The Conservative manifesto in 2019 was one of the least substantial in terms of what it proposed for a ruling party’s agenda, outside of its one major pledge to ‘Get Brexit Done’. Most of the commitments the government has made seem to have started with a slogan, with the policy reverse engineered from there. The most prominent of these slogan-policies has been ‘Levelling Up’, which was seen as so important that a whole government department was renamed to push through what became a centrepiece reform. News media repeated the slogan, inquired sincerely as to what it might mean, asked when it might happen, projected their own visions on to it. Few journalists thought to ask why it is large parts of ‘left behind’ places needed ‘levelling up’ in the first place.

Boris Johnson declared ‘levelling up’ the ‘defining mission’ of his administration, but in practice the main usage of this slogan-policy was to pretend the government was actually doing something positive alongside its various draconian pieces of legislation and attacks on democracy.

Usually, when politicians use these open, Newspeak-type terms, it is because they are trying to obscure more than they want to say. The etymology of ‘Levelling up’ is one of distinguishing properly neoliberal approaches from ‘socialist’ ones, by use of the extended phrase ‘Levelling up, not levelling down’ (for example, by David Blunkett and Theresa May) for a particular policy intervention. Blunkett used the phrase to defend further education spending on the basis that it would improve the lives of lower income students without levelling down wealthier, higher achieving students. Theresa May made this more explicit:

‘Socialism is about levelling down. Conservatism is about levelling up. Socialists believe that, if everyone cannot have something, no one shall. Conservatives reject that.’

Under Boris Johnson, the term has been more clearly used in the positive sense, dropping the reference to levelling down. Levelling up, under this administration, means challenging regional inequality and has more recently come to be used to talk about inequalities in general. Two and a half years into a disaster-ridden Parliament, however, ‘Levelling-Up’ remains a slogan-policy, beyond a small pot of money which seemed heavily skewed towards Tory and marginal constituencies. This paltry fund was followed up with twelve further ‘missions’—some containing specific aims to reduce rates of homicide, others more nebulous like increasing ‘pride in place’.

The first piece of legislation to contain the slogan’s name has only reached its early parliamentary stages in recent months: the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill, which was supposed to set out how these missions may be completed. In its initial draft, though, the Bill contains very little that can be said to ‘Level Up’, in the sense of action and investment that would significantly alter the lives of people across the UK—those whose towns, cities, and infrastructure have lacked the investment of London and parts of the South East for decades. There is very little in the way of investment or powers for the most deprived regions, no plan for investment in creaking infrastructure, nothing that would support new industries across the country.

The reason for the lack of any actual ‘levelling up’ should be quite clear to most people: it runs against the ideology and interests of the Conservative Party. The Tories may have been happy to spend lots of public money during the pandemic, some of it in ways the borders on the corrupt, but they still oppose the idea that the state can and should make targeted, long-term investments. They asked the question of how one might tackle regional inequality, but the answer to that almost always involves long-term state investment, often led by local or regional governments with devolved powers and funding.

The funding that does exist for the patchwork of devolved regional/city authorities requires them to compete for pots, rather than having the tax base and powers they need. This, again, has a political motive: given how many of these authorities are Labour-run, it is hardly in the Tories’ interests to have mayors pursuing alternative agendas that may work better than their own, or that challenge the developers and landlords that fund the Conservative Party. In part due to pressures from the Treasury, the Bill introduces no new funding. Years of talk about missions, ‘left behind’ places, the ‘red wall’—all of this has been shown to be electoral hot air, always plainly nonsense but something the Tories and the press went along with anyway in order to pretend they actually had some sort of plan to end the stagnation for which they are responsible.

What the Levelling Up Bill is really is a Planning Bill in disguise, something the Committee made clear at the very beginning of their evidence sessions. As I have written previously, the government has been trying for years to centralise the planning system to remove as much space for dissent to developments, whether that be newbuild housing estates or shale gas fracking rigs.

That the government are shoehorning what is left of their unpopular planning reforms into this Levelling Up legislation speaks to the vacuity of the ‘defining mission’. It also reveals the limits of their ideological position, why they can never really be counted on to address regional inequality. Planning, like the NHS, is one of the few areas of the post-war welfare state that neoliberal politicians have not been able to fully dismantle. The planning system’s initial institution was aimed at democratising land; the Planning Act of 1947 defined local authorities with responsibility for setting out their own development plans and deciding what should be developed or persevered. It meant that, for the first time in the UK, the right to develop land was a public matter, rather than one conferred by private ownership. This gave the planning system significant redistributive potential, and took power away from landowning elites. The aim was, if not always successful, to create economic growth across the country and intervene in public health through improving housing.

In stark contrast, what the Levelling Up Bill proposes is centralisation of power without any clear direction. The central mechanism of this process is the introduction of ‘national development management policies’ (NDMPs) which would override some of the policies made by local councils that lead their decision-making on particular sites, the most controversial of which are subject to public debate and deliberation (however limited). These NDMPs, according to the draft bill, can be implemented at the Secretary of State’s whim. Indeed, one of the main concerns of the Committee was that much of the Bill is vague and unspecified, cut through with powers like this and further provisions for the Secretary of State to put down secondary legislation to give the Bill its substantive content in the future. It is another power grab.

A government serious about equality and ‘levelling up’ would be looking to do the opposite of what this Bill does. Urban, rural, and environmental planning, as a strategic and long-term process, is fundamental not just to revitalising regions but also to responding to the ecological crisis. Instead of giving ministers more power to make decisions based on whomever has been able to lobby them successfully at the fundraising dinner, we need to be empowering local, regional, and devolved national governments to make decisions based on the needs of citizens, particularly in relation to housing and utilities.

National governments would then be able to set the parameters of this—for example, rates of social housing, and emissions reductions—as well as focusing on projects that cut across the country, like trains. There is nothing in this Bill that does this; instead, we are being invited to put out trust whichever multi-millionaire landlord or former oil executive gets given the ministerial position.

With even the economics writers at the Times conceding that the Tories have absolutely no plan for economic growth, what we instead have are attempts to extend the means by which rentier capitalism can be protected, extraction sites can be built against the wishes of the community, and Tory donors can continue to produce poor quality, un-ecological private homes that will need to be torn down in a couple of decades, if they don’t collapse before then. They may have dropped the ‘levelling down’ part of the phrase, but this etymology shows the real pre-occupation of the Tory Party: preventing the redistribution of their wealth ‘down’ to the public, the very redistribution required to invest across the UK. In this zombie neoliberalism, there is only levelling up for the already rich.