Since the 2019 general election, ‘levelling up’ has been a dominant topic of conversation in the policy world.
“What does it mean?” “Do I need to find out?” “Is it a real thing?” These have been the kinds of questions that people have been asking in my circles. Amongst liberals and on the left, people are confused by levelling up and cynical of its motives - but are also trying to work out whether opportunities might be opening up push a Conservative government into doing things it otherwise might not want to do.
Ultimately though, ‘levelling up’ is a conservative policy agenda. The fact that they’ve done such a poor job of defining it, and the fact that it has some reformist sounding elements, doesn’t mean it’s any less there’s. So what is levelling up actually about –how did the Conservative policy machine end up here, and will the agenda live on if Boris Johnson departs office?
Twelve months of turmoil
Though it was the 2019 general election that brought us the ‘policy’ – levelling up is best understood through the prism of the two electoral events that preceded it: the 2017 election and the EU referendum.
We all know what happened in that 12-month period between June 2016 and June 2017 – but the extent to which that year of tumult shook up conservative policy thinking cannot be overstated. In 2016 - so the story goes - they essentially discovered a new swathe of voters who could be wooed by a right wing cause. However, in 2017 they found that they could not win them in sufficient numbers by offering them the businesses as usual Toryism that had characterised the David Cameron years. 2015 had seen the first Tory majority won in the 21st century, but in a blaze of Brexit, Corbyn and May, it was gone just two years later.
It’s hard to remember now, but in the aftermath of these events, the talk on the right was of the need for ‘a period in opposition’ to come to terms with the electoral realities they were now facing. New Tory think-tanks were popping up to explain why ‘rehashing Thatcherism’ was no longer an option – and the need for new thinking was being presented as existential.
Change without changing
One way of understanding levelling up then is as a kind of policy repository for all the lessons learned on the right in this period.
Austerity had never been popular with people it actually affected – and by 2017, it was starting to affect an awful of lot us. Similarly, inequality was becoming an increasingly salient issue, and for the first time since the early New Labour years, surveys were showing that people wanted an activist state that actually made positive changes in people’s lives (see below).
Source: British Social Attitudes Survey
Something had to change if the Conservative show was to be kept on the road. However, the right could hardly adopt wholesale traditional left-wing stories about inequality, the damage wrought by deindustrialisation or the injustice of neoliberal political economy. They needed was a different narrative about what the problems were, why they were happening and how they could be solved.
Labour’s story was that the status quo was broken – that bad outcomes were an inevitable result of our political and economic systems. The Conservative party largely created those systems and still supported them - but they could no longer deny that bad outcomes were indeed happening.
What they needed was an agenda that said that the fundamentals of the status quo were good – but acknowledged that lots people were unhappy. They needed a language for talking about the problems in this country that did not call into question the overall project of the last 40 years.
Looking back at the discourse of on the right post-Brexit, you can see how this new vocabulary was slowly put together. Somewhere’s versus anywhere’s. Left-behind communities. Forgotten towns. These were the ideas and formulations du jour in Tory policy circles during the run up to 2019.
But what are these phrases actually articulating? All of them conjure the same basic image. Progress is happening. But some people are being ‘left behind’ and ‘forgotten’. The majority is in a good place. A smaller group is not. The task is about bringing the minority along. We don’t need to change direction, we need to ensure that everyone’s facing the same way.
The mission isn’t transformation - it’s normalisation. It’s bringing everyone to the Promised Land. The mission is levelling up.
What happens now?
Once we understand levelling up as being a project of maintenance rather than change, the whole thing starts to seem a lot more coherent.
The focus of the 2019 Conservative manifesto as far as levelling up went was on ‘connectivity’. What needs to happen in places that have been ‘left behind’ is that they need to be given access to the places that are already there. They need to join the game – we definitely do not need to change the rules. Another big focus for levelling up has been the ‘look and feel’ of places. If your starting point is that the political and economic status quo is good – a focus on aesthetics becomes almost inevitable.
Where is this going? The glib answer is nowhere. An agenda of not changing the system will lead to things staying the same. However, I don’t think that’ll be the full story. I suspect the forthcoming white-paper will outline plans for some significant actions. What those actions will be though is an aggressive doubling down on the way things already are – entrenching them, extending them, deepening them.
If we look to the output of the thinktanks doing the heavy lifting when it comes to this agenda – you can see what this might mean in practice. Take Onward, a think-tank founded in the tumult of the post-2017 period with the explicit goal of equipping the right with new ideas. They have published a range of reports that essentially serve as guides to what levelling up might mean in different areas. And in all of them, it seems to mean supercharging current arrangements.
Levelling up pensions will mean extending auto-enrollment. Levelling up for local government will mean a funding system that reinforces councils’ current core responsibilities. Levelling up the economy will mean attracting more investment to the industries that are already in each region.
Beyond Onward, if we look to some of the recent work of the thinktank that has been reported to have the most influence over the Johnson administration - Policy Exchange – we can see a similar dynamic at play. In a report from last year, they explored the role that the City might play in levelling up. Rather than finding the financialised nature of the UK economy to be part of the problem when it comes to regional inequality, they argue that the City can actually be an integral part of the agenda. By promoting growth, and by hopefully spreading out some of their back-office services across the country – they propose a City led vision of levelling-up. It’s the current British economic model – extended and entrenched across the regions.
What levelling up means then, is something classically conservative. Indeed, rather than being a big change of direction, levelling up is exactly the kind of project you might expect to see from a party that has been in power for over a decade. It’s a project of locking-in and deepening the work they’ve already done. It’s not about change, it’s about making things more like how they already are.
This is why, I think the core policy ideas coming out of the thinktanks will live on over the next few years, regardless of what happens to Boris Johnson or to ‘levelling up’ as a brand and buzzword. The normalising project will continue in one form or another until the next election at least. What else could the Conservative Party do at this point?
One might argue that this means that the fundamental problems around regional inequality that the levelling up agenda identifies will remain unsolved.
One might argue that that’s the whole point.
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