You’ve got their vote Boris... it’s time to level up
THE RECENT row over John Lewis wallpaper in Downing Street proved one thing yet again – politicians never knowingly under-patronise voters. If you thought that after a year where most people’s priorities were simply trying to stay in a job, or, you know, keep themselves and their families alive, there were many in Westminster that dragged us back into their weird world of warped priorities with a row over soft furnishings.
Indeed so wound up were some, both in Parliament and media, that they thought that we’d be willing to cause ballot-box chaos on the ludicrously-titled Super Thursday because someone in No 10 may have been rude about a big shop with a haberdashery.
Now I dislike the whiff of sleaze as much as the next voter, and Wallpapergate’s truth must be allowed to come out in the wash.
But that said, a country where more than 127,000 have died in a 15-month pandemic with millions more affected by the collateral damage of lockdown measures has a few other issues to solve first.
The 7,000-majority victory in Hartlepool, where people voted for the party they saw deliver Brexit, protect their jobs and undertake a life-preserving vaccination plan, is a huge sign of where real people’s priorities actually lie.
But things move fast and now the Government must deliver on the rest of their plans.
In particular there’s the shocking inequality that we’re promised will be solved by the Prime Minister’s plan to “level up” the country – providing equal opportunity for all no matter where they live.
The need to get cracking has been turbo-charged by the regressive effect of the pandemic and, unless we are otherwise engaged in a land war in northern France by then, the Queen’s Speech on Tuesday must show tangible signs of just what levelling up means.
The target for much of it has been those who live in the socalled “Red wall” – with Hartlepool the latest to turn blue.
But the casual and, again, patronising overuse of the term has started to irritate me in recent
“We are promised inequality will be solved by equal chances for us all
weeks. Where initially it was used to describe the seats in the North and Midlands the Tories won from Labour in the 2019 election, it now seems to be political shorthand for northerners in general.
It may be the ever-growing chip on my shoulder, but I have often wondered if some of the snootier members of the political class prefer to think of North Country folk like me as a vast, rough mass, with the same density as a brick.
Let’s not forget we do still live in a class-ridden country with a social mobility crisis that goes all the way to the front door of Downing Street, demonstrated by the recent exit of the PM’S director of communications Lee Cain.
In an administration supposed to be built on levelling up, particularly to aid those from workingclass backgrounds, he wasn’t so much levelled up as flattened by the Westminster establishment.
Before his hasty demise he said he’d lost count of the times he was “branded a bruiser... for the twin crimes of having a strong northern accent and shaved hair”.
Now traditionally I don’t weep for sacked spin doctors but the point is, our corridors of power need as many people called Lee as they do those called Allegra.
If they don’t work out how to share the opportunities at the highest level, then those voters who have switched to the Tories will wonder if they can be trusted to solve the problem anywhere else. And as they fight over the colour scheme, our politicians should remember that no party has a right to ownership of “the wall” or for that matter any part of Britain.
The Tory and Labour parties emerged in vastly different times and the people and causes they were created to represent have long since changed.
Labour in particular have an existential problem in facing that change, seemingly addicted to placating the more right-on side of Twitter rather than the vast majority of the people who do the living, working and bringing up of families in this country.
But it’s something, despite their current success, the Tories would be fools to get complacent about.
And that’s why they have to follow through with whatever “levelling up” actually means or risk losing all their gains.
In recent years they’ve both seen support chipped away by the Brexit Party and Ukip and there’s no reason why new parties on the Right, Left or centre couldn’t spring up to replace them.
In these febrile times, our established political parties should remember that they need us, we don’t need them, and their status and power depend on our will.
As Keir Starmer’s Labour have found out, if they don’t have our will “the wall” will crack, and all the John Lewis wallpaper in the shop won’t be able to cover that.