Thou Shalt Not

Thursday last week saw a plethora of different elections across the UK and among these polls was a referendum in St Ives.  Local folk voted by 83% to 17% in favour of a policy to ban the building of new second homes.  Faced with a housing market described as ‘financial cleansing’ of the locals, that’s no surprise, though of course it does nothing to ease the pressure on houses already built.

Reactions ranged from great interest, among towns and villages elsewhere, including western Wessex, to threats of judicial review by appalled developers.  Wessex already has an example of this type of policy, in the Lynton and Lynmouth Neighbourhood Plan in Devon, but this could be argued as an exception because of its location within the Exmoor National Park.  What happens when exceptions become the new rule?

Ministers in Lunnon insist that this is the sort of thing up with which they will not put.  The law will be changed to curb these uppity yokels.  Cornwall is surely somewhere that only comes into existence during the holiday season and switches itself off afterwards.  Localism?  Oh, we really are having a laugh.

The current issue of the MK magazine Cornish Nation highlights the raw deal that Cornwall is increasingly getting.  A cross-border Devonwall Parliamentary constituency is looming, regardless of token recognition of the Cornish as a national minority.  (If approved, this will make it impossible for MK candidates to represent Cornwall and only Cornwall, just as it will make it impossible for us to represent Wessex and only Wessex.)  Last month, a paltry £150,000 a year grant to support the Cornish language – equivalent to about three MPs’ expenses claims – was peremptorily withdrawn, to widespread dismay.  Cornwall’s Grand Bard described this spiteful act, so damaging to the tourism offer, as “an ideological decision based on indifference and not a financial one based on fiscal responsibility”.

Last year’s ‘Cornwall Devolution Deal’ was so feeble as to be an abuse of the word ‘devolution’, so limited in scope that it did not merit legislation or even a Commons debate.  The key areas of housing and planning are excluded from the deal.  Instead, the centralist inspection regime has imposed on Cornwall a much higher housebuilding target than that deemed appropriate by the majority of local residents and also re-written the council’s affordable housing policies to undermine their effectiveness.

As if to pour petrol on the flames, the Court of Appeal yesterday ruled it lawful for the London regime to prevent councils seeking contributions to affordable housing from sites of 10 homes or fewer, overturning a previous ruling obtained by Reading and West Berkshire councils.  These small windfall sites, often redevelopment sites, are the sort that can make a significant – and generally uncontroversial – contribution to housing development in our towns and villages.  Excluding them means that councils are ever more reliant on the volume housebuilders to deliver their one affordable for every two market houses.

This in turn puts ever more pressure on councils to allow more market houses than are actually needed by the local population, leading to yet more second homes and an influx of retired folk whose social care costs later in life are met from local taxation, not from national taxation or by the areas in which they paid taxes when working.  Meanwhile, as the Revenue Support Grant is being squeezed out of existence its place is being taken by the New Homes Bonus, a shameless bribe to councils to build or lose out.

This all began in the 1980s when we largely stopped building council houses and loaded the cost of social housing onto homebuyers, who themselves are often struggling to afford the prices.  Landowners do nicely though, with three attempts since 1945 at capturing their heightened development value through taxation or public ownership overturned by the Tories and no fourth attempt in sight.

The point we have to hammer home is that you really do get what you vote for.  Cornwall elected the full set of six Tory MPs last year.  What did it expect to get in return?  Little victories like St Ives mean nothing if the one lot can still count on your vote ‘to keep the other lot out’.  Tory, Labour, LibDem.  All centralist and all rotten to the core.  So forget ‘the other lot’.  Be your own lot and deny them all the power to do your community lasting harm.

Wessexit

Of all the reasons for remaining in the EU the most compelling arises from quietly contemplating the alternative.  Being marooned on a small island run by Gove, Johnson and IDS is a chilling prospect.  It also smacks of betrayal of those elsewhere working for a better Europe.  The Danes in particular fear isolation without their sceptical British friends.  What needs testing – and testing hard – this month and next is the idea that Brexit would unleash a decentralist wave upon whose crest regionalists as much as eurosceptics will surf smoothly to success.

That was the idea dismissed this week in a front-page report in the Western Boring Views.  Mark Berrisford-Smith, head of economics for HSBC UK Commercial Banking, told regional business leaders in Plymouth that negotiations over Brexit, and associated economic uncertainties, could pre-occupy Government for years, delaying other decisions, with the decentralisation agenda being one item moved to the back burner.

Of course, ministers could clear their desks of unnecessary distractions by pressing ahead with that agenda right now, but that sort of trust has never existed between central and local government and no amount of crisis will create it.  Our diagnosis is that the sickness goes to the heart of the relationship.  Earning central government’s trust should be no part of local government’s job; central government should exist solely as the obedient servant of the localities that elect it and if it fails them it should expect to be abolished forthwith.  Wessexit.

