In the first flush of his 2019 election triumph, Boris Johnson stood outside Number 10 and flourished a promise to “unite and level up” the country. He likes this theme so much that he has returned to it repeatedly. In so much as Mr Johnson has a “Big Idea”, this is it. Yet, from its genesis, there has been confusion about what he means by levelling up. It is not just external sceptics who complain that it is a slogan unaccompanied by either philosophy or strategy. The Tory MP Laura Farris recently remarked that it is “an ambiguous phrase” that “means whatever anyone wants it to mean”.
This criticism has been getting to the prime minister. In May, he brought a new recruit into the centre of government. He appointed Neil O’Brien, the Conservative MP for Harborough in Leicestershire, to lead policy development on the subject and tasked him with producing a white paper for this autumn. Those who genuinely believe in levelling up were encouraged by this appointment. Mr O’Brien is among the rare Tories who have been thinking about regional inequalities and what to do about them for many years. He has only been in post a few weeks, so it would be harsh to blame him for the fact that the prime minister’s most recent attempt to explain what is supposed to be his defining mission has been received with about as much enthusiasm as a cup of cold sick. Dominic Cummings, his former chief adviser turned chief tormentor, ridiculed it as a “crap speech (same he’s given pointlessly umpteen times) supporting crap slogan”.
Much as I enjoy the regular spectacle of Mr Cummings discharging the contents of his bile duct on the prime minister, the slogan is not the real problem. It is the lack of substance. The speech asked many of the right questions. It is “an outrage that a man in Glasgow or Blackpool has an average of less than 10 years on this planet than someone growing up in Hart in Hampshire”. It “cannot be right” that you are almost twice as likely to have A-level or equivalent qualifications if you live in Bath than if you live in Bradford. It is “an astonishing fact” that the per capita GDP of many regions of the UK has fallen below the eastern parts of Germany that were imprisoned in the Soviet bloc before the Berlin Wall came down.
Gross inequalities in life expectancy, educational attainment and prosperity are a blight that squanders potential and corrodes national cohesion. The feeling that some parts of the country have thrived while others have been left to wither has fuelled a lot of grievance. The Tory leader used that resentment for his own ends in the Brexit referendum and at the last election. He would be right to worry that the bitterness will reflux on him if those voters conclude that he was never really serious about doing something for their communities. That will involve hard work and tough choices. These imbalances are the result of economic and social trends that reach back decades and have been troubling British governments since Harold Wilson was at Number 10. This is a challenge larger than one parliament. It will be the work of a generation. A genuine endeavour to start tackling it demands leadership that is capable of thinking very long term.
Unless we are extremely unlucky, Mr Johnson will not be prime minister for a generation and he habitually acts as if he struggles to think much further ahead than tomorrow’s headlines.
The speech betrayed that weakness. There were a lot of random metaphorical distractions. At one point, he started raving about “the yeast that lifts the whole mattress of dough, the magic sauce – the ketchup of catch-up”. Lashings of rhetorical condiments came with meagre policy meat. There was a promise of £50m for better football pitches, a £10m plan to clean up chewing gum and a “National High Streets Day” to lift local pride. Given the profundity of the inequalities he had described, this is like offering a sticking plaster to a man suffering from a heart attack.
“Pride in place” matters a lot to many people. There is nothing at all wrong with trying to perk up beaten-down high streets and make civic amenities more appealing. This has a role to play, but it is very much at the easy end of levelling up, which is doubtless why it appeals to a prime minister who wants quick hits and recoils from harder choices. In a way he did not anticipate when he first pledged himself to it, levelling up is proving not to be a unifying theme, but an increasingly divisive one, especially within his own party. When he was returned to Number 10 in 2019, he had just taken lots of seats off Labour in the Midlands and the north of England. He wanted to hold on to those gains at the next election and, by doing so, consolidate a reputation as the man who extended the Conservatives’ electoral coalition into places the party had previously found beyond its reach. The intake of Tory MPs representing formerly Labour constituencies quickly organised themselves into a Northern Research Group. They have generally been fervent loyalists for Mr Johnson because many of them think they owe their seats to him. From their direction, we can hear growing rumbles of disgruntlement that they have yet to see many palpable results.
At the same time, southern Conservatives are becoming angsty. They were shocked by the recent loss of the Chesham and Amersham byelection to the Lib Dems. The drubbing of the Tories in that affluent part of the Chilterns has fed fears of more troubles to come in southern seats. Many factors contributed to that defeat. Opposition to HS2 and changes to the planning regime helped the Lib Dems to run one of their classic protest byelection campaigns. Tory MPs took away something else, reporting that they had detected a festering resentment among southern voters that “levelling up” essentially means taking money away from them to give to the north. When he faces a conflict like this, the prime minister’s default is to try to fudge it out of existence. So there was a defensive chunk of his speech in which he tried to reassure wary southerners that levelling up is not “a jam-spreading operation. It’s not robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
Yet if it is a meaningful enterprise then it has to entail allocating disadvantaged areas a larger slice of the resources going into transport, education, skills, government contracts and investment and job incentives than they would have done absent levelling up. That has to mean wealthier areas of the country getting less than they would have done. Some Tories are more willing to be upfront about this. Rachel Wolf, who co-wrote the Tory 2019 manifesto, has said that the Conservatives will have to choose whether they focus on the “just about managing” or concentrate on “affluent Britain” and “there is no third magic middle path”.
The UK is not only one of the most imbalanced countries in the western world, it is also one of the most centralised, and the prime minister now acknowledges that these two defects are connected. This has long been accepted by Tories who have worked on these issues. Michael Heseltine led efforts to regenerate inner cities during the Thatcher years in the 1980s. Jim O’Neill worked on the “northern powerhouse” project when David Cameron was at Number 10. They both contend, as do many others, that the solution is not for central government to throw out money at the caprice of ministers in need of an announcement to put in a press release.
Local needs are best met and local strengths best mobilised by devolving control to local leadership. Most mayors and councils would relish being given greater power to determine what suits their communities, but I will believe it when I see it if this government is genuinely prepared to relinquish control, particularly over money, and especially if it involves handing it to representatives of other parties. The form so far has been to make councils dance to the tunes of central government by telling them to bid for pots of cash distributed from Whitehall. Money from the centrally controlled towns and levelling-up funds have disproportionately favoured places represented by Tories. That’s not about levelling up, that’s about pork barrelling.
Tories who know him well say that if anyone can make sense of the prime minister’s “Big Idea” it is Neil O’Brien. First, he will have to work on levelling up the prime minister. That won’t be easy either.
• Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
