Levelling up is probably not even in the top tier of Liz Truss’s intray for this week, given the pressure to do something big on energy bills, and then to address the multiple other crises including the NHS, the Northern Ireland Protocol and Ukraine. But what she does with her predecessor’s flagship policy is a matter of great anxiety for MPs and activists in Red Wall seats. I spent some time over the weekend with Conservative councillors, MPs and Tory members in Greater Manchester. Unsurprisingly, most of them had supported Truss as be party leader. But most of them were also anxious about the future of levelling up, or whatever the new prime minister decides to call it to make it her own.
Truss will only have 18 months until the next election, which is an impossibly short amount of time to do much levelling up
Truss has paid tribute to the importance of ensuring that all parts of the country benefit from the same opportunities. But all the signs are that she’s not going to keep going in quite the same direction as Boris Johnson. For one thing, Michael Gove isn’t going to be the Levelling Up Secretary, and it’s unclear therefore whether his magnum opus, the Levelling Up White Paper, is going to remain intact. Greg Clark, his successor in that brief, isn’t going to stay there after this week’s reshuffle either. There has also been hostile briefing over the weekend about the way in which Gove had been trying to spend money in his department, suggesting a big squeeze on spending for levelling up is on the way.
Truss will only have 18 months until the next election, which is an impossibly short amount of time to do much levelling up. She also has pressure from supporters in blue wall’ seats to ensure that she doesn’t tilt the focus too far away from the Conservative heartlands, which many of those shire Tory MPs feared Boris Johnson did at times.
For the Tories who were excited about the levelling up agenda, it was a key part of why Red Wall voters turned blue in 2019. It means infrastructure and education, neither of which can really be sorted out within 18 months. Boris Johnson had become acutely aware that time was running out to level up even before his premiership was doomed: he was increasingly asking the relevant ministers and officials to come up with plans that would demonstrate success within the space of just a year. Truss has even less time – and possibly less interest too.
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