of this research analyse them in some detail.

The programme cost £379 million and ran for more than ten years in 107 different places. Elementary mathematics reveals that this flagship example of successful regeneration has created a risible one job every three weeks in the areas in which it has operated.

Next time the development agencies put out figures about job creation and jobs safeguarded remember the essential,unarguable, fact that this report unearths: GVA in every area where there has been Government regeneration has grown far slower than in those areas where there is none – and the gap is widening.

All you need to do is look – the King has no clothes.

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