Abstract
The Conservative Party’s ‘levelling up’ agenda has been deployed both as a tool for public communication and as a broad motif for the government’s policy programme, gaining a great deal of traction as a political message. ‘Levelling up’ is a vision of a post-Brexit Britain in which there will be greater state investment, educational opportunity, regional equality, and regional independence. However, this vision invokes a wide-range of disparate political ideologies without addressing the underlying tensions between them. It speaks to social democrats about tackling deprivation, it speaks to social liberals about equality of opportunity, it speaks to economic liberals about supporting the free market, and it speaks to conservatives about reuniting the nation. If ‘levelling up’ develops from a political slogan into a fully-fledged policy programme, it will become increasingly difficult for the government to manage the ideological tensions inherent in the levelling up agenda.