So let’s not get too excited by the idea of devolution, Osborne-style.  It’s not what we’ve campaigned for all these years.  The Municipal Journal last week allowed Cllr George Nobbs, Leader of Norfolk County Council a page to share his frustration.  Beneath a photo of the East Anglian flag and the headline ‘Killing off devolution’, he wrote:

“There is no more enthusiastic proponent of regional devolution than myself.  I have supported the idea of moving powers from Whitehall to East Anglia all my adult life.  When on Budget day the Chancellor announced a draft deal for East Anglia I nailed my colours to the mast in the most literal way, flying the flag of East Anglia from Norfolk County Hall.  However, remarkably, the institutional arrogance of central government seems set to give us a deal that cannot be sold locally.  As it stands not one of the three counties that make up the ‘Eastern Powerhouse’ look likely to be able to sell the current deal to members or residents…

The current ‘devolution deal’ was the result of a knee-jerk reaction to the Scottish referendum result and bears no resemblance to any other form of devolution in the UK, other than the insistence on the office of a London-style mayor for rural England…

The office of elected mayor is fine for London but universally opposed in shire county England.  Senior government ministers have said time and time again that in the past devolution has failed because it was top-down.  They had learned, they said.  This would be bottom-up.  We could design our own deal.  We would be in the driving seat, they said.  When we urged them to consider any alternative to an elected mayor (because we couldn’t sell it to our citizens) they said it was non-negotiable.  ‘No mayor no deal’ was the answer.  They were not even prepared to consider changing the one word mayor for another title.”

First it was Prescott, now it’s Osborne.  You can have any colour of devolution you want as long as it’s black.  So black you can’t see what’s going on.  The mayoral model is non-negotiable because it’s part of a London-party consensus that values opaqueness above all.  The democratic model, taking decisions openly, in full view of the press and public, and transparently, subject to the forensic examination of political debate in council chamber or legislative assembly, is judged not fit for purpose.  End all the politics, we’re told.  Actions, not words.  But efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things, and without continual accountability it’s very easy both to do things wrong and to do the wrong things.

Next month, we’re told, we need to reject the unaccountable Brussels bureaucracy in favour of, well, what?  How is accountability unfolding here?  We need to put our own, British values first, apparently.  Values like privatising our schools and our NHS, transforming them into profit centres far beyond any hope of democratic redress.

We’ve been told many times that the dissolution of English political unity would be too high a price to pay for the benefits regionalism brings, even if the regions reflect deep-rooted identities like Wessex and East Anglia.  Yet the displacement of our historic shires by ‘Greater Lincolnshire’, ‘North Midlands’, ‘Tees Valley’ and other mayored innovations isn’t viewed as a problem.  (Nor is it viewed as part of the ‘euro-plot’, as would any attempt to give England the regional governments now standard across all large west European countries.)  As Ben Page, Chief Executive of Ipsos MORI, also writing in the Municipal Journal, noted, “The new rash of elected mayors for improbable geographies face some real challenges in getting noticed in any way at all.”   That’s just it though.  They’re not there to be noticed.  A revolution in how England is governed is now underway as secret deals are lined up for sign-off.  Personality mayors and commissioners for made-up areas will preside as local services are handed wholesale to global financial interests.

Do the public care?  According to Ben Page’s data they do.  Around half (49%) support the principle of decentralising local decision-making powers, with only 17% opposed.  There are two main worries that are shared by 58% of those who don’t support devolution.

One is the spectre of ‘postcode lottery’ – the fear that services would start to vary between areas to an unacceptable degree (though it’s surprisingly acceptable for the Irish or the French to have different standards).  Keeping the number of English regions well below double figures is one way to minimise this fear: the present hotch-potch of ‘improbable geographies’ is going to have to be sorted out sooner or later and the sooner the better.  Another way is to make devolution real, so that regional politicians cannot blame Whitehall if they fail to match the standards of the best.

The second worry is that politicians in the provinces aren’t up to the job and so can’t be trusted with real power.  That’s hardly surprising: real talent isn’t going to be attracted to run an ever-shrinking range of services subject to ever more intrusive interference from ministers and their civil servants anxious about poor performance.  Breaking that vicious circle is easy.  Tolerate responsibility through the ballot box, open up the opportunities and the talent will come.  Or, to be more accurate, it will stay exactly where it is and not be lured to London.

