Within Wessex,
councils in Devon and Somerset
have pooled their economic development role and share a fire & rescue
service. There are rumours of forthcoming
mergers in other departments too.
Sometimes this sort of co-operation can move us in the right direction,
as in fire control services, which are now co-ordinated across most of southern
and central Wessex, defying London’s divide-and-rule obsession with the ‘South West’
and the ‘South East’. Such developments
are essential to improve our region’s resilience in large-scale emergencies. What is of great concern to us is when
co-operation stops short of the Wessex
level because London
insists on a different agenda.
This seems to be the case with the ‘combined authorities’, all of which
are part of a drive to create a ‘city-region’ scale of governance rather than a
truly regional one. Cities matter a lot
to this government, as they did to the last.
The belief is that concentrating decisions and resources in cities, at
the expense of the countryside, will produce some sort of economic miracle that
will benefit everybody. So we all need
to doff our caps to those creative, entrepreneurial, interconnecting urbanites
without whom we would be nothing. Sounds
familiar? Yes, it’s the London view of the world turned into a
general theory of economics.
Underpinned in policy terms by ‘city deals’. Despite the faint echo of Roosevelt’s
New Deal (which was much more wide-ranging), the real inspiration for the term
is the Thatcherite obsession with contracts, with shaking hands on a mutually
beneficial transaction. The problem is
that this isn’t a contract between equals.
What city deals are about is our cities signing-up to support for
government policy, however distasteful, in return for getting back some of the money the London regime has taken from them in tax.
The original idea of putting cities centre-stage by means of elected
mayors has been largely shot down by the electorate. It was always going to give rise to questions
about the scope of their mandate. Giving
elected mayors powers over hinterlands that have no say in their election was
too undemocratic even for the London
regime to defend. City-regions – joint
authorities for cities, suburbs and surrounding countryside – are Plan B. They’ve been discussed among the elite for
around 50 years and are now flavour of the month not only with the London regime but with the half-free Welsh Assembly, which
wants similar structures for the Swansea
and Cardiff/Newport travel-to-work areas.
That way the Assembly can continue to preside over a fragmented,
colonial economy instead of tackling the real job of building a genuinely free
and integrated one. Municipal leaders in
the English regions have exactly the same priority: keep it so local it
hurts. All because, in their experience,
shaped by the capricious acts of the London
regime, the regionalist alternative is a leap in the dark.
City-regions give the appearance of decentralisation without the
reality. Their powers are drawn up, not
down. They are small, manageable, and no
threat at all to the London
regime. They can even be played off, very
aggressively, against the aspirations of small nations and historic regions,
contrasting a supposedly sophisticated global-cities-club identity with rooted
territorial identities now to be judged passé.
They breed suspicion about the motives of neighbouring cities. They erode traditional local government
without replacing it with anything that has a compelling identity of its
own. They entrench the idea that life is
urban-centred and that nothing larger than the travel-to-work area is real
until the level of the sovereign UK is reached. That’s why they’re flavour of the month. And no-one should be fooled into thinking
otherwise.
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