Storm Arwen response exposes Boris Johnson’s levelling up lies, gerrymandering and loss of trust – Tom Richmond

There was already anger that Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng was absent – the suggestion was that he, and the Prime Minister, were on a conference call with Castleford-based Northern Powergrid and that this diary clash was unavoidable.

Kwarteng’s place was taken by Energy Minister Greg Hands who outlined how he and his boss had visited stricken areas in the North East and Aberdeenshire. Fair enough until it emerged that most of the time was spent in Tory seats rather than those held by Labour and the SNP.

North Durham MP Kevan Jones, whose urgent question prompted these unedifying exchanges, was incandescent with his follow-up point of order. “They made no effort (to) go anywhere but where they have a Conservative MP. I am sorry, but politicising the crisis is not right,” he said.

The SNP’s Richard Thomson, who represents Gordon, then claimed that he was not invited – as a local MP – to a Ministerial visit. Hands denied allegations of bias, saying that the itineraries also included Labour and SNP constituencies.

But the mumbling Minister was very unconvincing and the inference was that he and Kwarteng travelled through the seats of their political opponents without spending sufficient time on the ground to reassure their critics that all areas were being treated equitably.

And this matters because this Sunday marks the second anniversary of Boris Johnson’s election win – and his commitment to put ‘levelling up’ at the heart of his domestic policy agenda in the aftermath of Brexit.

Let me remind you what Johnson said on the steps of 10 Downing Street: “We are going to unite and level up – unite and level up bringing together the whole of this incredible United Kingdom...taking us forward unleashing the potential of the whole country.”

What rank hypocrisy. Try telling that, Prime Minister, to those backbench MPs, including ‘red wall’ Tories, who believe that the Government would have responded to Storm Arwen far more robustly if homes in the South East had been left without power – flooding victims here will testify to such double standards.

But the reluctance to even deploy the Army while families shivered, and Downing Street obfuscated over its staff Christmas party last December, also made a mockery of levelling up in the wake of the London Government’s briefings that the much-promised white paper is to be delayed to the New Year.

Supposedly innovative ideas are said to include elected county mayors and the creation of a new quango to monitor progress on the delivery on “core missions such as improving living standards and boosting local pride”.

Local pride? It suggests, two years after the 2019 election, that levelling up is little more than sprucing up flowerbeds in favoured areas – hence why Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s Richmond seat received preferrment over Barnsley, one of the North’s deprived areas, in one tranche of funding earlier this year.

And the length of time that it will take to turn a white paper – a glorified discussion document – into legislation that is then sanctioned by Parliament is that it is now doubtful that anything substantive will be achieved before the next election.

This despite the 2019 Tory manifesto making seven glib references to ‘levelling up’ from “to unite and level up” and to transport supposedly being key to “our plan to level up the UK’s cities”. The latter was followed by a specific promise to “build Northern Powerhouse Rail between Leeds and Manchester”, another Boris Johnson lie.

And, as the Government comes under pressure from Tory heartlands in the Home Counties to scale back investment in order to fund pre-election tax cuts, Johnson’s trustworthiness on a range of scandals, mishaps and u-turns is even more intermittent than power supplies in areas hit by the storms.

The country has to take the PM and his word that he, and Kwarteng, were in talks with Northern Powergrid about the restoration of supplies – and why it will take three months to process compensation claims – just as the issue was being raised in the Commons.

But the fact that MPs, and many victims of Storm Arwen and now Storm Barra, did not necessarily believe Downing Street suggests that the foundations of Boris Johnson’s ‘red wall’ are beginning to crumble following repeated betrayals of trust. After all, this crude example of policy gerrymandering offers further evidence that levelling up, two years after Johnson’s election win, is still a slogan that is bereft of a strategy.

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