- The Guardian Monday 2 May 2022
2
from Birmingham to Leeds and a new
link between Leeds and Manchester were
cancelled last year ; now, we learn that of
79 areas of England that have applied for money to
improve local bus services, only 34 will receive help.
The Liverpool City region had asked for £667m , but
will get a piffl ing £12m ; and although South Yorkshire
requested £474m, it is not going to receive a penny.
In the Queen’s speech due on 10 May , there will
reportedly be a new levelling -up and regeneration
bill, though no one seems to expect much from it.
The largely vague “missions” set out in the white paper- pegged to a deadline of 2030, and about regional
imbalances in jobs, investment, home ownership and
life expectancy – are expected to have ambiguous legal
force, and there are likely to be plans for some new
devolution based around mayors. Advance briefi ngs
have also promised new laws whereby “ landlords will
be forced to let out retail units that have been vacant
for longer than six months ”: not a bad idea, but hardly
indicative of the thorough local renewal that Johnson
and his colleagues once hinted at.
M
eanwhile, one of our most
glaring imbalances of power
still cries out for attention.
With a new fi nancial year
just started and council
elections looming, Johnson
recently told the Commons
that “ everywhere you look at
a Labour administration, it is a bankrupt shambles ”.
This is completely untrue , and also vivid proof that
the government will still not take responsibility for
the local crises caused by 12 years of cuts. After more
than 10 years of savings, Tory-run Stoke-on-Trent
is now in the midst of £10m of cuts. In Leeds, the
fi gure is £16m ; Liverpool is trying to plug a gap of
£24.5m. Mention levelling up to most council leaders- including Tories – and you will usually be met with
either snorts of derision or a quiet kind of baffl ement.
The rise and fall of levelling up is really a story
about Conservatism, Brexit and an increasing tension
between the people Johnson and his colleagues now
claim to speak for and their own ideological tastes.
Brexit re- energised their party, brought Johnson to
power, and won him the support of traditional Labour
voters who believed he might follow through on the
pre-referendum boosterism – £350m extra a week
on the NHS and all that – and change the places they
live in after years of decline. But in Westminster, our
departure from the EU also emboldened the kind of
Tory neo-Thatcherites who saw Brexit as a chance
to re affi rm the small-state, low-spending credo they
were never going to give up.
A more substantial leader may have tried to resolve
that tension by facing such people down. But the
small-staters won, and any halfway convincing ideas
about levelling up were among the casualties. For
plenty of Tory MPs, that is presumably a cause for
celebration. But in the disadvantaged parts of the
West Midlands, post-industrial Lancashire, the old
Derbyshire coalfi eld and the rest of the “red wall” , it
will probably amount to another boost for the same
festering disaff ection that led to Brexit. As much as
any switching between parties, turnout in this week’s
elections will be a useful indicator of how people in
such places are starting to feel.
Yet there is one glimmer of hope. Even if
the government discards its supposed fl agship
agenda, huge questions about regional inequality,
deindustrialisation and where power lies are at
least now being talked about. In the right hands,
they could be answered with ideas about new green
jobs, radically improved transport, thoroughgoing
devolution, the reinvention of higher education
and much more besides. For the Tories, levelling up
may go the way of David Cameron’s short-lived big
society – talked up one day and blithely binned the
next. Labour, by contrast, could seize the initiative,
if only it could banish its current air of smallness and
caution, and realise what Johnson’s retreat means:
a huge, potentially historic opportunity.
Scottish voters will cast their votes on Thursday
in 32 local election races. But it’s possible that
no party will win majority control of a mainland
council. This is partly by design. These elections
use the single-transferable-vote ( STV ) system. Scots
rank their preferences instead of being forced by a
fi rst-past-the-post (FPTP) system to gamble on one
party – often considered by voters as the least bad. By
its nature, FPTP squashes small parties and leads to
duopolies on power. In contrast, STV allocates seats
more or less in line with the popular vote.
The electoral system is one reason that “coalitions
of losers” often win Scottish local election races.
Another is that Scottish politics remains polarised
around national identity. The Greens’ decision to
enter the SNP-led Scottish government encourage s
supporters of these two parties to give lower
preferences to each other’s candidates. This would
give the SNP potentially a big advantage over the
unionist parties which have not tacitly – or explicitly –
recommended that their backers give lower preference
votes to the candidates of other pro- union parties.
However, council elections are fought in the streets on
bread and butter, rather than constitutional, issues.
Last month the Guardian highlighted North
Ayrshire , run with a Labour minority. It was the fi rst
council in the UK to introduce free period products and
the fi rst in Scotland to put mental health counsellors
in schools. These policies appealed to the young;
a politically smart move when over-16s have the
vote. Imitation, they say, is the sincerest form ofNews that Lisa Allen-Agostini ’s debut novel, The
Bread the Devil Knead , has been shortlisted for this
year’s Women’s prize for fi ction might be a cause for
celebration in her native Trinidad, but it will come as
no great surprise there. This small Caribbean island,
the larger of the two-island state it forms with Tobago- with a combined population of just 1.4 million
- has long punched far above its weight, producing
the groundbreaking historian CLR James, as well
as two Nobel laureates.