If being locked indoors with the Tories is the best reason for opposing Brexit then a good second is that the debate has been framed in terms of sovereignty instead of subsidiarity and on those terms Brexit poses an unacceptable risk.  That risk is that sovereignty regained will be sovereignty hoarded.  All Europe needs a debate on what can be done closer to the people than it is today.  Even if that means identifying things that are done too close to be done well – because there are some activities that can now only be effective on a scale beyond that of the classical nation-state.

It needs to be a European debate, not a British or English one, because only in the idea of a Europe of a Hundred Flags can small nations and historic regions achieve the recognition the nation-states are determined to deny us.  We hear a lot about how the EU is a malignant conspiracy to destroy those nation-states and their historic identities long-forged in good old-fashioned lethal conflict.  Michael Gove looks forward to ‘patriotic renewal’, while Jacques Attali fears another Franco-German war before the century is out.  Meanwhile, the British State for which we’re supposed to boldly patrify shows how much it really cares about our identity, turning our ancient shires, the roots of our democracy, into clone-zones of the metropolis and topping each with its own little Caesar.

Devo Min

There are quite a few bright spots for Wessex folk to cheer about in today’s budget – and not just a freeze on cider duty – but look beyond the headlines.  It’s good to see money for children’s A&E in Southampton, but isn’t the rest of the NHS on life support?  A “more resilient train line in the South West” (in other words, dealing with Dawlish) is backed, though this actually only extends to a feasibility study that’s currently stalled.  We mustn’t forget the “£20 million to help young families onto the housing ladder in the South West”, funded from the 3% stamp duty surcharge on additional properties.  Osborne says that’s a reward for good behaviour – “proof that when the South West votes blue, their voice is heard loud in Westminster” – but if we controlled our own resources and made our own decisions the cynical bribes wouldn’t be necessary.  With MPs in the South West still being urged to rebel over HS2, it seems they could do with more than a little regionalist help in turning up the volume.

We’ll be studying the financial detail before commenting further on those aspects that naturally fall within the Chancellor’s brief.  Meanwhile, we can comment at once on those that don’t but are there anyway.  ‘Devolution’, so called, can’t be taken seriously so long as it’s viewed as part of some national productivity campaign, no more than a footnote in the Government’s spending plans.  Constitutional change should be about democratic renewal, not the further empowerment of unaccountable business interests.  Are we happy too with the theft of our publicly funded schools in their entirety?  Theft it is, to nationalise the powers of a tier of government closer to the people, without its consent.  Where’s the referendum on that?

That’s why the devolution deals announced today are so pitiful.  If the local councils agree, there’ll be a Mayor for ‘Avon, Mk. II’, on top of the one Bristol already has, and despite the one Bath has just rejected.  Other parts of Wessex are still trying to line up their bids for more of the same.  In East Anglia, councils willing, there’ll be a Mayor too, heading the first region-wide elected administration in East Anglian history.  Like it or not, there won’t be a Mayor of Wessex.  Which is just as well.  We demand the open, transparent debate of a legislative assembly, like Wales or Scotland, not a behind-the-scenes fixer placed beyond accountability for a full four-year term.  The whole mayoral obsession is part of a failure to understand that London’s dominance over England is about the inter-regional distribution of political power, not the fact that it has a Boris and we don’t.

As with the North East referendum in 2004, what’s currently on offer may end up rejected locally as too little to bother with for the democratic and financial costs attached.  We’ve maintained a bold alternative that’s been rejected by all the London parties, essentially for the mortal sin of being ambitious in what we propose for Wessex.  All we need say in response is, where’s your vision then?  End the excuses, start rolling out REAL regional devolution, and do it now.

Exceeding Expectations

We’ve always enjoyed watching Mebyon Kernow’s progress and learning from what they get right, or very occasionally wrong.  Our association dates back to the 70s, when the founding generation of MK members was still at the helm.  It was the era of grainy, photocopied leaflets and duplicated magazines, produced in a political climate that is barely conceivable today.  British nationalism wasn’t the preserve of UKIP.  It was the mainstream consensus and any questioning of parliamentary sovereignty or cultural uniformity was treated to torrents of abuse.  Even Cornish nationalist arguments struggled to escape the confines of a unionist past, to cast off deference to the Duchy and loyalty to Liberalism.  A web of self-censorship was the accustomed response to an uncomprehending electorate.

The 80s saw a reaction against the colonels and the county set – with new policies that were radically Left-wing, but not exceptionally Cornish – amid great reluctance to accept that all parties, and all communities, have a Left and a Right.  Today MK has settled down to a synthesis that reflects where the wider world has got to.  Still radical, but more confident in asserting a Cornish dimension because Cornishness can now be much less defensive about itself.  The flag is flown widely, as Cornwall’s flag, no longer accused of being simply the flag of a political movement.  The language is used in schools, in local government offices and for tourism purposes, not so harrumphingly derided as a sign of deliberate division at odds with a gloriously united kingdom.  This year saw it praised by folk as diverse as comedian Ed Rowe and poet Benjamin Zephaniah.  Cornwall is changing, because peripheral Britain is changing and becoming a place more at ease with itself.

