Avon
Local History & Archæology – ALHA – does exactly
what it says on the tin. It’s an
organisation for local history and archæology in the Avon
area, serving some 80 affiliated societies, with a collective membership of
about 10,000. Founded in 1976, it has
outlived Avon County Council, recognising the economic and social – and therefore
historical – unity of the area, not so much separate from as special within the
grand historic counties of Gloucestershire and Somerset.
In 2011 ALHA launched its annual Joseph Bettey Lecture, named after the Bristol academic responsible for Wessex from AD 1000, Rural
Life in Wessex 1500-1900, The Landscape of Wessex and other books that
present our history from the inside looking out, not the outside looking in.
ALHA also holds an annual
spring conference, with this year’s entitled ‘The rocky road to democracy and
freedom: from king John to mayor George’.
In the wake of Magna Carta, Bristol’s
first mayor may have been the one chosen in 1216, another concession made by ‘Bad
King John’. The first directly elected
one followed in 2012, the renowned, red-trousered Wintonian, George
Ferguson. London’s
first mayor was in 1189, the first directly elected one in 2000, yet more
evidence of how Bristol tends to mimic London’s every move. Professor Murray Stewart’s closing talk at
the conference, ‘The elected mayor: democrat or autocrat?’ provoked vigorous
audience reaction. As well it might,
because one of the reasons for having an elected mayor was identified as “more direct communication with central
government”.
So it seems that having an
elected mayor as the key to city devolution is less about restoring civic
confidence, more about training better beggars. It isn’t about giving local folk the power
collectively to shape their own lives; it’s overwhelmingly about putting in
place a network of local fixers who can be summoned to Whitehall for instructions whenever any
smoothing needs to be done.
Keep that point in mind,
because there’s a familiar theme behind every local government
reorganisation. At the time of the ‘big
bang’ reforms of 1974, official explanations referred the reader to the
problems: the previous local local
authorities were “too small” and
there were “too many of them”. Size can
be a problem: there’s a relationship between it and functional competence and
that’s what underlies the idea of subsidiarity.
Being over-numerous though is not a problem for local authorities or the
communities they individually serve.
It’s not a problem they have any reason to recognise, let alone worry
about. It’s only a problem for
outsiders, more especially for those who have to deal with them all. The drive for fewer and fewer councils is
about improving the London
regime’s range of effective control.
Every reduction in the
number of councils is accompanied by a reduction in the number of
councillors. Replacing committee
government by cabinet government has concentrated power even further and left
the remaining councillors with little to decide, and therefore little reason to
stand. Progressively replacing elections
by thirds with whole council elections is already cutting by two-thirds the
number of opportunities for democratic involvement by voters.
The ultimate aim is surely to
have directly elected mayors everywhere, covering huge areas – though certainly
short of regions, which pose an actual threat to centralism. A gaggle of municipal Caesars voted into
dictatorial power for four years, with no means of popular redress in the
interim. The result is ‘stable government’. But it’s not what could be described as bottom-up
vital democracy.
Do not imagine that what has
begun in the big cities will not touch the shires. The current Cities & Local Government Devolution
Bill allows for mayors for combined authorities that include all (or just part)
of a county council area. A quarter of Ireland’s
county councils have chosen to style their chairman ‘mayor’. Although these county mayors are not
executive mayors, they set a precedent that may, one day, produce an elected
Mayor of Devon or Hampshire or Somerset. Not very long ago, a Mayor of the North East
– Greater Tyneside but with a vast rural hinterland – was perhaps the most
preposterous idea in politics; now it’s a real possibility.
This is a measure of how
unconservative the Conservatives can be in re-shaping the meaning of words. It’s also a measure of London’s
ability to get areas that are nothing like London to imitate its thoughts and actions,
whereas doing things differently is actually what’s needed to give them an
advantage over it. The onward march of
the mayors is but one example of this.
Tony Blair’s devolution of power to London was designed to evoke as few memories
as possible of the old Greater London Council during Ken Livingstone’s term as its
last Leader. So the GLC became the GLA,
the Leader became the Mayor, and London Transport became Transport for London. Since then, we’ve seen Transport for Greater
Manchester, Transport for New South Wales,
Transport for Edinburgh, Transport for Ireland and,
most recently, Transport for the North, which the Government now proposes to
put on a statutory footing. The first
step to a northern regional government?
There’s unlikely to be a Transport for Wessex:
the chronic under-funding of our region demonstrates the London view that if we think we have
transport problems we must be imagining them.
Against this dismal
backdrop, the Cornish experience is all the more remarkable. Devolution of power to Cornwall is finally happening, so one cheer
for that. It’s inadequate and it’s
undemocratic, so only the one cheer.
