LISA NANDY rightly observes that the Tories have “abandoned” levelling up — the promised targeted investment that would address Britain’s yawning regional inequalities.
Conservative rivals compete to pledge the most extreme form of Thatcherism, demanding corporation tax cuts and yet more deregulation.
We are so used to Tories saying one thing and doing the opposite that the significance of this may be lost on the left.
But “levelling up” was key to the Tory brand that swept to victory in the 2019 election. It may not have been as influential as the promise to “get Brexit done” but it was its essential counterpart: a commitment that Brexit would mean change.
Like Theresa May’s promise to end austerity in 2016, levelling up was a pledge made in the context of a socialist-led Labour Party which was calling for wealth redistribution and public ownership.
Like the Brexit vote, the 2017 election — in which Labour bagged millions of extra votes — was a warning that the political consensus of four decades was falling apart. People wanted change. And the Tories only beat Labour by posing as the party to deliver it.
Was it all a lie? Johnson’s premiership has been a web of lies, but serious political thinkers believed we were witnessing a genuine shift away from small-state, pro-market Conservatism.
Labour peer Maurice Glasman thought Johnson would “break from fiscal orthodoxy and embrace the activist state. Expect to see a thousand Boris buses bombing around the country lanes of England in partnership with local government. Expect a house-building boom. The PM will violate EU rules on state aid and competition law with relish…”
Until Johnson fell out with Dominic Cummings, this seemed to be the plan. Sajid Javid was sacked as chancellor for opposing spending increases. The pandemic even provided a context in which Tory MPs could be made to swallow state intervention. Internationally, neoliberalism also seemed on the way out: the new cold war between the US and China seeing the former adopt protectionist policies and plan huge infrastructure spending.
In the event, Johnson ditched his strategist and the whole project unravelled. We are seeing now how little support it ever had on the Tory benches. The Tories have nothing to offer but more of the same.
But the same is true of Labour. There is a curious parallel between the gulf between the Tory leadership contest and ordinary people’s concerns, and the Parliamentary Labour Party’s horror at the popularity of socialist policies after 2015.
Labour MPs in the Corbyn era claimed party members were unrepresentative of public opinion. As we learned in 2017, on issues like public ownership it was MPs who were out of touch (and still are).
There is much talk of how 160,000 Conservative Party members should not pick our next prime minister (and nor should they). But less observed is that reactionary and unrepresentative as they are, these 160,000 members are still more reflective of public opinion than most MPs.
Tory members say their main concern is the cost of living. Most of them do not want more tax cuts and a majority even support renationalising the railways.
The inescapable conclusion is that most MPs, of all parties, are now completely unmoored from the wider public.
Like the long war waged by Labour MPs and bureaucrats to destroy Corbynism, the fight to be Tory leader exposes a privileged Westminster elite that cannot even connect to its own political parties.
Levelling up was never socialist: it was never about public ownership or redistribution, let alone shifting the balance of power from employers to workers.
Even so, it was a reflection at Westminster of the widespread desire for change in society. Its passing, like the ferocious Establishment response to Corbyn, suggests the “Mother of Parliaments” can no longer even hear, let alone heed, the wishes of the people it rules.
