It is a scene of little drama, yet says so much that it stays in my mind. A couple of years ago, I was reporting in Ashington, Northumberland, as Labour activists debated what to offer voters in the approaching mayoral elections. The meeting room was inside the library, which was inside the council’s gym, which was inside a shiny great glass and steel hulk knocked up by Carillion, the giant that used to hoover up those PFI contracts – until it went bust.
A town built on coal, Ashington had been home to the Pitmen Painters – the extraordinary band of miners who turned themselves into artists – but that economy and its traditions were long gone. The morning had been spent on a fairly fruitless round of door-knocking nearby, the voters glaring at the Labour members as if they were bothersome Jehovahs, while the wind whipped in from the North Sea. On one side of the library stood a huge Asda, on the other a big Lidl, offering their customers cheap food and their workers low wages. This was today’s vista: a bombed-out economy, an electorate estranged from politics, and a visibly shrinking public sector getting picked over for cash by a parasitic private sector. You couldn’t ask for a clearer picture of austerity Britain.
At the end, I was collared by a woman. She’d been a teacher nearby and she wanted me to understand that, for her kids, places such as the Guardian, parliament and the Natural History Museum were impossibly far away. Long hours on the coach required cash their parents didn’t have and days their schools couldn’t afford. “They’ve never been to central London,” she said. “They live in a different country.”
Put those elements together and you have both catalyst for and cause of Boris Johnson’s levelling-up agenda. These are what Michael Gove calls the UK’s “overlooked and undervalued” communities. Punished by Margaret Thatcher, patronised by Tony Blair and cut adrift by the Westminster classes, they reacted in 2016 by voting in vast numbers for Brexit, then in 2019 turning swaths of the electoral map from red to blue. The MP for Ashington and the surrounding areas is ex-miner Ian Lavery, who in 2010 inherited a diehard Labour seat. At the last election, he won a majority of just 814.
Which brings us to the crux of the Conservatives’ “levelling-up” problem. If Johnson is to win another election, he needs these voters to turn out again – especially given Tory vulnerability in previously true-blue seats such as Chesham and Amersham, which turned Lib Dem long before the public had ever heard the phrase “wine suitcase”. Yet ministers will not spend the billions, nor introduce the serious changes that could help places like Ashington. From infrastructure to education, all Johnson has to offer is old money and reheated policies. Everything else is in Rishi Sunak’s Treasury war chest, ready for his rainy-day tax cuts. Nor can the Tories prove any serious commitment to this agenda, least of all Gove, who has spent the past decade voting through cut after cut to local council funding.
So what do they do instead? Two things. First, they divert some small change from London and the south-east towards the places the Tories won in 2019 – seats such as Darlington and Wolverhampton South West. Second, they follow Gove’s lead and unleash rhetorical bombast against the so-called elites in London. In short, they turn policy into posture and an economic problem into a culture war.
Listen to Gove this week: the divide in this country, he says, is between “working people” and “metropolitan condescension”, singling out for attack residents of Notting Hill. Coming from a founder of the Tories’ Notting Hill set who is selling a £2m house in Kensington, that’s pretty rich. But he has chosen his target well: London is now a red metropolis. It is no country for old Tories.
What makes Gove’s tale powerful is that it contains some truth. What makes it poisonous is that it purposely covers up the whole story. It talks about Notting Hill but ignores Grenfell. It bangs on about “the London media” but never asks why the media doesn’t then look more like ordinary Londoners – 40% of whom are black or brown or from an ethnic minority. (That might just liven up the comment pages of the Times.) On almost any measure, London does better than any other region in the UK, but much of this prosperity is enjoyed by a tiny minority. Factor in the sky-high cost of buying or renting in the capital, and as academic Jack Brown puts it in his recent book The London Problem, the truth is: “Londoners are working harder and longer for less and less reward, compared with the rest of the country.”
Almost as many Londoners live in poverty as would make up the entire population of the north-east. You could clear the city of Manchester of every one of its residents and stuff it with children from London stuck below the poverty line and still need more room.
Over the past 18 months, I have been visiting a primary school down the road from where I grew up in Edmonton, in the outskirts of north London. It is an area that played a huge part in the light-industrial revolution that swept the UK and the world, but now all those factories have gone and so has the economy – in a manner that the residents of Ashington would recognise. Teachers talk about how many of their kids leave because their parents have no proper housing. One girl aged about 10 spent a year riding with her mum on the top deck of night buses, because they had nowhere else to sleep. And they talk of how their pupils never visit the museums and attractions just half an hour away on the train. A teacher told me, “central London might as well be another planet”. The phrase sounded familiar.
The data research firm CACI provided me with profiles of central Ashington and Edmonton Green. In many ways, they look alike. Household income is, if anything, higher in central Ashington, while private tenants in my old neighbourhood spend almost triple their counterparts in the north-east on rent. Overall, the Londoners, my Londoners, make do with half the disposable income of those in Ashington. The one big difference is that residents of Ashington are older and 98% white, whereas Edmonton has families from Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, Somalia and south Asia. Whether from the north or the south, economically these people are in the same boat – which makes it vital for the Tories to harp on about their cultural differences. Rich remainers, citizens of nowhere … you know the rest.
These towns and suburbs haven’t somehow failed to keep up with the country; the country has failed them. Capital has sucked all it can from Edmonton and Ashington and Newport and Dundee – and it has cut and run, to get its fuel and workers cheaper elsewhere. It is the same problem all over, albeit with varied expressions. The job is not to level up, but to change course entirely.
• Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
