None of the politicians that we have today either understand or want to understand how the real problems that create an unjust and imbalanced society can or will be fixed.
The greatest travesty is that those we have elected to deal with such problems on our behalf are failing to do so.
Our politicians cannot deal with the problems that we face, because they are incapable of fulfilling the roles and responsibilities that they have been given, or self-interest leaves them wilfully blind to actually doing so.
The so-called success of our politicians revolves around the use of soundbites.
It’s been a problem since the time of the Blairist New Labour Government of 1997-2010. There was an identifiable shift from politics being about the end result (when at least some of our politicians had the wherewithal to get things done themselves), to becoming all about the message itself.
So bewildered was the Conservative Party by the (New) Labour landslide victory of 1997, they decided the only way to beat them was to play them at their own game.
As power has shifted back from the Blairist years (1997-2010) of the left-wing wolf dressed in right wing clothing, to the Johnsonian Conservative Party of the right that today is even more left than the left, a new low in the meaninglessness of what our political classes do [to us] to retain their power in this Country has finally been reached.
As I write in early 2022, one such soundbite in daily use is that of ‘Levelling Up’.
Suspicions that Boris Johnson and the current crop of Parliamentary Tories are pushing the Levelling Up agenda just as one way to survive, the element of truth that makes the term feel valuable to anyone with ears to listen, is that our political classes do at least appear to know that there is a problem.
All the while, the Labour Left pursue an agenda and way of thinking that through the changes and implementation of public policy achieve nothing but levelling down.
Levelling Up or levelling down; it doesn’t matter. Unless there is balance and fairness in the form of a level playing field at the point where we all step off, there will always be too many of us who lose out, whilst the same old few will end up with a win.
Regrettably, the truth that sits beyond that knowledge, is that none of the MPs sitting on the green benches in our Parliament know or understand the breadth and depth of the problem, or how the problem actually works.
That is why they are playing around with a soundbite that suggests the problem can easily be fixed.
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’
The people living and working in Villages and Towns around mid and Northern Gloucestershire and South Worcestershire experienced the worst that inland flooding can throw at us – and for a great many even more, when critical infrastructure was affected and the drinking water supply dried up as result.
Nobody could argue that the impact of the event did not come to the attention and supposed scrutiny of Westminster Politicians at the time. Pictures of RAF Rescue Helicopters winching stranded people to safety whilst hovering against the backdrop of the Cotswold Hills quickly caught international attention. I stood outside the Local Council Offices when then newly appointed Prime Minister Gordon Brown arrived.
At the time, within the immediacy of the flooding event itself, it felt like the powers that be simply couldn’t do enough.
But the moment that the floodwaters receded, the RAF had returned their big yellow flying machines to their bases and tap water supplies were restored, the media’s and therefore the attention of the politicians with the real power to do something meaningful simply drifted off to elsewhere and beyond.
Yes, remedial flood protection work took place here and there – especially in places that are very much in the wider public’s eye.
But the changes made in response to the Floods that year were in many ways little more than being aesthetic.
There was then and has been since no change in the way that Politicians, Government and the Agencies address the causes, influences upon and effects of flooding across the UK – despite many similar experiences for other people and communities across the Country that have already happened and are taking place in Yorkshire and the East Midlands today.
What was clear to me as a Local Councillor at the time of the 2007 Floods here, was that the Environment Agency wasn’t fit for purpose; that flooding was and always would be managed on the basis of so-called tried and tested thinking. And worst of all, that there was absolutely no room for new approaches or original thinking to deal with the problem as the specialists and those who possess the fiefdoms that are public sector responsibility would always know best – no matter what the reality and impact upon real people was or would be that was involved.
And whilst processes and procedures to deal the impact upon families that have to move out of their homes and perhaps live in caravans as a result for many months now appear to have become normalised, the fact that Government has concentrated only on managing the effects of any flooding crisis at the time, rather than dealing with the causes and what lies ahead should be telling us all that we really need to know.
Flooding isn’t a vote winner when there’s no water on the ground
With the shallow, self-serving politicians that we have in power today, the harsh reality we must all face is that in their majority, Politicians and the Political Parties that they represent are not interested in seeing any task through from start to finish, unless they believe that doing so will secure them more votes.
What our Emergency Services, our Military, and the people on the ground will do in Yorkshire and the East Midlands during the current crisis to help people will not be an issue in Westminster once the water has gone and this ridiculous General Election Campaign has passed by.
Addressing the issues that count and will make a difference – that’s Planning Policy, responding to the Housing Crisis, how we address Climate Change and the way that the Public Sector itself actually works, are not and never will be on the agenda for longer than it remains in the news. Or at least not until we have politicians with very different motives and people-first mindset involved.
Planning Policy
Many people don’t understand that Local Authorities don’t make planning law. They just interpret it.
And with rules that come from the centre – rules that sound great because they seem to consider this and sound great because they appear to consider that – we have all been misled into believing that a one-size-fits-all approach to the way that we build in all locations, environments and conditions across this Country can work out for everyone wherever they are in the same way – even with different people with different motives doing the interpretation that is involved.
For instance, the Planning System is itself so arbitrary that floodplains that have been built up and covered with dumped earth and inert debris then qualify as being safe to build on. Yet there is no consideration for the displacement of floodwaters that would have historically rested at that location. Nor is there though given for how that water might flow around this newly created island or indeed what other properties or places would now be affected by what will be both a new and at time of flooding inevitably different water flow.
