You would have thought that Brexit, with its mission to make Britain poorer, was one fallacy enough for a government determined to return to the national penury of the 1970s. But no, it goes hand-in-hand with another: levelling up, with its anti-London riff that also harks back to the postwar decades of British decline.
Actually, the two go together. Brexit and a hostility to Britain’s economic and entrepreneurial powerhouse are two sides of the same “fuck business” coin, which the prime minister revealed as his governing philosophy when faced with near-uniform hostility to his Brexit populism from the people who actually run the enterprises which keep the nation in business.
Why is “levelling up,” which now has an entire department named after it under Michael Gove, such a bad idea? Isn’t it just platitudinously desirable, so much so that the Labour opposition mouths it as much as the Tory government? Who can be against policies to improve the left-behind parts of the Midlands and the north of England?
The problem isn’t the desire to radically improve non-London. It lies in the implicit view that London has got too big for its boots and needs containing, and that what matters is narrowing the gap between London and the rest. In reality, there will be precious little national wealth with which to level up unless London continues to grow as the biggest and most competitive powerhouse in Europe for the creative, educational and professional services sectors.
Less London doesn’t mean more Lincoln and Liverpool. It just means more Los Angeles and Paris. Oh, and the idea that London and the southeast are oases of plenty and prosperity is as fallacious as levelling up itself. Each stop on the Central Line east of Liverpool Street represents a year or more reduction in life expectancy until you get to the countryside, and whole swathes of the southeast, like the Medway towns, have suffered de-industrialisation on a scale to match Stoke and Merseyside.
As ever, Boris Johnson wallows in a paralysis of muddle. He is a London MP and former mayor of London, whose one positive contribution to public life was boosterising the capital during the London 2012 Olympics, which in retrospect marked the high point of Britain’s postwar prestige and prosperity before he decided to trash it by allying with Farage in a bid to seize the Tory leadership from Cameron.
Symbolically as it now seems, my last one-to-one meeting with Boris—as recounted in my recent profile of “the Prime Etonian”—was in February 2016, when I was his adviser, as the former transport secretary who had pioneered Crossrail and HS2, on a bold plan for a second Crossrail line in London. This was to go north-south, complementing the first east-west Crossrail line, now renamed the Elizabeth Line. It was to be an engine of massive further growth for the capital, including a desperately needed Underground connection for Clapham Junction, and a fast and frequent rail service to regenerate the huge left-behind Lea Valley, going north to east from Hackney, which could be the location of hundreds of thousands of new homes and dozens of thriving communities.
As I relate in the profile, after telling me in his office how much he agreed with Crossrail 2, Boris quickly changed the topic to political agonising about his approach to Brexit and Cameron. Five years later, we have got Brexit, Crossrail 2 is cancelled and the Elizabeth Line is still not open, many years late, due to systematic government incompetence and lack of leadership. It sums up what has happened to the whole country.
If Gove and Johnson had a decent long-view grasp of 20th-century British history, they would know that they are repeating the mistakes of the postwar decades. Then, the same approach to "levelling up" caused a generation of government policy to reduce the size and economic footprint of London in a bid to “rebalance” England. It began with the Abercrombie Plan of 1944 which, in the wake of wartime devastation and concern about the pre-war unregulated sprawl of the capital, sought deliberately to shrink London by dramatically reducing its housing stock as part of slum clearance and relocating much of its manufacturing industry elsewhere.
The result was four decades of decline when London lost more than two million in population, its public services atrophied, and much of inner London became known for failing schools, rising crime, unemployment and run-down council estates. This was the grim and dangerously edgy Camden Town I grew up in during the 1970s.
London only turned the corner when prime ministers from Thatcher onwards put London at the heart of the European Union’s rapidly expanding single market, and after Tony Blair pioneered serious growth and public service investment and reform to rejuvenate the capital, including a new mayoralty first occupied by Ken Livingstone in 2000 which transformed the city’s transport and policing for the better.
But back to Abercrombie. The big failure is that while there was a postwar plan to do down London, there was no credible plan to do up Liverpool and the other de-industrialising parts of England. Nor was there in the Thatcherite 1980s. The Blair decade was better because its public services revolution benefitted pretty well all parts of England equally. But the need remained for systematic industrial renewal, and there wasn’t enough of it, particularly after the 2008 crash. This, together with the public services austerity which followed Blair/Brown, is the key reason why there was such popular support for Brexit in the regions unrenewed, fanned by the populist Gove and Johnson who knew that Brexit and anti-Londonism was pure scapegoating of the worst order.
The truth is, there will be no levelling up unless London levels up as a central part of it. Anti-Londonism is a crassly stupid piece of wilful nonsense. It could only be inflicted by politicians who know that to be true but couldn’t care less.
