Myths and Realities of “Left Behind” and “Levelling Up”

Abstract

The past few years have seen the rediscovery by political and media commentators of areas in post-industrial Britain characterised as “left behind”. It is rarely acknowledged that this attention to regional inequality has only come about after decades of political neglect and cultural erasure of these areas following deindustrialisation. Current ideas about regional inequality and proposed solutions to it—from the “Red Wall” to “levelling up”—are often conceptualised in ways that in fact continue this neglect, by homogenising these regions and imposing top-down narratives about their demographic and political nature. This paper will contrast these developments with new approaches in several parts of the UK, focusing on democratic localism or “community wealth-building”, which have seen communities in “left behind” areas already addressing regional inequality, and offering their own alternative economic and social models, in a way that presents a more nuanced picture of both class and regional identity.