For the impact of future flooding events to be limited for existing properties, Towns, Cities and Villages to the same levels and impact that they are having right now, Planning rules and the way that we interpret them must change to embrace the increasing likelihood of the black swans, rather than the imbedded mentality of ‘it couldn’t happen here’.
Unswerving technical adherence to manmade rules doesn’t allow for reach and impact of Mother Nature.
Solving problems without creating others must be a priority for all areas of civic life and activity.
The response to the Housing Crisis
Yet another of the political footballs that is currently being bounced around is the topic of which Political Party will build more houses and how quickly they will build them if they should find themselves in power once the Election question has been resolved.
The myth that we need to build so many new houses evaporates the very moment that you consider how much they actually cost.
How often have you seen house prices drop in any part of this Country when a new estate or development has been built?
The truth is that prices of old and new property in the local areas usually rise and like most things where prices and need can be manipulated, profit and therefore greed are the underlying cause.
Building at the levels we have already embraced is already creating a time bomb for potential flooding incidents that would never have had this kind of impact in the past – especially with planning policy as it is.
There needs to be a massive rethink and politicians who were thinking about the people they represent would certainly bring this foolish and ill considered approach to the problem to an immediate stop.
The way to deal with the housing crisis is to make better and more equitable use of the houses and buildings that we already have.
It isn’t helpful to pretend that the only solution is to keep on building more and more, whilst creating many more real ones than the hollow one that it is supposed to solve.
Climate Change
Yes, Climate Change or the Climate Crisis that our young people are now beginning to champion and the way of thinking that they are challenging is a very real part of the flooding problem too.
The weather in this Country and around the World is changing – no matter what your views might be about the cause.
The cold hard reality that we all have to face is that the weather patterns that are here today will take many years to reverse.
But there are steps that we can take to address their progression and pathway to becoming worse.
It is not simply about legislating to change the behavior of people who are already trying to make the best of what can be very difficult lives.
This is where the inexperience and impractical idealism of young people could easily be seen to make a valid argument that is beneficial to us all seem outwardly very wrong. Like Flooding events, protests soon disappear from the minds and plans of the wrong politicians and that is the truth – no matter how wrong.
Sadly, with Climate Change, much of the problem is again about money and greed.
The businesses that have the biggest part to play just need to be led to think differently and see that the profit which is their obsession is still there for them tomorrow as it is for them today. It will just come from them investing, operating and behaving ethically in a very different way.
Industry and money might not be listening now, but that will be different when we have different people in charge.
The necessity of political change that wont be served simply by having a General Election
The complexity of the problems that are contributing to the Housing Crisis, the failure of Planning Policy, Climate Change and Flooding as an issue in its own right will never be dealt with in the way that it needs to be by politicians who are only interested in the outcome of the next Election and how they convince all of us to give them their vote.
If we want the change that we need with the issues that we are facing not just like Flooding, but which we are experiencing each and every day, we must elect different people into Parliament, our Councils and into positions of power who will put people first. Politicians who know what it will take and – most importantly – are actually prepared to do everything necessary to get all of those things that need doing – and not just Brexit – done.
Unloading water at the Wheatpieces Community Centre, Walton Cardiff, near Tewkesbury, following the July 2007 Floods
With 10 years now passed since the Gloucestershire floods of 2007 we cast our minds back to the magnitude of those events that affected significant numbers of people and communities across the County and surrounding areas in the middle of July that year.
So much water trying to find its way to a natural watercourse created rivers and lakes in the most unexpected locations and seeing upended cars by the roadside and in ditches the following day, like some scene from War of the Worlds left a picture in my mind which was at the very least quite surreal.
But it was on the Sunday, when word really began to spread that there had been a problem at the Mythe Water Treatment Plant as a result of the Flooding which meant tap water was about to run out, that the real consequences of what we were afterwards told was a 1 in 100 year event really began to unfold.
After an unexpected phone call from a constituent that afternoon, asking where they could get water I found myself spending over two weeks delivering water and coordinating drinking water supplies around my Council Ward, increasingly conscious of how very thin the veil of individual social responsibility, commonly known as civil order actually is, when it was pricked in so many other areas by people fighting over water, steeling it and even urinating in bowsers where communities had been supplied. We can only begin to imagine what would have happened if the emergency services had not won their battle against the rising floodwaters of the River Severn when just centimetres from flooding the Walham Electricity Substation just outside Gloucester.
From my own perspective, the contact with members of the community I then represented that getting so directly involved gave me was of incalculable benefit. Not only did I see the impact of the breakdown of our utility service supply at first hand, I also gained real-time understanding of flooding and also what can be the very localised nature and requirements of our arbitrary Planning system, which continues to fail local people, and the communities in which they live every day.
The news channels have today made use of the good-news stories which followed the 2007 Floods, such as the permanent flood protection and defences that have been erected in places such as Upton on Severn, just a few miles upstream from Tewkesbury. Yet the bigger story beyond remains the lack of understanding or failure to acknowledge the real impact of building not only near or on flood plains themselves, but also on ground which in extreme weather events, would or has historically become the natural channels where a rainfall overload will find its way to our local main rivers via the floodplains in between.
Events like the 2007 Gloucestershire Floods are not rare events. This fact has been only too well illustrated by the many different experiences that Towns, Villages and in some cases even Cities have been continuing to experience ever since, and yet we still have a Planning system, environmental policies and public sector approach which is in real terms not even fully reactive in nature.
Adam Tugwell 