There’s one very big problem though.  Cultural confidence hasn’t led to political confidence and without that Cornwall continues to be subject to colonial-style government, both externally in terms of powers denied and internally in terms of aspirations curbed.  All of that is evident in the feeble ‘Devolution Deal’ its political and business elites have been handed by the London regime.  MK Leader Dick Cole commented that “From our perspective, it is not ‘democratic’ to give more influence to unelected bodies with limited democratic legitimacy such as the Local Enterprise Partnership, and it is also extremely disappointing that Cornwall has failed to secure any new powers over planning or housing.” 

The London regime remains adamant that devolved powers are only available to those areas willing to give 100% support to its own objectives.  One of these is de-democratisation – handing powers to unelected bodies and replacing what democratic debate does exist with elected mayors and fewer councillors.  Another is the whole ‘turn your environment into cash’ scam of growth and development.  Devolving only the power to lock yourself in to someone else’s vision would cause riots in Scotland or Wales.  So why are there none in Cornwall or the English regions?

To be fair, these things do take decades to reach fruition.  It took Wessex 40 years to go from first steps to legal recognition of our flag.  It will take a while yet for politics to pass from the hands of a generation that can’t see the point of what we’re about (or even views it as dangerous) to one that can’t see why we should wait any longer.  That’s why, in Gramscian terms, achieving cultural hegemony is so important: it makes political change easier, to some extent automatic, while without it political success can only be ephemeral.

The current issue of Cornish Nation reports on the defection to MK of Michael Bunney, a much-respected member of the Labour Party and former county councillor.  In a statement to the media, Michael said: “After 22 years of membership of the Labour Party, and having been a parliamentary candidate, I have taken the decision to leave Labour and join MK…  In so many areas of policy, the one-size-fits-all approach from London has damaged Cornwall.  Planning policy is ruining our beautiful landscape.  House building targets are enforced on us by Westminster and yet there still aren’t houses for local people and the Government prevents Cornwall from tackling the problems of second homes.  Economic policy has enforced cuts in Cornwall, while vast sums are spent on infrastructure projects elsewhere, such as HS2…  MK exists to represent all the people of Cornwall, whether they were born here or have chosen to make our beautiful Duchy their home.  I believe it is time for a new generation to join the campaign for Cornwall and that only MK can unite all people in working for the best interests of our local communities.”

Those east of the Tamar may well be asking how they too can have some of this.  Where can they find a political party that is open to new ideas benefitting the place where they live and the people who live there?  As far as the shires of Wessex are concerned, they need look no further.  We’re here for them all, to be for Wessex no less than what MK strives to be for Cornwall.

Infra Digging

Public opinion remains divided over the wisdom of bombing Syria.  Much less so than the House of Commons, which this week allowed the red mist of ‘hitting evil hard’ to out-vote reasonable doubts over what military action can achieve without a lasting political solution in sight.  Who benefits, besides the suppliers of Brimstone missiles at £183,000 apiece and those who eventually win the contracts to rebuild a country’s shattered infrastructure?

There’s something quaintly 20th century about the UK joining the aerial posse over Syria when the evidence is that the Paris attacks were planned from within Europe.  And funded from where?  It could be anywhere.  Which means that foreign policy alone cannot guarantee home security.  BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday broadcast a documentary on the threats posed by growing reliance on the Internet.  With hackers becoming ever more sophisticated, cyber war is joining nuclear war in the thinking of those whose job it is to predict and avoid catastrophes.  Hackers who gain even temporary control of a national power grid could do real damage by overloading critical equipment that can take two years or more to repair.  And where there is chaos there are casualties too.

Austerity and resilience make bad bedfellows.  Cost pressures are driving the transition to ‘digital-by-default’.  But digital-by-default is a fair weather system.  Rip out the back-up, rely on microwave signals, not copper wire, computer programs, not manual valves and paper manuals.  Then cope with a real crisis.  It’s not just about the back-up technology.  It’s about retaining the skills you need to operate it.  From the floods of 2014 to Fukushima, it’s still knowing what levers to pull when the screens go dark that makes all the difference.

