How the Tories failed the North: 10 years of broken promises from the ‘northern powerhouse’to‘levelling up’
Ciara Garcha, History at Hertford College
26
The Conservative Party’s thundering victory at the 2019 general election has been partially attributed to the crumbling of Labour’s so-called ‘red wall’ of support in Northern England. From Redcar to Leigh, several Northern seats shed their decades-long allegiance with the Labour Party in favour of Tory blue. Tempted by Brexit, the leadership of Boris Johnson and nebulous promises of “levelling up”, 2019 saw many Northern communities and constituencies vote for the Conservatives for the first time in living memory. The Tories won new and unprecedented support in this part of the country, yet their ten-year-long record in office shows successive failures in terms of the North.
look left MT20
It seems important to establish how flawed the term ‘the North’ is in a political context. For many working in Whitehall and Westminster, it evokes images of smoky skylines, or struggling post-industrial towns. Continued framing of ‘the North’ by London-based journalists and politicians represents a problem in itself: a desire to cast those north of Stoke as one, (its exact boundaries continue to be widely debated) simple self-contained group. ‘The North’ is not a monolith; it’s diverse, varied and dynamic. Any discussion of the politics of Northern England and Northern constituencies must fully acknowledge this and take it into account. Lazily using ‘the North’ is not good enough; the political establishment and media have to do better to understand the political world outside the Westminster bubble.
The Tories’ repeated failure of ‘the North’ seems to have begun here: with a failure to truly understand the communities and people in Northern England constituencies. Grouping the millions of people in Northern England together into a simple catch-all phrase that can be repeated time and time again in slogans (the “Northern powerhouse”; promises to “level up in the North”) has been the Conservative trend for the past ten years of their administration, and is a problem in itself. The perpetuation of the use of the term ‘the North’ promotes simple, one-sizefits-all approaches to a varied and diverse part of the British polity and serves only to sustain ignorance about Northern English communities and constituencies, and to further alienate Westminster from the region. The 2010-2015 Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition saw attempts to appeal to voters in Northern England dressed up in the slogan of ‘The Northern Powerhouse’. As the pet-project of former Chancellor, George Osborne, it purported to seek to redress the imbalance and inequalities that skewed the English polity in favour of the south. The planned project covered a range of areas from transport, to devolution all of which would be invested and developed across Northern England, in order to “power up the North”. Despite being christened with a ministerial position and successive publicity campaigns, it remains difficult to discern what ‘The Northern Powerhouse’ project actually ac hieved,
