What levelling up?

The views expressed in this article are those of the author

In the 2019 General Election and its immediate aftermath Dominic Cummings deployed, on Boris Johnson’s behalf, a most excellent phrase; Levelling Up.

It was excellent as a campaigning tool in that it meant different things to different people. The dejected ex-industrial worker in the one-time engines of Britain’s economy felt it meant reward for their decades of hard work and contribution.

The young-person in a collapsing seaside town where underinvested education had left them without the opportunity to “get-out-and-get-on” felt it meant the opportunity to see some of the reward their educationally advantaged peers had seen. The rural countryside worker, who’d seen their community hollowed out for second homes or extended outer-suburbs, felt they would see a return to community-based employment. It was an antidote to disappointment.

It was excellent as a campaigning tool because it was right. Everyone thought it meant regeneration, everyone was right to want that, everyone was to be disappointed.

Many have written about what came next; the mismanagement of funds, the lack of joined-up thinking, how regeneration funds were diverted to support the governing party’s marginal seats rather than actual programmes pointed at actual need. About how those diminished funds disposed of on a shrinking pool of genuine levelling-up programmes were distributed based on the quality of a written bid rather than the clarity of the actual need.

Instead I’d like to focus on two things. On the massive, missed levelling-up opportunity that Covid gave us and on what levelling-up could have meant, if it had been intended to genuinely equalise opportunity.

Firstly of Covid. One of the really positive policies of the last decades was the Blair government’s insistence on increased access to higher and further education. It has given more UK citizens more opportunity to be more prosperous than their parents, than would otherwise have been the case, unambiguously. But it has come with costs.

Students have been required to contribute to the system through a student loan (arguably a graduate tax) system, as public finance was incapable of taking that burden. Universities have had to borrow significantly, funded by that student debt, to provide the increased capacity and to achieve competitiveness not just with their UK peers but internationally. But perhaps the most significant change has been that more bright young people have been drawn from their communities to University towns for their education, and then on to the big cities for high-value employment, massively changing the UK demographics.

Covid blew a hole in the last element of those assumptions. So many “white-collar” jobs were transformed overnight into remote positions and even now a huge proportion of what was once office work is now hybrid. That hybridity could mean that those well-paid workers who grew up in small towns could move back, live near their parents, with lower housing costs, spreading talent, wealth and success around the country.

That so many of a “conservative” bent, by no means just within the Conservative party and its traditions, rile against flexible working as some unwanted innovation for the feckless and workshy is to ignore the huge potential familial, societal and economic benefits that the normalising, establishing of well-managed hybrid working could bring.

But what should levelling-up mean if it really were about equalising the opportunity of those feeling “left behind”? I’d argue it’s less about regenerating the High Street with a lick-of-paint on the library and a modified bus route. I’d say the root of the imbalance in wealth, in opportunity, in perceived agency is really an imbalance in POWER!

Almost every democratic country in the world has a mythology around how the people there determined how they should be ruled. In France there’s the revolution and the iterative republics that followed it. In the US there’s their war of independence against colonial imposition and the constitutional congress that followed where the states established their own, and a federal, authority. Something similar is reflected in the traditions of most of the democratic world and even in some of those places that feign democracy.

There are exceptions also of course. In Germany, the victors of World War II imposed a new constitution, taking elements of the derided Weimar settlement and of the previous Kaiser’s constitution but adding safeguards against totalitarianism and specifically against the exclusion of any part of society on racial or regional grounds. Japan similarly received a bizarre but popular and successful mash-up of British monarchism and American constitutionalism.

In the UK we have none of this. We have Magna Carta for the Lords (1215), the poorly-named English Civil War (1651) and the Glorious Revolution for Parliament (1688) and the Great Reforms Acts (1832) for the common man and (delayed to 1918) the common woman too. But the model of this change in the UK has been different. In other jurisdictions change has come as a consequence of war or revolution and has generally received popular support.

In the UK tiny parcels of political power have been drip-fed to the citizenry, always - perhaps as a consequence of the heinous trauma of the Civil War - only enough to avoid revolution. Avoiding civil war is admirable. That we have never, ever been consulted about our form of government is a hideous injustice and renders us servants in our own land.

I’d guess that most of the population rather like a democracy, a parliament, even a royal family, but to have never been asked saps those institutions of their legitimacy; they have no historical mandate.

Levelling-up SHOULD have been that; giving every man and woman in the UK a genuine say in how they’re governed.

Stephen Gosling, Vice-Chair, Unlock Democracy