This week we return to rural Lincolnshire to find out what Levelling Up will do for Britain's safest Tory seat.
Last week I looked at the constituency of South Holland and the Deepings, and why it has become the safest Tory seat in the UK. This week I want to continue looking at this area, to ask specifically what the government’s ‘Levelling Up’ plans might mean for these kinds of rural constituencies.
Earlier this week I looked at Tory party co-chairman Oliver Dowden’s speech to the right wing US think tank the Heritage Foundation, and how ideas from the Foundation are being picked up by the British right. I also looked at the obsession with British people not having enough kids in an article on the Right’s demographic anxieties. And I covered new government guidelines on ‘impartiality in schools’ which some say resemble the Section 28 rules which banned the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality.
Levelling Down in the Fens (part 2)
The Levelling Up white paper was released on 2 February, and the only mention of Spalding, the main town in the South Holland and the Deepings constituency, is in reference to the upgrade of the A16 between Boston and Spalding.
Spalding Today’s senior reporter Andrew Brookes didn’t seem too impressed, saying:
“I’ve read through the paper so you don’t have to dear reader – it’s 332 pages, with one mention of Spalding, 23 of Lincolnshire and 264 of a little place you might not have heard of called London. There’s also a completely unnecessary page outlining the largest cities of the world since 7,000BC.”
Michael Gove’s Department for Levelling Up was accused of having copied some parts of the report from Wikipedia because they couldn’t find enough actual content to fill the report with. It also contained glaring publishing errors like repeated paragraphs and looked like it had “been cobbled together in a rush”. Much of it seemed to repeat Theresa May’s industrial strategy which was released four years ago and then scrapped.
The Conservative Party, even while putting most of the British state into managed decline, wants to show there’s some kind of material reward for electing Tory MPs. Unfortunately, they are so ideologically committed to destroying the state that Levelling Up is likely to amount to window dressing. As people like Prof Prem Sikka and Guardian writer Chaminda Jayanetti have noted, recent funding increases will not reverse the £15 billion austerity cuts to council budgets.
As Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham said on Question Time recently, “you cut councils in their budgets, then you campaign against council tax rises, and councils have no other choice.” In Spalding, the local council even had to bail out the privatised bus service recently, according to Andrew Brookes:
“The Government wants everywhere to have a public transport system that is ‘closer to the standards of London’. Right now, that’s laughable for us. We’d snap your hand off for something nearer to the standards of Lincoln, let alone London. Let’s not forget, the county council has had to step in to help run Saturday buses in Spalding for the first three months of the year due to the challenges facing Brylaine with a shortage of drivers and the lack of cash for rural buses.”
The constituency is littered with closed railway stations like at Holbeach, Cowbit and St James Deeping.
Holbeach station in 2008, via Wiki Commons.
The East Midlands has the lowest per capita spend on transport at £289 per person, compared to £882 in London. And it’s not just Lincolnshire which has noticed that the Levelling Up agenda falls far short of what many expected, with the Yorkshire Post saying it does nothing for rural economies.
Brookes points out that education, skills, culture and other infrastructure desperately need investment from the government. For example, “on the broadband front, there are still many parts of South Holland that are in the worst 10% of the country for internet speeds”. Investment in broadband, as well as funding for police and planning reforms have all been proposed by the National Farmers Union, while other rural business groups like the CLA have also called on the government to show more ambition for rural areas.
Research by the Rural Services Network has found that “prioritisation of the Levelling Up Fund has favoured non-metropolitan urban locations, especially in northern England’s ‘red wall’. Other areas though have been “overlooked”.”
What do they have to gain by investing more in rural Lincolnshire when it’s already such a Tory area? There’s no electoral benefits to investment there, unlike in the Red Wall seats that went Conservative in 2019. Pure electoral calculus means the Tories can ignore the areas that most support them, another absurd facet of our outdated electoral system.
South Holland MP Sir John Hayes has only mentioned ‘levelling up’ in Parliamentary speeches twice, neither occasion being directly concerned with his own constituency or what benefits the programme might bring residents there. He doesn’t seem overly concerned with the programme’s touted benefits, and with a seat that safe he doesn’t need to be.
It’s deeply ironic that the Levelling Up agenda, by pushing money into urban areas of the North, could risk exacerbating the divisions between rural and urban areas. According to the Yorkshire Post there is going to be a second Levelling Up report specifically about rural areas, which just shows how rural areas are relegated to a less important status.
Boris Johnson says that ‘Levelling Up’ will “make us more prosperous and more united by tackling the regional and local inequalities that unfairly hold back communities and to encourage private sector investment right across the UK.”
But what creates these inequalities in the first place? Capitalism tends to concentrate resources in metropolitan hubs, so if you want to reverse the process of capital flight from rural areas, the government needs to direct capital there, by investing in infrastructure. It cannot just rely on the private sector, which is what it seems to want.
I looked at the budgets of South Holland District Council from their available financial statements, and after what appears to be a big fall in council tax revenue around the 2008 Financial Crisis, the total budget has remained remarkably flat, rising by far less than inflation over that time.
The Council is currently proposing a council tax increase for 2022/23 of “2.83% – £4.95 per year – an extra 9.5p per week for a Band D property.” Inflation is running at 5.5%, so the council is effectively reducing its income in real terms year on year.
According to Spalding Today, in a survey they did, “just 3% strongly agree it is a pleasant place to live”, though there is hope that a £800,000 Arts Council fund for a local arts group will help fill the hole created by the demise of the local flower festival in 2013.
There seems little evidence to me that the Levelling Up agenda will do anything for a place like Spalding, which is crying out for direct government investment in infrastructure. There is a vicious cycle of capital flight from the area, resulting in less investment and shrinking council tax revenues. To reverse this trend would require a government less ideologically committed to neoliberal capitalism.
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