Levelling Up the British Press



Michael Gove, MP, Minister for Levelling Up                   Ben Houchen, Tees Valley Mayor

Scott Hunter

1 February 2022

We have to confess that Tees Valley Monitor has never quite grasped the proper etiquette on Twitter. Here’s an example. One of our readers put out a tweet this afternoon suggesting that journalists at the Guardian take a look at what is happening at Teesworks and consult our articles for evidence.

We noticed that John Harris liked that tweet. And we hadn’t. On the other hand, we suspect that John Harris liked it and immediately forgot about it, while we haven’t. We’d just like to explain why we’re not standing on one leg waiting for an email to arrive from the Guardian any time soon.

But if anyone thinks we’re about to indulge in a bit of navel gazing, can we put you straight on that before we go any further? We’re going to start with Chomsky and work backwards.

It was Chomsky who observed that Trump’s strategy in government was to ensure that all eyes stayed on him. And while the world was watching the pantomime and getting high blood pressure over the outrageous tweets, the real work of dismantling the structures of accountable, democratic government passed largely unnoticed. It went unnoticed because it didn’t happen in Washington, where the world was watching but in thousands of offices in states across the country where his acolytes quietly undermined environmental protections and democratic safeguards, all of it remaining below the radar, at least until it was too late to do anything about it. Now Trump has gone, but the book burning continues apace. 

The British press, meanwhile, never fails to disappoint. For days now it has been obsessed with Sue Gray’s report on Johnson’s behaviour.  When the report was finally published it was the damp squib that was all it was ever going to be. But all eyes remained on Johnson. Which is just the way he likes it.

When we wrote the second part of our series “Who Runs Teesworks?” we began, not with Ben Houchen but with Michael Gove. When he got up at the Conservative Party Conference last October to talk about levelling up, what he wanted to talk about was Teesside, and specifically the progress being made by the South Tees Development Corporation. Levelling up in action. All of it complete nonsense.

Within two months of that speech, 90% of the shares in the company that controls the revenue of the South Tees Development Corporation was in private hands. In a terse statement, Ben Houchen announced that the alternative to handing over control of Teesworks Limited to developers was for the whole scheme to be mothballed. Something not even hinted at in Gove’s speech.

We might predict that when Gove delivers his levelling up policy on Wednesday, he will not make mention of the fact that this flagship scheme was, by the end of November 2021, at risk of financial collapse. We might also predict that, when his speech is covered in the media, little mention will be made of Teesside. 

Yet the fate of the South Tees Development Corporation is crucial to the credibility of the levelling up agenda, and, of course, crucial to the regeneration of Teesside.   In the articles we have presented so far on the Corporation, we have made much of the mismanagement of the scheme. But beyond that there is the simple fact that it is chronically underfunded. The regeneration funding put up by this government is a drop in the ocean compared to what the scheme really needs to be viable and to work in the public interest, rather than the private profit of a few property developers.

It is Teesside that provides the evidence that this government’s levelling up agenda is little more than window dressing. That the prospect of mothballing the whole enterprise was a real possibility.

Will the media take to seriously examining what is happening on Teesside as a measure of the seriousness of ‘levelling up’? Houchen recently stated that the STDC had received regeneration funding to the value of £240 million. Time for some comparisons.

Let’s measure it in Garden Bridges. The London Garden Bridge is reported to have cost £53 million, yet it exists only in Boris Johnson’s imagination. The economic regeneration of Teesside is being sought at a cost of four and a half imagination bridges.

And when Gove proposes more powers for metro mayors, no one will question it. The devolution of power is a good thing isn’t it? And when a mayor goes rogue, sets up organisations like the Tees Valley Trust Fund that are beyond scrutiny, and puts public money into them, no one is sufficiently concerned to question the wisdom of giving metro mayors more powers. When a metro mayor goes rogue and brings an airport into public ownership, and in reality the only thing that the public owns is its debts, the media will not question it.

When there is evidence of small-town grift, and donors to the mayor are favoured with contracts, does the local press report it? No. They’re terrified of it.

When a mayor ceases to declare donations to the Electoral Commission, no one questions it.

It is not of sufficient interest that the devolution on which levelling up should depend, is not fit for purpose, having been set up in such a way as to deter scrutiny, rather than encourage it.

Will the national press start to notice the significance of this? Don’t hold your breath. The cavalry isn’t coming. It’s too far out of their comfort zone.

And the lack of media interest is the mark of how distant levelling up really is. In the end it’s not just about the lack of funding on the one hand, and the profligate spending on the other, it’s about the fact that for the media, regions like this one are of no significance, areas where nothing of any importance ever happens. That perception has to change. Because those who are sitting in the stalls at the Boris Johnson show are missing out on where the real action is. It’s here, where no one is looking.

Nonetheless we would like to thank @guyrbailey for trying to drum up some interest.