“Slowly, the party I joined will become almost unrecognisable.”
Matthew Parris
The elections in England last Thursday set a series of political challenges. In Scotland and Wales, they were of course overshadowed by the character of their respective assemblies and focus on the union, but in England they have presented a major challenge for both the Labour Party and ‘middle-ground’ Conservatives.
At first sight, Boris Johnson may appear to both as a populist ‘rabble rouser’, in the same mould as Donald Trump. He may indeed ‘play to the crowd’ in his appearance, his language and on TV; but, when he speaks of ‘levelling-up’, it’s genuine. He is an egalitarian at heart, and people understand that, even if some politicians don't.
So in this commentary we join the voters of Hartlepool in calling for a better understanding of what it means to be egalitarian.
Matthew Parris, a former MP but now a journalist, is one of those ‘middle-ground’ Conservatives who doesn't understand Boris, as he made clear in his Saturday Comment piece in The Times.
His assessment, that Boris is taking the North-East for a ride, is summed up in this depressing little paragraph in his article: “As disillusion in red-wall Britain grows, the Tories will turn back towards the class interest with which the party has been historically associated: towards the achieving, entrepreneurial places and people; back towards business, towards graduates, the employed, the savers, and the more comfortably off. And when they do, they will find we have wandered away.” [our underlining of 'we'].
By making this extraordinarily elitist statement, even including himself in the [underlined] ‘we’ at the end, Parris is declaring that he doesn't believe all of these essential aspects of wealth creation - entrepreneurial activity, business, university education - can be embraced by people outside his class. He is so totally wrong, and I am sure Boris will do his level best to prove it.
Does he think that entrepreneurial activity, business and university education are in the genes? Or that they are an inherent part of upper-middle class inheritance?
It is true that wealth and family does provide significant inter-generational opportunities, but there are so many who have achieved extraordinary things from a difficult start to prove that those opportunities can be achieved by all. That is nowhere more evident than among those who were in care during their childhood and adolescence, but whose spirit and determination has brought them significant adult achievements.
When the French and American revolutions of 240 years ago demonstrated their shared confidence in ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’, they were speaking with the same confidence in the levelling-up agenda that Boris speaks of today; and, when we wrote last week of needing to keep a check on the rich and powerful in order to deter their persistent pressure for intermediation, we might as well have been including Matthew Parris in our criticism.
This is because the widespread achievement of human potential can only be egalitarian if it rests with the individual, and has those checks and balances in place to ensure opportunities for all.
So, when we speak of egalitarian capitalism, we are explaining how levelling-up can be achieved in practice; we are providing the wherewithal for this agenda to be turned into reality.
The Labour Party has some claim to this as well as the Conservatives: it was, after all, Gordon Brown who introduced both the Child Trust Fund and an egalitarian approach to employee share ownership. But Sir Keir Starmer seems to have forgotten that in his focus on No. 10 wallpaper.
Egalitarianism is not the preserve of any one political party, neither is it the possession of those who believe in mass state-intermediated social welfare. It is the birthright of every human; and those who care about others, who share a genuine love for their neighbour whoever they are, will be instinctively egalitarian.
We now have three years of post-Covid growth to demonstrate how this can be achieved, and the UK government is making a good start. However, it needs to embrace both mass participation in individual ownership and inter-generational rebalancing in order to overturn the elitist attitudes of people like Matthew Parris.
Gavin Oldham OBE
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