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.

Futures should matter (more): Toward a forward-looking perspective in economic geography

“…Similar critique can be observed in the UK context concerning its implementation of the “levelling-up” policies in so-called left-behind places (Jones, 2023). According to Ormerod (2023), such political discussion is often based on a biased and narrow version of history that categorizes and excludes certain social groups.…”

“…According to Ormerod (2023), such political discussion is often based on a biased and narrow version of history that categorizes and excludes certain social groups. Consciously or unconsciously, scholars seem to understand time as linear, which leads to their selective understanding of progress and development that determines the creation of certain versions of the future (Jones, 2023).…”

“…Unlike postmodernist views, which believe that the reality is solely socially and discursively produced, a critical realist view assumes both that there is a reality that exists independent of our knowledge of it (i.e., realist ontology, see Yeung, 1997) and that through proper reasoning, we can test many of our ideas to see whether they are most likely true or false. While postmodernist geographers have produced numerous work related to alternative futures/future-making by proposing concepts such as diverse economies, alternative economies, degrowth, democratic/progressive localism, and so on (e.g., Featherstone et al, 2012; Gibson-Graham, 1997, 2008, 2017; Jones, 2023; Krueger et al, 2018; Schmelzer et al, 2022), this tradition has a problem of epistemic fallacy (Bhaskar, 1998), which refers to the elimination of the intransitive objects of knowledge and thus the reduction of ontology to epistemology. As pointed out by Francis (1999), while poststructuralist analysis can show the subtle and multifaceted changes taking place in the discursively constituted possibilities for new subjectivities, it cannot disentangle the conditions of possibility for these new discursive frameworks.…”