Keir Starmer vows to do levelling up, but better. Will voters buy it?

It is a joke told and retold with such regularity that I'm a little self-conscious about resorting to it so early in a newsletter. Woody Allen says it best as Alvy Singer in the 1977 film, Annie Hall:

"Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort and one of 'em says, 'Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.' The other one says, 'Yeah, I know, and such small portions.' Well, that's essentially how I feel about life. Full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly."

This is also how the Labour Party seems to feel about the Conservative government. Failing on taxation, failing on public services and now failing on levelling up. But keen not to diverge in any meaningful way.

This is of course a little unfair. Labour has reams of policy and we haven't even seen the manifesto yet. But the party's local elections launch is another reminder that Britons can to a large extent expect more of the same whoever wins in June/October/November [delete as applicable].

Speaking in Dudley, Keir Starmer said it was "unforgivable" that the Tories failed to follow through on their pledge to level up left behind parts of the country. The whole thing is worth quoting:

“My frustration of the past 14 years, but particularly since 2019, is that in saying levelling up, the government was tapping into something real that people yearned for, but they didn’t have a viable plan. And they didn’t do the hard yards. That’s unforgivable."

Starmer said Labour would – no eye-rolling at the back –  introduce a “Take Back Control Act”, granting new powers to regional mayors over large swathes of transport, skills, energy, and planning, something he described as “full-fat devolution”.

Starmer, like any sane politician, supports devolution when it suits him and opposes it (see: Ulez extension) when it doesn't. Devolution at least has the advantage of being free, or at least free at the point of promise, and thereby getting past Rachel Reeves.

But here's the reason why Labour's levelling up rhetoric is good politics. It enables the party – which to many is still considered something of a snooty London clique – to tell voters in the Red Wall words to the effect of: you weren't wrong to vote for Boris Johnson in 2019 in order to level up your area. But it didn't happen, Johnson is no longer on the ballot and Rishi Sunak doesn't care about you. So vote for us and we'll do levelling up properly.

Of course, the same problems that the Conservatives faced in office will restrict Labour. First of all, what is levelling up? Is it merely the application of a lick of paint to tired high streets or a fundamental rebalancing of the UK economy? And if it's the latter, that has been proposed by governments dating back decades (see: Regional Development Agencies, Local Enterprise Partnerships etc) yet still London generates roughly 22 per cent of the UK’s gross value-added, despite having just 13 per cent of the total population. 

But that's tomorrow's problem (and perhaps for another newsletter). For now, Starmer has some local elections in which to manage expectations and a general election to win. Until then, we will all have to exercise some portion control.

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