The Class Politics of Levelling Up Failure
I don't intend repeating Gove's vague "missions", which have been summarised elsewhere. Most of the establishment critiques of it are spot on, as far as they go. The money pledged, the schemes announced, and the paltry ambitions of the government's big idea (Boris Johnson's "mission", if you can believe it) fall far short of what is needed to overcome decades of decline and neglect. Today, the £1.5tn the German federal government sunk into the East post unification has been the point of comparison, and one in which the East now enjoys a better standard of living than whole swathes of the English Midlands and North. But it's not enough to lament the Tories' hopelessness, take the piss, and call them incompetent for the umpteenth time. We have to ask why Gove's modernisation is so lacklustre and why, for all intents and purposes, amounts to giving tired-looking town centres a lick of paint.
Let's start with the generous, some might say naive explanation. It's that the Tories don't know what they're doing. In the Dave and Osborne years, their windy rhetoric about their "long-term economic plan" were but gusts of befuddling words. There was no plan. They took their axe to public services, privatised whatever was left after decades of sell offs, and presented their efforts at deficit reduction as the measure of their economic competence. And sadly, enough people fell for it to vote them back in. Underpinning Osborne's political economy was a viciously class conscious strategy aimed at making workers pay for the bank bail outs, and a hope that conferring more powers on the Manchester and Birmingham mayoralties would magically transform Britain into a turbo-charged Germany. Reader, this did not happen. When Theresa May had her go, from the steps of Downing Street she pledged her premiership would head in a different direction, a programme with a concern for social justice(!) and inequality at its heart. Nick Timothy put it in her ill-fated manifesto, and that was as far as it went while the loss of her majority and the pain of the Brexit negotiations torpedoed her authoritarian, but ostensibly patrician (matrician?) agenda. Johnson took it up as he inherited and built on her voter coalition. And two years on, notwithstanding Covid, here we are. Still talking about what-might-be. Tory statecraft since Thatcher can't build because it has forgotten how, and why we see incompetent decision-making, delay, and underestimation of the challenge.
A more coherent and accurate explanation locates the Tories' levelling up difficulties in the interests they articulate. Or, to use the old fashioned language, class. These should be familiar by now to anyone who has followed the Tory politics of the Covid crisis. Their incoherence, downgrading of public health priorities, but trying to face multiple directions at once is more than stupidity and incompetence but the effect of competing pressures. Their nationwide economic plan is no different.
Apart from their general concern with keeping workers under the heels of their employers, the primary economic interest the Tories have long favoured is the City of London. Not finance capital but, historically, commercial capital. Consistently, whether the two-nation politics of Thatcher or the one-nationism of Macmillan, the preservation of the City as a (if not the) global centre of finance and brokerage is their priority. The City interest lies in increasing the volume of trades as more trades mean more commission and therefore greater profits, and this free market common sense circulates among the revolving door of personnel between it, the Bank of England, and the Treasury. Cementing it in place are significant layers of Tory MPs whose immediate class interests tie in with the City (Sunak and Rees-Mogg, for example), and the dependence of the party on donors drawn from this coterie. This is important because basically, as well as the Tories' tribulations over Europe being partly rooted in received wisdom and statecraft, Brexit was also a debate taking place in City circles. How to secure London as a global hub in the 21st century? Stay within the ambit of the EU and keep clipping the coupons while becoming increasingly subordinate to the European Central Bank and Frankfurt, or strike out alone in a bid for global pre-eminence? I digress. The point is if this is the core sectional concern of the Tory party, then what takes place in the rest of the country is largely irrelevant. As long as the elite institutions keep churning out the next generation of brokers and city slickers, who cares whether unemployment is a problem in Bradford or not? Therefore Tory politics rests on a substrate of instinctive indifference.
Coming next we have the next layer of interests the Tories pander to: finance, property, and landlord interests. During 2020, their contradictory public health strategy consistently put the health of rents above the safety of workers and young people. Opening the universities up for a semester had much more to do with servicing the investments of property speculators, and landlords big and small than wanting to give students a decent experience, for instance. What has this got to do with levelling up? This layer, shading from the impeccably bourgeois to the chancing-it petit bourgeois, already do quite nicely out of Britain's lop-sided economy. The building of housing and the sprucing up of town centres threatens to increase the supply of residences and quality commercial properties, which is a direct threat to the rents they charge.
Related to this is the mass base of the present Tory coalition of voters: older people. This isn't because people naturally become conservative as they age, but in Britain at least there is a strong correlation between age and asset ownership. If you were able to acquire a house via a cheap mortgage in the 70s and 80s, or through the Right to Buy, or a bargain in the early 90s following the collapse of the Thatcher/Lawson property bubble and before prices took off again, in many parts of the country that asset has appreciated significantly and these older, mostly retired homeowners have an interest in this continuing - even if they have no intention of selling. Seeing the state of the country, millions of elderly owner-occupiers want a valuable asset they can pass on to their children to help them after they're gone. A perfectly reasonable desire, which leads many of them to vote for the very party that makes life unnecessarily hard for their working age children and grandchildren. A case of opposing their offsprings' future property-owning interests to their current interests as working people. In the here and now, this constitutes a further break on Tory modernisation. Everyone wants to live in a nice place, but if there are too many nice places then the value of their estates stagnates or, gasp, might even decline.
As far as the mass Tory core are concerned, it's very rarely spelled out in these stark terms and finds itself sublimated through authoritarian politics, nationalist populism, and beggar-they-neighbour politics. It therefore acts as a real pressure on the Tories, one that has effectively boxed them into a corner with a mass coalition (at least before their current difficulties) more likely to vote than the rest of the population, but not replacing itself like-for-like. Even as assets are passed on and inherited by the families they leave behind. The conservatising consequences of ageing (i.e. property ownership) is breaking down.
This is a snapshot of the internal contradictions the Tories have to wrestle with. Gove's White Paper, just like the non-starter industrial strategy and May's One Nation affectation before that indicates they have a sense that electoral success under Boris Johnson is not sustainable. The relationships feeding it are undergoing decay. To win in the long-term, the Tories have to strike out and make new supporters. Which is very difficult when the exigencies of maintaining the present coalition means kicking people of working age in the teeth. There is no way of squaring the political circle. Its coalition of interests are too tied to the asset price inflation economic model, and doing anything about it can only invite electoral defeat for the Tories. For that reason, Michael Gove might as well pad out his regeneration strategy with wistful invocations of ancient Rome. They are incapable of delivering on their levelling up promise, so why not offer some light reading instead?
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