For an empty slogan from a disgraced source, “levelling up” has come far. When the Conservatives adopted it in 2019, it seemed no more likely to achieve distinction than those Johnsonian relics, abject even at the time: “build back better”, “get Brexit done”, “oven-ready”, “unleash Britain’s potential”.
But, three years older and still vacuous, the phrase has been sanitised even beyond the point of not requiring a “so-called” or inverted commas to tong it into political debates. Non-Conservatives, individuals who pride themselves on never calling Johnson “Boris” will now echo the phrase as if it really were more meaningful than “build, build, build”. Thinktanks treat it as a worthy concept; the TUC has been happy to advance the Tory-burnishing slogan with its own contributions on the “levelling up agenda”. Among the more surprising organisations currently dignifying a term that usefully distances Johnson’s party from the inequalities it cultivated, we find Arts Council England (ACE) citing this synonym for improving something as its reason for defunding or threatening some of the most valued cultural bodies in England and Wales.
