Paul Salveson on the democratic deficit in devolution plans
The last Chartist was produced just before we knew the outcome of the Makerfield By-Election. To say that a lot has happened since then is putting it mildly. A convincing Burnham win was followed by his appointment as Leader of the Labour Party, then Prime Minister. There’s much to be pleased with, not least his promise to bring bus fares back down to £2, reversing one of the dafter things that Starmer did. This, and many other modest but significant initiatives – combined with his personal appeal – has seen a “Burnham Bounce” reflected in Labour’s Bev Craig winning a convincing victory to replace Burnham as mayor of Greater Manchester.
A centrepiece of Burnham’s politics is his commitment to “devolution”. Within hours of being made Prime Minister he announced that there would be a “Number 10 North”, located in Manchester. It’s already doing business and senior civil servants are busy making the move north.
This is all good stuff, but how radical is it? The “devolution” which Burnham espouses isn’t all that, well, devolutionary. Dispersing government departments around the country isn’t new, though having a Prime Ministerial base outside London is, and there’s nowt wrong with that. But it’s not devolution of power. We will still have a centralised legislature, with some civil servants working partly up North and partly down South. Which will be good for Avanti West Coast and will also help influence civil servants” view of the world in which they live. I’ve always been a fan of Marx’s dictum, that “material being determines consciousness”, or something like that. Where you live determines how you think, in other words.
From my experience I’ve found senior civil servants a) generally very nice people, b) highly intelligent and c) in a mental universe that is highly London-centric. Having them living outside London, even in Didsbury or Chorlton, might help how they view the world. Even better if they moved to places like Farnworth (the beer’s cheap), Radcliffe (good tram service) or Hindley (nice station gardens). But they will still be responsible for implementing policy determined by Westminster, rather than the regions and nations of the UK. Even if the House of Commons was moved up North while they spend a fortune on renovating it (Dewsbury Town Hall would be perfect), this would still be a highly centralised government.
Yes, you might say, but Andy has championed the setting up of city-region mayors, with the creation of new “mayoral strategic authorities”, while reforming local government and creating new unitary authorities. But this is where it starts to get a bit messy. Local government in England is rapidly disappearing, being replaced by large unitary authorities which are anything but “local”. I live in “Westmorland and Furness”, a relatively new “local” authority which stretches from Morecambe Bay to just south of the Scottish border, taking in large centres such as Barrow and Kendal and dozens of smaller market towns and villages. It is neither “local” nor “strategic’. Next year we’ll get an elected mayor for the new strategic authority of Cumbria, but he or she will not be scrutinised by an elected body. The same has applied to the well-established mayors of Greater Manchester, Liverpool, West and South Yorkshire and so on. Generally, they’ve done a creditable job but there is a big democratic deficit here, about which most politicians and commentators are silent.
Meanwhile, slightly further south, the county authority of Lancashire is being split into four, with the abolition of local authorities such as Preston, Blackburn with Darwen, Blackpool and Burnley. Instead, it looks like there will be four unitary authorities, imaginatively termed North, South, East and West Lancashire. Apparently, there will be consultation on the final names, but nobody was asked in the first place if they wanted the county council to be abolished or new, much larger, “local” authorities created. Local government will become even more remote from the communities they supposedly represent, with historic identities trashed. The result will be even less interest in local politics. Sadly, this is being done by a Labour Government, but one of Labour’s traditional blindspots has been a combination of a highly centralist mode of thinking combined with, in many cases, a contempt for local identities and traditions which the smaller local councils exemplified. It all went badly wrong in 1974 when small and usually very efficient local councils were scrapped, replaced by larger “metropolitan” authorities.
If Burnham is serious about devolution, he needs to go back to Blair and Prescott’s plans for regional government in England. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have elected (by PR) assemblies which form an obvious model for England – combined with smaller local councils which reflect real identities, working with genuinely strategic regional assemblies with more powers devolved from London. Come back The Hannah Mitchell Foundation, we need you to make the case!