Britain has a great deal of ageing infrastructure.  There’s a real drive on right now to upgrade it.  But it’s not just about running to stand still.  UK population is still rocketing, while the increasing frequency of extreme weather events means that previous standards of protection simply aren’t good enough.  So far, not so good.  The UK, the world’s fifth largest economy, was this year ranked 27th by the World Economic Forum when it comes to delivering quality infrastructure.  So critical is this problem that governments stripped bare by privatisation are turning to global investors to fund it, even ones about whom there are entirely reasonable security concerns.  That’s a measure of how far governments of all parties have abandoned their primary responsibility to uphold our way of life.  The investment being sought is competing for cash with other parts of Europe.  Is there scope for better co-ordination?  Much of the continent thinks so and while the UK is agonising over Brexit, they’re pushing ahead.

Let’s assume that the UK gets the investment it wants.  Now, who gets that investment next?  Where does the Middle Eastern and East Asian capital all end up?  What are the new national priorities?  The Conservatives have set up the National Infrastructure Commission, headed by ex-Labour man Andrew Adonis, to answer those questions.  We can be sure of two things.

One is that London will receive vastly more than its fair share.  We’ve shown before the extent to which this happens.  The reason it happens is that the nations and regions outside London fail to elect sufficient nationalist and regionalist MPs to stop it.  It’s that simple.  Any provincial representative of the London parties can be easily bullied into voting more cash for the capital.  Because we all benefit from London’s prosperity, don’t we?  Because the ‘experts’ tell us it’s the best possible value for money, don’t they?  Because we’re all in it together, aren’t we?  As long as it’s public spending, Labour can’t think of a single reason to fault it.

The other certainty is that any regional dimension will be skewed in London’s favour.  This is a well-established principle seen in other centralised European countries.  In France, spending on motorways and high-speed railways has been designed to reinforce the Parisian view of France, linking cities deemed to be within the same official region, while ignoring links across those boundaries.  Brittany’s historic capital, Nantes is tied more tightly to other cities within the artificial ‘Loire Country’ region than it is to the rest of historic Brittany.  Rennes, capital of the administrative region of Brittany, has better links to Paris than it does to Nantes.  (Those who understand French can read more in a book called Bretagne et Grand Ouest by Pierre-Yves Le Rhun.)

Within the confines of still-inadequate devolution, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales have all developed national plans with a significant infrastructure component.  With devolution bedded-in, each has now reached at least its third round of plan-making.  England has no equivalent, national or regional, though the UK Government has what it calls a National Infrastructure Plan, in fact just a list of big projects taken out of context.  Powerful interests insist that only local clubs of councils, in theory equal partners in city ‘deals’ with the London regime but in practice wholly under its thumb, can plug the gap.  This is plain wrong, for three reasons.

Firstly, because its approach to place is wrong.  The emphasis on functional economic areas, the cities-first agenda of combined authorities and metro mayors, flies on the rhetoric of globalisation and the irrelevance of broad territory.  Equally though, it flies in the face of the fact that cities are not islands but depend for much of their life-support on those broad territories that the anti-regionalist consensus would like to ignore.  The places where you’ll find the water-gathering grounds, the power stations and the landfill sites.  Mayors-for-all is a timid retreat from real devolution, failing to provide joined-up government at the regional scale, the scale at which meaningful links can be made between the major infrastructure providers.  Highways England plan roads.  Network Rail plan railways.  So who’s planning transport?  No-one knows how much wealth is wasted by the silo mentality prevalent among the utilities.  These are companies set up to milk public services for private profit.  Poorly equipped regulators make matters worse because their remit is protecting the consumer from exploitation by natural monopolies.  It isn’t the wider public interest, so utilities are, for example, prevented from funding investment ahead of demand (but are allowed to use their own, unco-ordinated projections of what it will be).  Different aspects of a single scheme – like the new reservoir at Cheddar – get split between different control periods and held up accordingly.  None of this would be necessary if powerful regional assemblies ran the public utilities and decided their own priorities.

Secondly, because its approach to time is wrong.  There is much more to survival than economics, and getting cities fit to compete in a global economic system heavily dependent on oil.  In building sustainable regions it’s paramount that we build for the future, for how the world will be and not for how it is.  That means a process of infrastructure planning driven by long-term political campaigning, not short-term economic speculation.  It means building (or rebuilding) things like north-south rail links in Wales and Wessex, or improving those that run east-west across the Pennines.  These are schemes that struggle to pass any conventional cost-benefit test because that conventional analysis is weighted so as to reinforce the status quo.  One reason why such a huge amount of transport funding goes to London is that savings in travel time count as economic benefits of a scheme that can then be quantified in terms of the travellers’ incomes.  The more highly-paid the travellers, the greater the benefit assumed.  As taxpayers, we fund things like the London weighting allowance that drive up those incomes, and this in turn helps attract more public spending.  Low-wage areas are starved of transport investment because workers’ time is not valuable enough to tip the cost-benefit scales in their favour.  Decision-making needs to pay less attention to the biased outputs of computer modelling and get assertively political instead.

