(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The U.K. government's long awaited white paper on “leveling up” could hardly have appeared at a less propitious time. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is distracted by partygate. His Conservative Party is in turmoil. Labour is baying for blood. Vladimir Putin occupies the tiny sliver of the British mind reserved for serious politics. There will inevitably be accusations that the government is engaged in a cynical exercise in wagging the dog.
Yet the white paper — usually a precursor to legislation — is a serious discussion about a serious subject, indeed the most serious subject in British politics. The country is one of the most regionally and socially unequal societies in Europe as well as one of the most centralized. The 2016 referendum on European Union membership revealed that more than half the population was so angry with status quo established under the governments of Tony Blair and David Cameron that it was willing to turn the table upside down. Much of the discontent was concentrated in left behind Britain, most obviously in the post-industrial north — the country's “broken heartland” — but also in decaying seaside resorts, or ex-resorts, shabby provincial towns and cities and inaccessible regions such as Cornwall.
Any post-Brexit government of whatever political hue had no choice but tackle the problem. Theresa May pledged to focus on families that were “just-about-managing” before she was swamped by Brexit. Johnson then broadened the agenda to leveling up the country: that is equalizing the distribution of opportunities between regions and, to a lesser extent, between classes.
This time, leveling up was swamped by the pandemic rather than Brexit. But, to his credit, Johnson has worked hard to put it back at the heart of his agenda, allocating the biggest brains he can get his hands on to the subject. Michael Gove, the secretary of state in charge of the policy, has the best reforming record of any senior Tory, as demonstrated by his stormy but transformative time as secretary of state for education in 2010-14.
One of Gove's first moves was to rename the old Department of Housing and Communities the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. Neil O'Brien, his right-hand man, has been thinking about this subject since he was special adviser to Chancellor George Osborne from 2012 to 2016. Andrew Haldane, the former chief economist of the Bank of England and very far from a Conservative political appointee, is one of the country's most innovative economic thinkers.
The government's blueprint for “spreading opportunity more equally across the country” is an admirable one. It tackles the most common complaint about leveling up — that it's just a buzzword — by providing both a definition and a metric for measuring success. The government can now be held accountable for delivery rather than just aspiration.
It addresses a wide-range of problems that affect regular people — particularly the “just-about managing” — from poor transportation links (a particular problem in the north where it is often easier to travel to London than it is to get across the country) to unequal educational opportunities to planning permission. It presents serious solutions to Britain's structural inequalities such as improving technical education, creating more free schools, shifting new arts funding out of London and building more houses in the north. And it acknowledges, against the fierce opposition of the Treasury, that you can't do anything about regional inequality without also tackling centralization. Gove promises that every part of the country will have the chance to appoint their own “London-style mayors” in what will amount to the “biggest shift of power from Whitehall to local leaders in modern times.”
Implementing this ambitious agenda will be a formidable task. The aging of the population means that the British state doesn't have the same capacity for engineering big structural reforms that it did under Margaret Thatcher. Resources are immediately gobbled up by the National Health Service and Community Care. The “cost-of-living crisis” — the combination of increasing prices of necessities and rising taxes — will inevitably affect poorer Britons more than richer ones. The reduction in the living wage in particular will drive many “just-about-managing” people into real poverty. Devolving power to the provinces will inevitably mean devolving power to Labour mayors such as Andy Burnham in the Manchester region and Jamie Driscoll North of Tyne, which helps to explain why so many Labour voices have been loud in praising the reforms.
Regional inequalities are deeply rooted in British society. Great Victorian novels such as Elizabeth Gatskell's “North and South” lamented the gap between the smoky north and the bucolic Home Counties. The reforming Labour government of 1964 tried to do something about it with little effect. If anything, the problem has been getting worse. The Covid pandemic has hit the working classes — who are more concentrated in the north — far harder than the professional classes. The brutal truth is that London is a key node of the global capitalist economy — a financial, services and cultural goliath — while Manchester is not.
However, the leveling-up agenda is in danger of sprawling all over the place — becoming regional policy, industrial policy, educational policy and, indeed, cultural policy. The last Conservative Party Conference was an exuberant festival of leveling up as every government department and every lobbying group competed to get a bit of the action. A policy that tries to do everything can too easily end up by doing nothing.
The best antidote to policy sprawl is a disciplined prime minister in Downing Street who keeps a tireless watch on a big idea, just as Thatcher did with the free-market reforms of the 1980s. Even when he's not distracted by fighting for his survival, Johnson is nobody's idea of a disciplined prime minister, and certainly no Thatcher. He prefers flamboyant photo opportunities to the hard drilling of policymaking. His absence in the House of Commons on Wednesday as Gove unveiled his white paper was as notable as it was depressing. The energetic Gove will have to make up for the prime minister's personal foibles by driving his policy day and night.
For all that, the government deserves to be congratulated for taking on a big problem rather than shying away from it. Britain's practice of pouring public subsidies into the already successful Great Wen of London was a disgrace. Public policy should have aimed at reducing market-based regional inequalities rather than reinforcing them. The London-based elite's habit of ignoring the festering problems in the regions was contemptible. The white paper is part of a British renaissance in thinking about how to improve life in out-of-the-way towns.
British politics is currently at a fever pitch as the Labour Party demands the prime minister's resignation on almost daily basis and, in response, the prime minister waves the bloody shroud of Jimmy Savile, the television personality and disgraced pedophile who died in 2011. But it is notable that the Labour Party's policy on leveling up is not that different from the Conservative Party's — indeed the opposition's shadow minister to Gove, Lisa Nandy, didn't know whether to accuse the government of heading off in the wrong direction or savage it for stealing Labour's policies.
There may be lots of reasons for thinking that the country would be well rid of Johnson. But his signature policy of leveling up deserves to survive long after he — and indeed the current Conservative government — has disappeared over the horizon.
More From This Writer and Others at Bloomberg Opinion:
Why the U.K.'s Ruling Party Can't Rule Itself: Adrian Wooldridge
Boris Johnson Is Spared But Hardly Off the Hook Yet: Therese Raphael
Boris Johnson's Houdini Act Loses Its Magic Touch: Martin Ivens
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously a writer at the Economist. His latest book is "The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World."
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