The government pits regions against one another in a battle for handouts. Meanwhile, it keeps cutting local authority funding
For a term that has been in circulation for more than two years, “levelling up” has not been the catchiest of political concepts. Journalists and politicians now tend to treat it as a self-explanatory part of the national vocabulary, but in my experience few people in the real world have any idea what it means. Neither, if they were to be honest, do large numbers of Conservative politicians.
But it will not go away. Boris Johnson’s reshuffle was sold as the formation of a new team that would “focus on uniting and levelling up the whole country”. Michael Gove’s arrival at the newly renamed Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, we were told, represented a ramping-up of the effort applied to this challenge. “I don’t think people appreciate quite how seriously Boris takes levelling up,” one Conservative source told The Times. If you appoint Nadine Dorries as the culture secretary and then float the idea of a return to imperial weights and measures, many people may have trouble believing you are serious about anything, but there we are: amid the culture wars pantomime, the prime minister’s allies insist that levelling-up efforts are under way and will now only gather momentum.