Last Word: The Future of Towns
| Author | Will Jennings |
| DOI | 10.1177/2041905820911751 |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
44POLITICAL INSIGHT•MARCH 2020
Last Word
The 2019 General Election was won
in Britain’s towns. The Labour Party
lost seats to the Conservatives in
Leave-voting constituencies it had
held for a lifetime, sometimes dating back to
mass franchise – like Bassetlaw (1935), Rother
Valley (1918), Wrexham (1935) and Bishop
Auckland (1918). The ‘red wall’ crumbled,
leaving Boris Johnson with a commanding
parliamentary majority and the Conservatives
with a new electoral coalition.
These trends marked a continuation of
the deepening geographical divide in British
electoral politics – between places that
have prospered in a globalised knowledge
economy – predominantly major cities – and
those on the periphery, towns and rural areas.
This pattern had become sharply evident
in the EU referendum and 2017 General
Election. It is the product of a combination
of divergence in the demographic proles
of places on the core and periphery,
and changes in voting behaviours at the
individual level, amplifying the magnitude of
the electoral shock.
Changes aecting both people and
places are driving electoral change. As the
UK’s ‘core’ cities (places like London, Bristol,
Cardi and Manchester) have become
younger, more ethnically diverse and home
to a growing population of professionals
and graduates, many smaller towns have
aged and seen a smaller contraction of their
population employed in routine and manual
occupations (the traditional working class).
At the same time, age and education have
become stronger predictors of political values
and vote choice for individuals. Together,
these trends have given rise to a signicant
transformation of the electoral geography of
England and Wales (with the ascendance of
the SNP having redrawn Scotland’s electoral
map, too).
In the aftermath of the 2019 election, the
pivotal role of Leave-voting English towns
in handing a large parliamentary majority to
the Conservatives was widely heralded. The
Prime Minister vowed that the government
would ‘repay the trust’ that had been put
in it by its new supporters. This political
commitment to towns interpreted the Brexit
vote as a demand for change – building on
the government’s pre-election commitment
to the £3.6 billion Towns Fund supporting
100 town deals (targeted investments
in infrastructure, skills and culture) and a
programme of high street regeneration. The
government’s call for ‘levelling up’ seemingly
treats the economic and cultural roots of
Brexit as inseparable – fusing voters’ desire
to ‘Get Brexit Done’ with the need to address
regional inequalities.
Why has the ‘towns’ frame become so
inuential in accounts of the election? After
all, many of the social and economic forces
driving this electoral change have been much
discussed by political scientists – not least
trends of class dealignment, the changing
relationship between education and voting
behaviour, and the emergence of Brexit as
a focus of political identities and attitudes.
Place seems to have taken centre stage in
attempts to understand the election and the
political mandate it delivered.
As Co-Founder of the Centre for Towns
think tank I am hardly an independent
observer, but it is possible to identify a
number of factors that arguably have
contributed to the increased attention to
towns.
Firstly, the raw political calculus that most
seats that started the 2019 campaign as
marginal were towns, and also typically Leave-
voting, meant that these were prime targets
for the Conservatives’ campaign on the issue of
delivering Brexit. Focusing on ‘towns’ served as
a proxy for the new bellwether constituencies
that were integral to either party securing a
parliamentary majority.
Secondly, there is mounting evidence of
signicant geographical inequalities in many
aspects of social and economic life in Britain.
These are not only observed with respect
to regional productivity (often the focus of
concern), but also in areas of public policy
ranging from social mobility to opioid deaths
to failing schools to charity sector activities
to foreign direct investment to digital
connectivity to bus cuts to local government
spending.
From a public policy perspective, many
– though not all – towns are struggling
when evaluated against critical indicators.
This is not to say that cities do not also face
profound challenges, but policymakers have
until recently, had a blind spot as a result of
their focus on city-led models of economic
growth. That focus was an understandable
response to the struggles of many regional
cities in the 1980s and 1990s, but there
has since been a relative disregard for how
outlying towns and areas are impacted by an
agglomeration based model.
To full its ambitious promises on levelling
up, the Johnson premiership will have to
be laser-focused on delivery. With the next
general election due to be held in May
2024, the time scale will be extremely tight
for realising material improvements in the
condition of towns that are perceptible to
voters. The underlying causes of decline in
many towns stretch back decades. Turning
things around will be neither a quick nor easy
task for even the most capable government.
Brexit adds a further element of
uncertainty, both in the potential for
negotiations to distract the government
from its domestic agenda, and if the terms
of the UK’s future relationship with the EU
(and trade deals eventually struck with
other countries) impact on the budgetary
position of the government and its room to
manoeuvre. Whether the levelling up agenda
delivers a fundamental transformation of the
geographical inequalities present in the UK
today remains to be seen.
Will Jennings is Professor of Political Science
and Public Policy at the University of
Southampton and co-founder of the Centre
for Towns.
The Future of Towns
Will Jennings explains how towns became a key political battleground
and asks if Boris Johnson can fulfil his promise to ‘level up’ Britain.
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