The recent “Levelling-Up” White Paper, stretching to 332 pages, raised a few eyebrows with its extended lessons from history, ranging from ancient Cairo through to the renaissance Florence of the Medicis.
Yet the one time it doesn’t look back to is the last time “Levelling” was a serious agenda in England. Cast your mind back to 1649. It was a time of turmoil. The king had been executed in January and debates were raging between Royalists and Cromwellites about how the nation should be governed. And on the radical fringe of the anti-Royal forces was a group of revolutionary dreamers who dared to imagine a future which banished not merely crowned authority, but all hierarchy between the high and mighty and everyone else. They called themselves the Levellers.
In April of that unstable year, news came of a group of men found digging and planting vegetables on a hill in Surrey. These men were a breakaway group from that radical wing of England’s republicans. In a pamphlet entitled “The True Levellers,” leader Gerrard Winstanley and 14 others argued that “England is not a free people, till the poor that have no land, have a free allowance to dig and labour the commons, and so live as comfortably as the landlords that live in their enclosures.”
The True Levellers soon became known as the Diggers, by virtue of their connection to the land. They espoused a vision of shared ownership, mutual support and abundance; they railed against a government which sought to “lock up treasures of the earth from the poor.” For Winstanley, true redemption could only come through local democracy, communal land ownership and a deep respect for the earth as the provider of plenty rather than a resource to be hoarded. Land not only sustained people with food but provided dignity through work: the Digger vision was a productive, co-operative community where people worked and ate together as equals.
For a brief few months in 1649, it seemed quite possible that the world might never be the same again. This possibility quickly receded in 1650: radical groups began to crumble and institutional power asserted itself, as England moved towards government by parliament and then Cromwell’s increasingly personal “protectorate.” But what might we take today from this brief, tumultuous period in English history?
First, any serious agenda for “levelling”—like Winstanley’s—has to incorporate a major overhaul of where power sits and how wealth flows. Winstanley argued for regular elections and the decentralisation of decisions to local communities. It will be interesting to watch how the White Paper’s “trailblazer deeper devolution deals” play out, but we are likely to need to go much further, for localities to really play a part in how the country is run.
Second, we cannot seriously talk of “levelling up” without combining deep ecological awareness with a social justice agenda, just as Winstanley did in 1649. The True Levellers called land “our common treasury.” Four hundred years later, the climate crisis can no longer be swept aside. We live on a planet of finite resources; we are behaving as if they are infinite. The White Paper did not go nearly far enough to acknowledge this new reality and what it might mean for the way we address inequality.
Third, for the True Levellers of 1649, the remedy for poverty wasn’t about charity or even redistributing income round the edges. It was about sharing assets more fairly in the first place. Winstanley argued that we should judge the success of a society on how well the poorest do. Perhaps the modern equivalent is the “mission” in the White Paper about reducing the gap in life expectancy between rich and poor regions. The Health Foundation argues that this will in reality take 75 years, not the 15 cheerfully asserted by our rather—well—cavalier rulers in Whitehall.
Moreover, the pamphlets penned by Winstanley and the True Levellers were prescient about the risks of an industrialised market economy and agglomeration of power and wealth. By contrast, the official solutions put forward this week rest on a rather narrow worldview. They are built on—indeed reinforce—the prevailing economic orthodoxy that created many of the inequalities we now face, seeking to prop up things as they have been and holding up places such as Stanford-Silicon Valley and London as exemplars.
This is where the story of the Diggers encapsulates what is now needed. This group of planters looked at the barren soil of an outmoded royalist order and responded with a sweeping vision of how the land could be stewarded back to health.
Today, the extractive model of consumer capitalism that has shaped our lives for 50 years has again left our country’s soil barren, so we are disconnected from the very earth that sustains life on this planet. The current Levelling Up agenda is, at best, an attempt to sow seeds in the depleted, dried out soil of places that have been decimated by austerity and a commodified labour market. At worst, the centralised proposals of the White Paper are akin to dumping an industrialist’s monocultural soil on top of what is already there.
So what if Winstanley and his True Levellers were in charge today? They might have cut back the White Paper’s length a bit, and added a little godliness, for sure. But they also would have argued for a broader, shared conception of prosperity, which ensured that the assets on which it relies were controlled by society. There are hints of this in the White Paper, but Winstanley would surely have put promises of Community Wealth Funds and deep devolution front and centre.
And he might have brought us back to the land itself. Different plants will grow tall in different places. Winstanley would have celebrated that diversity and nurtured it, respecting the landscape’s natural variations and arguing that those living in each place know best what’s needed there.
The Diggers dared to look beyond the status quo and dream of a fairer, more sustainable future. On that hill in Surrey, Winstanley and his friends set out to show what that could look like in practice. As storm clouds gather in our own time, and political temperatures and inequalities rise, we sorely need some of that energy again. Then we’d be well on the way to realising a serious 21st-century Levelling Up agenda.