VS Naipaul , representing prose, was a grudging son
of the island, who pointed out in his 2001 Nobel lecture
that only through leaving could he learn about his own
history; Derek Walcott , in the poetry corner, was an
enraptured adopted son who, in his own 1992 lecture,
proclaimed the island’s capital, Port of Spain , a polyglot
“writer’s heaven”. Poetry and prose have continued to
thrive at home and among an increasingly formidable
diaspora, with Naipaul’s own extended family alone
going on to produce the Quebec-based chevalier des
lettres Neil Bissoondath , and Vahni Capildeo , winner
of the UK’s richest poetry prize, the Forward.
The latest wave of successes, however, may
necessitate an overhaul of literary orthodoxy, for the
simple reason that so many are by women. Allen-
Agostini joins last year’s Costa prize-winner, Monique
Roff ey , and Amanda Smyth , whose novel Fortune is
in the running for the Walter Scott prize for historical
fi ction. They are merely advance warning of a literary
fl attery. Holyrood’s SNP government has taken
North Ayrshire’ policies nationwide. Labour’s
minority administration here works because –
unusually in Scotland – the council is run on a
cabinet system. North Ayrshire’s left wing council
leader, Joe Cullinane , in eff ect dares opposition
councillors to reject popular policies. They rarely
do. North Ayrshire even has a version of the
“ Preston model ” where local public institutions
spend more of a combined £1bn budget locally
to enforce social goals.
National polls suggest the SNP is well ahead, with
Labour the second most popular party. All eyes this
week will be on Glasgow, once a Labour stronghold,
now run by the SNP. With the cost of living crisis
uppermost in voters’ minds and Scottish councils
struggling after a decade of cuts under SNP rule,
material concerns ought not to be relegated to just
another front in the constitutional battle. Although
the Tories have attacked library closures and Labour
promises cheaper bus and train fares, the fi ght
to be Scotland’s largest unionist party militates
against subliminal cooperation.
Anas Sarwar , the Scottish Labour leader,
has ruled out formal coalitions with the SNP or
the Tories after these elections. This strategy
has proved unpopular with Labour councillors
who have spent fi ve years running coalition
administrations. However, Mr Sarwar’s approach
has been backed by Sir Keir Starmer. It is a gamble.
In 2017’s local elections, polling shows seven in
10 Tory, Labour and SNP supporters used their
transferable vote to express preferences for other
parties. With Liberal Democrat supporters, the
fi gure was even higher. If Scottish Labour cannot
recover because of constitutional polarisation,
it’s hard to see how Sir Keir can win a majority in
Westminster. Labour is the largest party in only
four Scottish councils – a tally that is behind the
Conservatives. Mr Sarwar’s bet will have paid
off if Labour reverses its fall.avalanche that will be coming down the slopes in
the next couple of years, ranging from fi ction to
poetry, books for children to creative nonfi ction.
The precursors of Trinidad’s younger female
novelists are still going strong today: writers and
thinkers such as Merle Hodge , Dionne Brand
and Shani Mootoo , who are celebrated across
the Caribbean, but whose canonical importance
to world literature has yet to be more widely
recognised. In Hodge, this lineage has its own origin
story. In 1970, she became the fi rst black Caribbean
woman to land an international publishing deal.
Her novel Crick Crack Monkey used patois to tell the
story of a young girl uprooted from rural to urban
life, beginning a tradition of historical reclamation
by and for women that plays out today in the work
of writers such as Roff ey and Allen-Agostini.
The reasons for this startling success are various.
Patronage has played its part. The traces of a lively
periodical, the New Voices , can be seen in writers
such as Jennifer Rahim – a polymath with a new
novel due out next year – whom it nurtured through
two decades until its closure in 1993. The OCM
Bocas literary prize has, since 2011, been fi rst to spot
a raft of local talent, including Roff ey and this year’s
winner, Celeste Mohammed. It is part of a small but
infl uential festival, which has become a fi xture for
academics across the scattered campuses of the
University of the West Indies and beyond.
Then there is simple geography, which has
made Trinidad such a melting pot of cultures and
languages. The new literature does not ignore the
violence and injustice that are the legacy of the
region’s brutal colonial history, while luxuriating
in the beauty and variety that have kept its writers
loyal even as they spread around the globe. As
Rahim wrote of her relationship with her homeland:
“We leave to fi nd / what is left behind / and that
holds us, / more than we know.” Continued from frontTrinidad’s prize-winning
female authors are now
rewriting literary history
Literature
May elections
A failure to reverse its
fortunes would be bad
news for Scottish Labour
Founded 1821 Independently owned by the Scott Trust No 54,646
‘Comment is free... but facts are sacred’ CP Scott
The levelling-up crusade lies
withered and abandoned
John Harris