Finally, because its approach to people is wrong.  The devolution ‘deals’ are characterised by next-to-no public involvement.  The various closed-door Leaders’ Boards, Enterprise Partnerships and what-have-you that come and go exist in the legal shadows, inspiring no confidence either in their own permanence as entities of local governance or in the stability of the strategies they devise.  That’s no way to attract long-term investment or to act as the credible equal of the UK State.  And accountability?  The best you’ll get is to vote once every four years for a mayor you never asked to have.  The result is likely to be very low turnouts that undermine any claim to political legitimacy for the new single voice of the area.  It’s sad but true that the only reason to vote at all will be to keep out the candidate most likely to ignore the public and abuse the power to spend your money on his or her personal preferences.

With investment decisions now being planned that will shape our society for the next 30 to 50 years, strong regional voices are more important than ever.  We should remember that the regional dimension in England is closely related to questions of resilience.  In both world wars, regional structures were central to civil defence (and in between for organising the Government response to the 1926 General Strike).  The regions in use today – the boring zones still being touted as the only possible basis for elected assemblies – trace their administrative roots to the areas for which Regional Commissioners were appointed in 1939.  In the event of invasion, with London captured or destroyed, these men would have assumed all civil powers within their regions.  In Wessex, those men were, in the west, General Sir Hugh Elles, briefly replaced by Sir Geoffrey Peto, and in the east Harold Butler, later replaced by Sir Harry Haig.  Familiar names, no doubt, to those who needed to know.  An article in The Political Quarterly in 1941 commented that: “At last we have established regionalism, after much discussion and excessive delay.  But the experiment in regional government represented by the Regional Commissioners is utterly different from the kind of institution which was the subject of so much advocacy and controversy during the past three or four decades.”  It wasn’t the last time that principled regionalists would be disappointed by chronic imagination-failure in the corridors of power.

So it’s no surprise to see renewed calls for regions to take the lead in identifying their infrastructure needs.  In our previous post, we referred to Surveyor magazine’s coverage of local devolution.  Plans are already in place to develop Transport for the North into a statutory body by 2017.  The Midlands Connect Partnership is developing similar ambitions.  Andrew Pritchard of East Midlands Councils told Surveyor that the Government’s agenda is “having an impact on the way we do things.  We recognise if we are to compete for funding we have to take a more collaborative approach.”  This need not be limited to transport: Martin Tugwell of the Chartered Institution of Highways & Transport told the magazine that he welcomed the move to regional transport planning and said it should also extend to other infrastructure such as digital, energy supply and distribution and water networks.  Flood risk and waste management might be thought useful additions to that list.

With sufficiently determined regional leadership, this is an agenda that can be wrested out of the hands of the London regime.  If not, we shall see more London-oriented investment, packaged as ‘helping’ the regions plug in to what they need while in fact adding to what has colourfully been called London’s ‘vampiric suction’.  It can be done.  We just need a new set of MPs: they’re the obsolete infrastructure we really need to replace.

Gearing Up

Surveyor is the magazine for highways and transport professionals.  This month’s issue is headlined ‘Return of the Regions’ and opens to reveal an editorial by Dominic Browne, and more besides.  The editorial starts as follows:

“In January of this year the Department for Transport (DfT) launched a small (by government standards) pilot competition for local authorities to find ‘total transport’ solutions in rural and isolated communities.

To some this may have seemed fairly innocuous; a scrambled attempt to cover ground in local services left barren by revenue cuts.  Yet the guidance for bidders contained a line that appeared to herald something more than spin, smoke and mirrors; something that looked like an honest appeal.

‘Service integration has not been attempted on any scale up to now, so the essential first step is for local authorities to work out how to go about it.’

Events this month, where we have seen the wheel of public reform turn once more, recalled this line.

When the coalition government first came into power, the word regional was banned.  Localism was the new watchword.  This month saw the concept of regionalism bloom again.  Across the North and the Midlands two major bodies built of local authorities are ready to take on statutory powers for regional transport planning.  While in the West Country, Surveyor has been told there is an ‘aspiration for more formalised regional control of transport’.

Further south, we see major sub-regional groups developing.  In the East Midlands we have the two great communities of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire planning a joint combined authority and in ‘England’s Economic Heartland’ of Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, we have an integrated total transport plan blossoming that, in its conception, actually pre-dates the DfT’s competition.

