Covid isn’t over yet, despite Boris Johnson attempting to wish away Delta as if it were an airline he could ban from Heathrow. But even if it were, people will soon start asking what he means by “levelling up” and “building back better”—and he doesn’t have a clue. Nor, alas, does Keir Starmer, which is why he is far happier arguing about the precise regulations for mask-wearing next week than what should happen to the economy next month and next year.
Of Johnson’s two slogans du jour, “levelling up” is the most problematic, because it is conceptually wrong as well as lacking in policy.
Obviously, England has grotesque problems of regional inequality and poverty. Seven of the 10 poorest regions in northern Europe are in England, while Europe’s richest region is inner London, with the home counties of the south-east not far behind. Astonishingly, regions in the north and midlands, as well as Wales and Northern Ireland, are between five and 30 per cent poorer than West Virginia and Mississippi, two of the US’s poorest states. They are barely richer than many of the regions of former communist central and eastern Europe.
Equally obviously, this was a cause of Brexit, followed by the Tory advance in the “red wall” under Jeremy Corbyn and now Keir, who lacks a plan for regenerating these traditionally Labour regions. Equally lacking is a Labour critique of Brexit, which has enabled Boris to consolidate Nigel Farage’s success in scapegoating Brussels for Westminster’s failure to deliver for the poorer English regions.
On “levelling up,” Labour has taken wholly the wrong lesson from last week’s Batley and Spen by-election. Keir would have you believe that the Tory tide had been turned and that the “spirit of Kim Leadbeater”—the constituency’s excellent new MP, and sister of the assassinated Jo Cox—was about to sweep the country. He has even claimed that Labour would have won a landslide but for George Galloway’s candidacy. In reality it was a narrow escape, by just 323 votes, and since Galloway appears to have cornered a large part of the populist Brexit vote, no-one can tell what the result would have been without him.
But in any event, the political challenge is to provide a credible and exciting blueprint for regenerating the “red wall.” Neither Boris nor Keir have one in sight, and “levelling up’’ is wholly misleading as a way of conceiving the challenge because it implies that the answer lies in being more like London.
For whatever the incantations of Westminster and Whitehall, London’s huge business, financial and creative sectors are not migrating to any notable extent to Batley and Spen, or to Hartlepool, or to Sunderland; and even if they were, the challenge for London itself is also to regenerate post-Brexit. The city cannot be complacently banked as a resource for “redistribution” to the midlands or the north.
What the north needs is decent infrastructure—yet Boris has just delayed indefinitely the eastern leg of HS2 to Derby, Nottingham, Sheffield, Leeds and the north-east. It needs schools and educational opportunities as good as in London and the south-east—yet real-terms funding for schools is still declining. And it needs a proper economic plan for regional jobs and businesses. That must involve a renegotiation of Boris’s Brexit deal—the same deal that Keir voted for and dares not criticise.
“Building back better” is not inherently awry, but it is vague. The first step in doing so meaningfully is to catch back up after the set-back of Covid. But where is the plan? Kevan Collins’s £15bn educational catch-up plan was axed. British politics is crying out for a leader to reclaim Tony Blair’s mantra of “education, education, education.” None is in sight.
Beyond that, there is no plan whatever for the 10 million NHS operations backlog which is projected for the end of the year. And no-one—Tory or Labour—has a clue what to suggest in place of the mass unemployment threatened when and if furlough ends in September.
Rishi Sunak and Rachel Reeves, his new shadow after Keir’s first shadow chancellor vanished entirely, are competing on who can say least about the path to recovery after Covid. On the BBC’s “Marr” programme last Sunday, the Oxford-educated Reeves revealed she had never read Karl Marx. Let’s hope she has at least read the Book of Proverbs: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”
