A tale of two towns – one in the north, one in the south – exposes the lie of ‘levelling up’
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.
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