PM’s levelling up plan at risk of failure, warns ex-No 10 adviser
There is a definite rural dimension to this levelling up agenda which has brought many rural towns in the context of initiatives such as the Towns Fund to the attention of regeneration funders who were previously completely uninclined to be interested in them. This article revealing a bit more about the dynamics underpinning the whole process is really interesting. It tells us:
Mr Tanner, a former adviser to Theresa May, has become an influential voice in Conservative circles after his Onward think tank identified the red wall seats in the run up to the last election.
They were the once rock-solid Labour seats which fell into Conservative hands at the 2019 general election.
In a report shortly before the election, Mr Tanner described “Workington Man” – from the West Cumbrian constituency – as the sort of lifelong Labour voter who would switch to the Conservatives.
This voter was pro-Brexit, sceptical of globalisation and wanted a government that would protect cherished local institutions such as pubs and post offices from closing.
In an interview with Newsnight ahead of the publication of his new report, Mr Tanner says: “Absolutely we came up with the Workington Man concept at the last election. We identified that as the archetypal voter that swung towards the Conservative party and delivered all those seats in the north of England – like Workington, like Walsall, like Warrington – those seats that the Conservative party had often never held before.
“It is precisely those seats that would benefit from a more localised approach, a bottom-up approach where communities take control of local assets like libraries and sports clubs and community hubs. Using them as the lynchpin for regeneration is likely to be successful in regenerating those local areas.”
Newsnight visited Workington to gauge opinion about the government’s “levelling up” agenda. Some shoppers thought the government was too focused on larger metropolitan areas.
But Mike Johnson, the Conservative leader of the local Allerdale Borough Council, did not recognise the criticisms in the report.