The Tory Right named their latest response to it Levelling Up. For decades, Labour and the Left have responded to it with public policy that adds up to levelling down.
But what is ‘it’? Do our politicians actually know what ‘it’ is? What is ‘it’ they don’t understand?
Today, we find ourselves in the early stages of a cost-of-living crisis and a fall in living standards that is the worst since records began. But these are only some of the issues we now face.
Social mobility, debt, housing, energy, inflation or stagflation, healthcare, climate change, education, wealth inequality, fake news, crime, wokeism and many other problems join the list that’s fast growing into this out-of-control crisis that is touching everything we know, too.
Change is happening around us in ways that make very little sense. Yet the messages we hear in the media and from our politicians suggest that everything is as fine as it can be. It is leading many of us to assume that we are alone with our views and feelings; thinking that we must be going mad.
The UK is the person with major health problems. It’s in a beauty salon, where every wannabe politician must be seen as top dog by everyone. But this political class are just the Saturday morning trainees, only able to sweep up and comb hair*. They smile sweetly and tell the Country that having a great look is all it takes to fix the problems experienced by all. Meanwhile, what the UK really needs is every form of medical surgery known, with the mental health care and physical rehabilitation necessary to make every part of our system work together, returning the UK to full fitness and providing fair and balanced lives for everyone in the shortest time possible.
With an establishment obsessed with sound bites and messages, rather than public policy that has real depth, Adam Tugwell unpicks the realities of Levelling Up, levelling down and decades of mismanagement and self-interest from a political class that simply isn’t up to the job.
Adam demonstrates that the broken tools of a flawed political age will always leave someone, somewhere behind, and shows that our politicians are repeatedly failing to create the social backstop that the UK needs to stop anyone being avoidably disadvantaged.
Levelling Level focusses on the inevitable process of change affecting everything around us that underway today. It discusses how we can harness the experiences that will accompany the challenges that we face to make life better by establishing a Basic Living Standard for all.
Levelling Level proposes that it is not money and financial wealth, but people and the way that our society treats its poorest and most vulnerable that underscores our real value, success and health as communities and as a Nation.
Levelling Level is a solution to the UKs problems that works for all.
*The qualified hairdressers are the government officers and civil servants, or people who like to ‘nudge’
Adam Tugwell 