The Ambiguous Ideology of Levelling Up

Abstract

The Conservative Party's ‘levelling up agenda’ has been deployed both as a tool for public communication and as a broad motif for the government's policy programme, gaining a great deal of traction as a political message. Levelling up is a vision of a post-Brexit Britain in which there will be greater state investment, educational opportunity, regional equality, and regional independence. However, this vision invokes a wide range of disparate political ideologies without addressing the underlying tensions between them. It speaks to social democrats about tackling deprivation; it speaks to social liberals about equality of opportunity; it speaks to economic liberals about supporting the free market; and it speaks to conservatives about reuniting the nation. If levelling up develops from a political slogan into a fully-fledged policy programme, it will become increasingly difficult for the government to manage the ideological tensions inherent in the levelling-up agenda.