More than three years after malign fun-fur mascot Boris Johnson first gibbered out the catchphrase, we finally have incontrovertible evidence of what “levelling up” actually is. For its duration, Johnson’s government had a flagship policy that it couldn’t have defined even if it hadn’t been drunk on the contents of a wheelie suitcase. Levelling up now turns out to be a sort of inter-constituency Squid Game, in which MPs who voted for various stripes of self-harm are now forced into trial-by-combat against each other in the hope of appealing to the caprices of shadowy gamesmaster Michael Gove. Arguably there’s an ironic wit to the format – a sort of handout for the anti-handout party, designed solely to inadequately mitigate the effects of cuts made largely by that same party. The players seem quite upset about it now, but are of course free to terminate the game if the majority votes to do so.
Or as one Conservative MP who missed out fumed yesterday: “I’ve got shops without roofs and whole streets of boarded-up houses and some people are getting cash for adventure golf.” Which is, by coincidence, exactly the picture in the political glossary next to the phrase “sunlit uplands”. Another Tory MP described the policy delivery as “a fuck-up of epic proportions”, casting it as the Stalingrad of not securing a planetarium for your northern marginal.