What’s to be devolved will allow better integration of public services
and therefore produce better outcomes for less money. It’s the case for devolution in a
nutshell. But what’s to be devolved will
not allow Cornwall
to decide its own future. The crucial
powers over housing and planning needed to halt the destruction of Cornwall’s communities
and environment remain in Greg Clark’s hands, demonstrating that devolution is
not defined by what’s devolved but by what’s retained. Governments, aloof from it all, keep the
important powers; councils take unpopular decisions they couldn’t shape but
will be blamed for anyway. Inadequacy is
compounded by a lack of democracy; key powers are to be handed not to Cornwall
County Council but to quangos like the Local Enterprise Partnership, to those
who have never fought an election, let alone done so successfully, yet are
still allowed to set local priorities because they’re rich. It’s like the 20th century never happened.
What’s most remarkable about
Cornwall
however is that local institutions that already exist are being entrusted with anything
at all. Cornwall is the first rural county to make
such gains, just as it was the first royal duchy back in 1337: forms of
precedence that all help to build a case for more powers to follow. It’s also the first area not to be forced
down the mayoral route considered de rigueur
for the conurbations, where a single directly elected focus is currently
lacking. (The Government was recently
defeated in the Lords on this point, but that’s far from being the end of the
parliamentary debate.) It has to be said
that if the conurbations lack an elected focus it is the Tories that the Tories
have to blame for that because it was they who abolished the relevant county
councils in 1986 and 1996. Without
putting in place a regional
replacement worthy of the name.
Who has current
responsibility for devolution? The
Ministry of Justice used to be the Department for Constitutional Affairs but
constitutional affairs are now firmly the province of HM Treasury. This became clear this month from the launch
of a paper setting out the Government’s ‘productivity plan’, Fixing the foundations. It contains some interesting facts, such as
that London accounts for 28% of the UK’s GDP, while New York contributes 7% of
the USA’s and Berlin just 5% of Germany’s.
The comment that ought to follow is that both those countries have
federal systems of government that prevent the over-concentration of economic
activity by preventing the over-concentration of political activity. The printers seem to have missed that bit
out. An unfortunate omission.
There’s a section devoted to
Mr Osborne’s fixation on elected mayors.
It quotes research showing that cities with fragmented governance
perform badly. It doesn’t point out that
one reason why governance is so fragmented is that the London regime has taken power after power away
from local councils because they can’t be trusted to toe the party line. Returning a few with strings attached doesn’t
address this key issue. Moreover, so
long as devolution is to business-dominated quangos rather than to those
untrustworthy councils, joined-up governance will remain elusive.
So too, it seems, will
consistency. Fragmentation wasn’t judged
a problem when the Tories abolished those county councils. They talk too of a Northern Powerhouse, yet
power is something that will not be exercised at the northern level: the
Northern Powerhouse will be directed from the Chancellor’s office and delivered
across a fragmented region by locally elected metro-mayors acting as his
district commissioners. How long is the
north of England
going to put up with this colonial-style regime? It’s a vital question because the future of
regionalism in England
hinges on the willingness of northerners to lead the revolt against London divide-and-rule. We’d love the revolt to start in Wessex but we
face different issues – regions are different and that’s why we need to empower
them all – and so we must watch and wait for our own moment of opportunity.
It cannot come too
soon. The Treasury’s paper bemoans the
fact that England
has as many as 353 councils, with 18,000 councillors, all able to put a
democratic spanner in the works. (It
doesn’t point out that France has 37,000 councils, linked in a labyrinth of
joint authorities, yet still manages to survive in the modern world.) The tone is unmistakeably that economic
survival depends on rooting out democracy.
Investors won’t come here if they have to persuade – in public – some irritating
people who just don’t understand how corporate deals are done. Without effective scrutiny, before decisions are taken, the whole
thing is unavoidably suspect, but so what?
Greed is good, right?
Previous generations strove
to bring the key economic levers under democratic control, to make business
accountable. Today’s is rushing headlong
in the opposite direction, making democracy more businesslike, not in the
laudable sense of efficient operation but in the altogether more unpalatable
sense of making it less democratic. If
it starts with local government, it will not end there. Why have MPs if we can have an elected Prime
Minister, beyond criticism’s reach for a fixed five-year term? (Mr Cameron referred this weekend to having
to take “my Parliament with me” over Syria, as clear
a case of lèse-majesté as
can be imagined.) Why have 200 separate
states when we can have a single world president applying a single corporately
written law? Powerful institutions are
what safeguard democracy, by being persistently awkward; powerful individuals
are what undermine it, by attacking them as vested interests obstructing change.
The irony is that elected
mayors, pushed again and again as an extension to and modernisation of our
democratic traditions, are now being imposed on cities like Manchester that have already rejected them in
referenda. Bristol, meanwhile, is the only city to have
voted to have an elected mayor under new legislation that prevents it voting to
change its mind in the future. The
arguments for and against having elected mayors are essentially academic – and
irrelevant – so long as the London regime is determined that we shall have them
at all costs.
