Levelling up: a transparent policy

Whatever flaws he may have, Boris Johnson really goes for transparency in a big way. Not always deliberately. But most usefully.

Boris Johnson launches his Levelling Up initiative
A man of transparency. That we need to see through

I’m thinking of the news that the Health Secretary Sajid Javid has sadly tested positive for Covid. The rules are clear, and the government itself has spelled them out, to avoid any possible confusion. Anyone who has been in contact with someone infected with the disease must go into self-isolation.

Johnson had spent some hours in a meeting with Javid. There should have been no question what he had to do. Just as, in the minds of those of us who’ve got used to him, there was no doubt what he actually would do.

Yep. He announced he wouldn’t be isolating.

There was an entirely predictable response of fury to this announcement. “One rule for us,” people said, “another for them.” Well, yes, that’s true, but how is that news? He’s had a spectacular and public falling out with Dominic Cummings, but at the time Cummings was his chief adviser, Johnson turned a blind eye to mind-blowing breaches of Covid restrictions. In the same way, he did nothing when his Home Secretary, Priti Patel, was found to have bullied staff, or his then Health Secretary Matt Hancock had gone along with major contracts being awarded to a personal friend of his (and not fulfilled).

The fury over Johnson trying to avoid self-isolation had its effect, however. He will now isolate. Because he saw that not doing so might hurt his popularity. If there’s one thing he hates even more than inconvenience to himself, it’s the prospect of potentially losing votes. He saw the way the wind was blowing, and quickly tacked to take advantage of it.

Back in 1982, I travelled to Berlin to consult some documents held in what had once been the Prussian Royal Academy of Sciences. An accident of history had left that building, and its archives, in the Eastern Sector of the city, the sector under Soviet Control, and the capital of what was then (laughably) called the German Democratic Republic. Everyone else called it East Germany and knew it was a puppet of the Soviet Union.

While there I made friends with people of my age or thereabouts. When they knew no one listening was likely to denounce them to the authorities, they were outspoken in their criticism of that mean-spirited, autocratic state run by authoritarian incompetents in which they lived. They had no time for their rulers, hacks sure they were entitled to a privileged life, living in gated communities with better accommodation than most, and with a higher standard living than their compatriots.

Sound familiar at all?

After one evening with them, one that had gone on into the small hours, I found myself walking towards my hotel at 2:00 in the morning. I was struck by how entirely the place corresponded to the ideal of social control pursued by Margaret Thatcher, then British Prime Minister. The streets weren’t particularly brightly lit, but I felt no sense of threat at all. Well, they were almost deserted, with only the occasional police patrol car cruising past.

This was a world where you were unlikely to be mugged, where any drug taking was out of sight of decent citizens, where there was no homelessness or begging. Why, there wasn’t even any prostitution, I was told, which meant that doctors seeing women with certain types of infection, would mark their medical notes “frequently changing sexual traffic”, just as a hint to how they might be earning their living.

A population cowed into silence and submission, an elite living the good life, and a veil of hypocrisy over any troubling truths.

Again, doesn’t that ring some bells?

Why do I mention all this now?

Well, in the late eighties, under so-called Communist rule, the GDP per head of East Germany was a little under US$38,000 a head in 2020 terms. 

Today, in Yorkshire and the Humber, in Northern England, where Labour traditionally won most parliamentary seats but has been losing them at a depressing rate to the Conservatives, GDP per head is just under US$37,000, in those same terms. 

The North of England is doing even less well than that basket case of a country, East Germany in the last years of its existence.

Maybe that’s why people have been turning away from Labour, after being so poorly off after generations of voting for them. Especially with Johnson promising them “levelling up”. That makes him sound committed to ending the disparities between their region and others (GDP per head is over twice as high in London as in Yorkshire and the Humber).

However, they need to take advantage of Boris Johnson’s transparency. Look at his behaviour, for instance over the Covid isolation: his first instinct was to duck the obligations of regulations he’d introduced himself. Only when he began to fear that he might lose popularity did he backtrack and agree to comply.

It’s the same with levelling up. Has he done anything to change the position of the North of England? A few million for new football pitches or to tidy up high streets is not going to reverse East German style decline in the North.

Don’t you think he might just be talking about levelling up because he knows it wins him votes in the former Labour seats he needs to hold at the next election?

As with following regulations, his heart isn’t in it. Especially since his party isn’t sold on the idea. After all, it has just lost a parliamentary by-election in Chesham and Amersham, one of those areas of wealthy people who believed the Conservatives were there to keep them rich. If levelling up means switching serious funding to the North, Boris Johnson may find himself in serious difficulty in the South.

Remember. He’s easy to see through. Look carefully and ask yourself, is he really interested in helping anyone who isn’t rich already?