Thread by @docrussjackson

#THREAD

Last year, in a fascinating article for think tank 'The UK in a Changing Europe' @UKandEU, Jack Newman explored the use of the phrase "levelling up" in Parliament, finding it has a
surprisingly long & shifting history...

ukandeu.ac.uk/levelling-up-t…

It took particular prominence during the 1860s in a debate about the relative positions of the Anglican & Catholic churches in Ireland. In this debate, one member of the Lords made the observation that ‘you must arrive at equality either by levelling down or by levelling up’.

In the 20th century, the phrase became more about financial rather than religious equality, & it tended to be used in relation to government funding. One example, is from the 1940s, during a war-time debate about benefits for soldier’s spouses.

Labour MP John Parker asked ‘Cannot the anomaly be removed by levelling up the rates paid to the wives of serving men for the whole country to that paid in the London postal district?’

In Parliament, usage of ‘levelling up’ grew slowly throughout the 20th century.

Increasingly, the term related to the increase & equality of government spending.

During the New Labour era, use of the term rose sharply.

There was a narrowing of its meaning, primarily referring to social policy & specifically to the distribution of school funding.

David Blunkett, when he was Education Secretary, explained that the government’s further education spending entailed ‘levelling up, not levelling down’.

In a debate about Primary schools, on 5 June 1996, Dr Bob Spink made an astonishing 'contribution'.

"What I now find pretty hard to swallow is hearing Opposition Members, not laughing at me, but pretending to agree with me. But they really are still advocating the socialist ideology that has submerged education in an execrable process of levelling down."

"hat is what socialism is about—levelling down. As my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton said, Labour opposed selection, setting, streaming, testing & the publication of results. Labour betrayed generations of children by its socialist Plowden project-based ideology."

Bob Spink was elected as the Conservative Party MP for Castle Point in 1992, lost his seat in 1997, but regained it in 2001. Having resigned the Conservative whip in March 2008, in April 2008 he defected to UKIP, becoming that party's first MP.

In 2017, Spink was convicted of four counts of electoral fraud, & was given a six-month prison sentence, suspended for two years, in January 2018.

In June 1997, echoing Spink, future Prime Minister Theresa May argued "socialism is about levelling down. Conservatism is about levelling up. Socialists believe that, if everyone cannot have something, no one shall. Conservatives reject that.’

Unless it concerns rules eh?!

This was an early indication that ‘levelling up’ was to become a broader Conservative mantra, or slogan, rather than simply an idiomatic or technical phrase.

From the mid-00s the phrase fell out of fashion, & became scarce over the following decade.

Where it was used, it appeared in relation to a wide range of topics eg in a debate on the gender pay gap in 2008, with Liberal Dem Lynne Featherstone arguing that ‘equal pay [should] mean levelling up [the wages of women to men], not levelling down [the wages of men to women]’.

Interestingly, the phrase "levelling up" is only used in the House of Commons on 30 occasions, whereas by 2020 it is used 457 times, & last year, 564 times!

Anyway, it's apparent that it's just rhetoric, rather than something real & tangible.

Slogans help win elections!