Whatever happened to “levelling up”? At the start of the decade, after a Tory landslide won with the help of a promise to “unite and level up, spreading opportunity across the whole United Kingdom”, it was nearly impossible to escape the phrase. But in the thick of a rather anaemic 2024 general election campaign, references to anything so bold as a concrete plan for addressing regional inequality are notably absent from the rhetoric of both main parties.
In the red corner, Keir Starmer has said relatively little on the campaign trail about raising up the regions. Meanwhile, the rapidly self-immolating Tory establishment seems to have forgotten it ever invented levelling up in the first place. Facing a probable massacre at the polls, Rishi Sunak’s strategy seems to be merely to try to limit the damage by stoking fears of Labour tax rises. Where in all of this – we might ask – are the gaudy, headline-grabbing, almost inevitably specious electoral catchphrases promising decentralised power and redistributed wealth to the regions that have dominated the past decade of British politics?
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