This may come as a surprise, but I think the Tories’ levelling-up policy has got it right
There are transformative moments in politics when the opposition gets gifted the political agenda. In the 1970s, it was the power of trade unions and inflation that gave the Tories control of the narrative, just as after 2008, it was the aftermath of the financial crisis. Today, Covid and Brexit have combined to make the condition of the people the number one political issue. The question of how to react to this threatens to overwhelm a Tory party that is divided between its libertarian wing and its one-nation advocates and whose leader is self-evidently unfit for high office.
It is a new transformative moment. The news last week that January inflation hit a 30-year high of 5.5% to produce the biggest cost of living squeeze for 60 years is the backdrop to a mounting social crisis. The pressure is reflected in a falling birth rate and stagnating, even declining life expectancy, desperately unfair life chances, disempowerment, justified post-Brexit economic pessimism and social neglect, all alongside phenomenal private wealth. Labour, for the first time in 15 years, has the chance to command the agenda and do to its opponents what was once done to it.
“Levelling up” is the talismanic policy that brings all this together. Boris Johnson, for all his glaring deficiencies, had the wit to see that. It was not his alleged campaigning genius or what the deluded Europhobes think is the compelling case for Brexit that won the 2016 referendum and 2019 general election. Rather, it was the massive disaffection of millions of working-class voters with the status quo. There had to be change and levelling up, whose need is reinforced by the lethal unfairness of Covid, represents his personal commitment to deliver the change.
Except, as the
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