Jake Enea is a Conservative activist from Newport.
The Conservative Party’s defeat in 2024 marked more than the loss of government.
It exposed a vacuum of strategic clarity — particularly in our approach to regional growth.
Labour has returned with managerial confidence but little structural ambition. Reform UK channels anger but offers no credible governing programme. There is space, still, for a party of enterprise, renewal, and practical idealism. But to occupy that space, the Conservative Party must learn from its own successes, confront its failures, and recommit to economic seriousness.
Levelling up, as an idea, retains public support. As a delivery programme, it fell short.
The intent was clear: rebalance the economy, revive civic pride, and reconnect political sovereignty with place. But the tools were fragmented, the funding opaque, and the execution mired in bureaucratic process. In the end, voters saw slogans rather than structures. This created the worst of both worlds — rising expectations with static outcomes.
The lesson is not that state-led intervention in regional economies is inherently doomed. It is that partial devolution without power, capital, or permanence cannot deliver transformational growth. This was always a risk in the Treasury-led model of controlled decentralisation. The antidote is not to abandon the field, but to return to a more confident, market-oriented approach — one with proven precedent in Conservative statecraft.
The regeneration of London’s Docklands in the 1980s offers that precedent. The London Docklands Development Corporation was given real authority: streamlined planning powers, a pro-investor tax environment, and freedom from local political stalemates. It worked not because it was perfect, but because it created a clear investment thesis: long-term certainty, low friction, and private-led ambition. The result was Canary Wharf — a globally significant economic zone built not by subsidy, but by aligning policy with market forces.
This is the model that should inform a next-generation Conservative regional policy. And it should begin where the need is most acute — in post-industrial towns with latent economic assets but limited agency to deploy them.
Take Grimsby.
With natural advantages in offshore energy and logistics, its recovery potential is strong — yet throttled by regulatory drag, spatial incoherence, and under-capitalisation. The right response is not more competitive bidding for central funds. It is to establish legally empowered Development Corporations, supported by an opt-in planning code, full expensing for qualifying infrastructure investment, and zero business rates for new high-value firms. Pair this with a regional stock exchange pilot — enabling SME capital-raising outside London — and you have the beginnings of a Northern economic engine grounded in local agency, not central approval.
This would go beyond Freeports and enterprise zones. Both policies are sound in principle, and early results show modest gains. But they lack one crucial component: structural permanence. They are still, in effect, government programmes. What is required now is a shift from programme to settlement — from discretionary zone status to legally embedded economic reform areas. Let us call them Sovereign Investment Zones. These would be enabled by central legislation but governed locally, with ministerial oversight limited to macroeconomic guardrails, not daily administration.
Of course, critics will argue that Canary Wharf was a product of its time — the right idea, in the right city, in the context of financial deregulation. But that underestimates how replicable the model’s mechanisms are: planning control, capital incentives, regulatory certainty, and local autonomy. Those tools are not exclusive to 1980s London. They are available now, if we choose to use them.
To be clear, this approach is not risk-free. It requires trade-offs: in central control, in fiscal symmetry, in short-term metrics. But it aligns with a more fundamental political economy principle — that growth happens when policy removes friction, not when it replaces markets.
This is also the only credible Conservative response to the political forces now reshaping the landscape. Labour offers caution and control. Reform offers rupture. What the Conservative Party must offer is capacity — the capacity for local areas to govern their own economic future with real tools, not recycled frameworks. That message speaks to voters tired of stagnation, but wary of populism. It connects the politics of belonging with the economics of productivity.
Leadership matters here. Under Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative Party is uniquely placed to reclaim this agenda.
Her instincts on deregulation, institutional reform, and fiscal discipline make her the right figure to argue for a bolder model of place-based growth. She is serious about the role of government — not in directing markets, but in creating the conditions for them to thrive. If we are to restore trust in Conservative governance, we must restore belief in Conservative ideas — not as abstract ideology, but as tools that work.
Let this be the next stage in that project. A policy of local investment sovereignty. A strategy rooted in precedent but designed for this moment. A settlement that says to every town: if you have ambition, we will give you power.
And let us not stop with England’s North. A true Unionist growth strategy must extend the same offer to Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland — devolved responsibility matched by enterprise freedom and strategic investment. Economic dignity should be a shared national standard.
We built Canary Wharf. Let us now build again — with the same clarity, the same confidence, and this time, with the whole country in mind.