Some of this goes back to traditional English regionalism.  The North, and to a lesser extent the Midlands, have always been comfortable seeing themselves as individual cultural entities, while some even still see Cornwall, another beneficiary of recent devolution, as a country in itself.  In the south, where demarcation is more of an economic issue, sub-regional transport planning may be more practical.  The capital of course, effectively a region in itself, already has the might of Transport for London working for it…”

Poor old South.  The devil’s in the demarcation, isn’t it?  Boundaries may be fuzzy but we know where the North and the Midlands are.  We might even be able to point out East Anglia, another traditional entity but now one sadly subsumed into the ‘East of England’ Prescott zone, where it rubs shoulders with north London.  But the South?  And the West?  Here it gets confused.

In 1919 Professor C.B. Fawcett published a famous, not to say infamous, work entitled Provinces of England: A Study of Some Geographical Aspects of Devolution.  It included a map of 12 provinces, defined by physical features and ignoring county boundaries.  The only nod to history was the re-use of certain names as labels of convenience.  Cornwall and Devon were combined as the ‘Devon Province’.  The ‘Wessex Province’ comprised no more than the Solent basin.  In between was an area stretching from the Wye valley to the English Channel, grouped as the ‘Bristol Province’.  Fawcett explained its name as follows:

“Round Bristol the popular regional name has been ‘West of England’ or ‘West Country’.  But our Bristol Province has no better claim to the name ‘West of England’ than the West Midland Province has, and a less claim than could be made on behalf of Devon; while the term ‘West Country’ has different local meanings from north to south of England – in Durham and Northumberland it refers to Cumberland and Westmorland.”

Generations of the more materialist regionalists have praised the prof for his objectivity and lack of sentiment.  Most fail to comment on the fact that in 1942 Fawcett revised his map, now with 11 provinces, several minor and some major boundary changes, plus a couple of name changes while he was about it.  Surely unassailable objective reality ought not to be that malleable?

Cultural geography is about people and the place they call home.  It picks up where physical geography leaves off and it’s what’s rightly central to any discussion about English regionalism from below.  It’s because that voice from below is so often suppressed that we have this difficulty with demarcation down south.  It’s why we’re assured that it’s absolutely all about economics, and the functional parameters of accommodating and responding to growth, and not at all about culture.

Is Cornwall part of the ‘West Country’?  For a Cornishman, the west starts at Truro and carries on to the Isles of Scilly.  Cornwall has the Cornish Riviera.  Devon has the English Riviera.  You might think the penny of national separation would have dropped by now.  So if England’s West Country extends no further west than the Tamar, how far east does it go?  According to a recent study of regional accents by YouGov, no further than Somerset.  Not even as far as Brisawl, me lover.

The ‘West Country’ is a slippery term because it’s defined by those living to the east of it.  It’s what’s down west from London and as London’s sphere of influence grows so the West Country shrinks.  Between the wars it was still possible to describe Berkshire, Hampshire, Wiltshire and Dorset as the ‘Middle West’ (the reference is from Lovely Britain, edited by Mais and Stephenson), somewhere too far west to be the Home Counties and not west enough to be the real West Country.

Wessex today is split west-east – between the ‘South West’ and ‘South East’ Prescott zones – but another line would be north-west / south-east.  Even in the days of our independence we had Wessex west of Selwood and Wessex east of Selwood, the diocese of Sherborne and the diocese of Winchester.  As with the Highland / Lowland line in Scotland, our geography has shaped our history, creating divisions for others to exploit if they will.  Whereas a self-governing region could work to strengthen the lines of communication that bind us together, the priorities of the London regime for centuries have been to follow the lines of least resistance, the tentacles that reach into deepest Wessex.  There’s the Bath Road, the Kennet & Avon Canal, the Great Western Railway and the M4 going to the west; the Portsmouth Road, the London & South Western Railway and the M3 going to the south.  Or so it’s presented.  The reality is that of travel in the opposite direction, for these are not primarily the bonds of a resilient and self-confident region.  They’re the great veins along which our region’s tribute flows up to London, never to be seen again.

The demarcation problem in ‘the South’ is insoluble so long as London is allowed to dominate.  The North and the Midlands aspire to break free of London and they have the distance and the spirit to make it so whenever they choose.  As Surveyor’s editorial notes, the South may be tending to see its future solely in terms of sub-regions, satellites submissive to the will of the Great Wen, not defined, as others are, in resistance to it.  So long as that’s the case then it deserves the environmental and social catastrophe that’s heading towards it as London overspill eyes its fields.

It doesn’t have to be that way though.  Wessex has a flag, Wessex has a patron saint, Wessex has its own, much abused dialect.  We have as much right as any Mercian or Northumbrian to govern ourselves.  In so far as we’re on London’s doorstep, our culture in the front line facing the steamroller, we have a stronger and more urgent case than they do.

