It's a very long slogan

Tweet

 

It’s probably a mistake to take the UK Government’s verbose White Paper on ‘Levelling Up’ too seriously. It’s likely that we will have a new government before it ever gets converted into legislation, let alone action, and with even the supposed author having allegedly described the content as “shit”, it’s unlikely to survive the imminent fall of the man who invented the term ‘levelling up’ without having a clue what it meant. That is especially true if his successor turns out to be the current Chancellor, who has done his best not only to neuter the paper by refusing any significant new funding, but also to make people in the poorer parts of the UK even poorer by his decision on Universal Credit and his less than half-hearted attempt to be seen to be doing something about the cost of living crisis whilst making it worse.

There is little purpose, therefore, in any detailed analysis of something which is likely to be either ditched within weeks or else relaunched to mean something very different and a great deal cheaper. There has always been a huge contradiction at the heart of the vagueness, as a result of the PM’s propensity to promise different things to different people. In launching his crock of brown matter this week, Gove referred to the need to “shift wealth and power decisively to working people and their families”. Leaving aside the unlikelihood of the Tories ever wanting to shift wealth and power to working people, the PM has already promised his MPs and the electorate that his levelling up agenda will be achieved without taking anything away from anyone, and especially not from Tory areas in the south-east of England. Promising both to leave current wealth untouched and to shift it elsewhere is typical of the Johnson approach, but it is an impossible combination. Levelling up is, of course, possible without transferring wealth – but it depends on both creating more wealth, and ensuring that new wealth is created where it is needed. The timescale for doing that would be very much longer than the already hopelessly over-optimistic one laid out in the White (perhaps I should say Brown) Paper; and it would need the government to take much more control over the way the economy operates, something which is anathema to any conceivable successor to the PM.

‘Levelling Up’ remains what it has always been – a vague slogan which sounds like a good idea in principle. At 332 pages long, it now even fails the test of being a good slogan.

Protecting Tory voters isn't levelling up

Tweet

 

For the PM to talk about moving to a high wage economy on the same day that his government reverses the temporary uplift to Universal Credit would look like just another example of incompetence and inconsistency if the clash of dates hadn’t been known for months in advance. It looks instead more like an example of just rubbing people’s noses in it. 

It’s true, of course, that the uplift was always billed as temporary but the rationale for moving from an inadequate weekly payment to a marginally less inadequate weekly payment for the duration of the pandemic was never spelled out explicitly. It clearly has little to do with any suggestion that the pandemic was somehow going to cost those receiving the benefit more, but always seemed to be associated more with the fact that more people were going to end up claiming the benefit, as a result of a furlough scheme which cut the wages of millions of employees. It’s no coincidence that the ending of the uplift comes at roughly the same time as the ending of furlough; it’s all about electoral politics.

It’s a sweeping generalisation to say that, in so-called ‘normal’ times, most of those in receipt of Universal Credit in England (and it's only England that matters to the government) will be either Labour voters or else non-voters, more concerned with managing their daily lives than with voting in an election where most votes count for little. (And who can honestly blame people struggling to make ends meet on a daily basis for being less than passionately concerned about which particular bunch of deficit fetishists are in charge of implementing an austerity programme?) But being a sweeping generalisation doesn’t necessarily make it incorrect. What the furlough scheme did was tip many more of the voting public – including a number who do, or could be persuaded to, vote Conservative – into the area where they needed to claim the benefit. The uplift was intended not so much to protect the interests of claimants as to protect the electoral interests of the Conservative Party. Now that very many fewer of their voters fall into the system, they believe that they can afford to revert to the even more inadequate level of benefit which pertained previously. People who don’t vote for them simply don’t matter to them.

The PM claims that it is better for people to be in high-wage employment than to depend on benefits. He’s right – but if his government were serious about that, they could legislate tomorrow to outlaw any employer paying a full time wage so low that staff need to claim benefits in addition. Such a proposal might give them a little difficulty with some of their own backbenchers, who seem to believe that not paying people enough to live on is a perfectly reasonable employment practice (and also effectively provides a handy public subsidy to companies who donate, or might be persuaded to donate, large sums to the Tory Party), but I’m sure that they’d get enough support from opposition parties to get the measure passed. Outside the ranks of the Tory Party, I doubt that there are many MPs who believe that paying people less than enough to live on is ever a reasonable thing to do.

There is nothing in the PM’s rhetoric about a high-skill high-wage economy which is going to help those at the economic bottom of society, doing jobs where there is little or no possibility of innovation or improved productivity. Even if it were possible for all those doing jobs on low pay to walk into higher-paid employment tomorrow, the requirement for most of those jobs would still be there; we’d just be faced with an unfulfilled – and unfulfillable – requirement. Levelling up (even if it were defined, which it has not been to date) is a not unreasonable aspiration, but the word ‘levelling’ is more important than the word ‘up’. Unless action is taken to reduce the disparity between the top and the bottom, it’s not levelling at all, and there will still be people left behind at the bottom. Ensuring that his party can win elections without ever needing the votes of any left in that group is a much more limited aspiration – but probably a better description of the overall policy aim.