Boris Johnson’s “Levelling Up Across the Whole of the UK”: One Nation or Business as Usual?
Presented as an essential aspect of the Conservative Government’s agenda, Boris Johnson’s Levelling Up policy was announced several times between July 2019 and the creation of a Levelling Up Department in September 2021. Notwithstanding the pandemic’s impact on the Government’s capacity to implement...
Tallennettuna:
| Julkaisussa: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/rfcb, |
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| Päätekijä: | |
| Aineistotyyppi: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Kieli: | Anglais |
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Revue française de civilisation britannique
2022
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| Aiheet: | |
| Linkit: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Yhteenveto: | Presented as an essential aspect of the Conservative Government’s agenda, Boris Johnson’s Levelling Up policy was announced several times between July 2019 and the creation of a Levelling Up Department in September 2021. Notwithstanding the pandemic’s impact on the Government’s capacity to implement its political agenda, for almost two years, Levelling Up remained a vague policy with many broad and sometimes ill-matched projects put together under a heading that increasingly sounded like an empty electoral slogan. To quote but a few of the proposals made in that lapse of time, Levelling Up was to unite the country by “bringing opportunity and wealth in every corner of the United Kingdom”, it would restore “local pride”, “answer the plea of the forgotten people and the left-behind towns”, “erase deep inequalities”, provide “a beautiful education” to all schoolchildren, “unleash Britain’s productive power” and enhance devolution: in a nutshell, widespread government intervention to “build back better” with a Roosevelt-style New Deal. This was a rather novel commitment for a contemporary Conservative Prime Minister. Was Levelling Up just a crowd-pleasing mantra or was it a genuine commitment to end austerity and to give a new, One Nation, direction to the Conservative government? This paper examines the context in which the Conservative Party deployed its Levelling-Up agenda and what policy programme underpins it. It then considers Levelling Up in the broader context of Boris Johnson’s One Nation pledge and One Nation Toryism in general. |
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