Our first priority, naturally, is to jettison the idea of the ‘West Country’, a concept far too flexible for its own good.  Wessex is an alternative name that retains the idea of being placed geographically to the west of London.  It does so without the notions of ineradicable inferiority, mental dumbness and infinite recession into peninsular twilight that have characterised a view of the ‘West Country’ handed down from above.  One busy lopping off our eastern shires one by one.

Time to stand, men of the west.  And then push back.

Mercia on the Move?

Yesterday our President and Secretary-General travelled to Stafford to attend a meeting of the Acting Witan of Mercia.

The Acting Witan arose out of a group called the Mercia Movement, who researched and published as The Mercia Manifesto their vision of an autonomous and sustainable bioregion in the English Midlands.  In 2001 this led to the calling of a widely publicised Mercian Constitutional Convention to debate a draft constitution for the region.  The Convention worked patiently and good-humouredly for many months to agree a constitution.  Its efforts culminated in a declaration of independence read out in front of the Birmingham Council House on Mercian Independence Day, 29th May 2003.  Those who wished to remain active in campaigning for de facto self-government constituted themselves as the Acting Witan and have continued to lead political regionalism in Mercia.

At one level this may all sound like play-acting, the Government-of-Mercia-in-Internal-Exile.  In fact, relentless legitimacy is remarkably powerful in its ability to put the London regime on the spot.  The Acting Witan has signed up over 2,000 people as registered citizens of Mercia.  How many citizens does the UK have?  None, is the answer, only subjects of a Norman Crown.  How good does that look in comparison?  The Witan’s Convener, Jeff Kent, has succeeded in having himself removed from the electoral register on the grounds that he’s a Mercian, not British citizen.  Bureaucracy has no way of knowing how to respond to the unexpected and so eventually gives in.  We were told of correspondence with the London regime in which civil servants are being backed into a corner until they ultimately accept the role being written for them, as the UK’s appointed negotiators over the formal transference of power to Mercia.

Meanwhile, Mercian consciousness is growing, thanks to helpful events like the discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard.  We were shown letters from successive Leaders of Stoke-on-Trent City Council looking forward to working with the Acting Witan in promoting Mercian culture.  Plans include a Mercia Day, which Stoke acknowledges will need to be co-ordinated with other local authorities across the region.

One reason perhaps why regionalism is rushing up the agenda, driven this time from outside the London parties, is the size of the gap between what those parties laughingly call ‘devolution’ and what the term actually implies.  While Scotland has a First Minister accountable to Scotland’s parliament, the regions of England are to be reorganised into arbitrary areas headed by elected mayors that no-one asked for.  And accountable?  Oh yes, once every four years, and in the meantime free to strut about like Mussolini to conceal their lack of real power.  Patience with London’s lies is wearing thin.

Natural and human systems often have a weak point that is an aspect of their greatest strength.  The London regime’s greatest strength is its antiquity, and its weak point is the ultimately unlawful nature of that, namely, the Crown stolen at Hastings.  The Acting Witan plans, when its resources allow, to set up a regional court to try establishment figures for numerous crimes against the land and people of Mercia.  Seats in the public gallery can be expected to go very early that day!

Our relations with the Acting Witan have always been exceptionally good.  Both our movements recognise that the other is trying out an experiment to see if it works.  Ours is to see if an English regionalist party can follow the electoral path to success that the Celtic nationalist parties have mapped out.  The Mercian road to regionalism seeks instead to re-invent politics itself from the bottom up.  It’s not a race, but we both hope to learn whatever we can from the experiences of the other.

WR started earlier, in a blaze of publicity in 1974, and have managed largely to avoid splits and splinters.  Mercia has not fared so well, with a galaxy of often tiny groups claiming to speak for the region, sometimes reacting to the discovery of the others by refusing to work with them.  It could be a parody of Monty Python’s Life of Brian: the Mercian People’s Front versus the People’s Front of Mercia.  From what we observed yesterday, that seems to be on the point of changing.  The ground has been cleared.  Now the time to plant has come.

Izzy, Whizzy, Let’s Get Bizzy

Or maybe 'Ozzy, Wheezy'.  What is the sound of one hand clapping?  George Osborne ought to know, following his announcement this week that business rates will be ‘devolved’ to local councils, along with the one-directional power to lower them.  Osborne’s understanding of devolution is that it’s that degree of autonomy that allows others to take the same decisions as the London regime would take anyway, given the opportunity.  And nothing more.  Devolution in an era of spending cuts is in effect an invitation to self-mutilation if associated radical changes are all ruled out.  Labour, of course, are happy to do what it takes to preserve their hereditary power.  And will surely agree that local government shouldn’t be allowed to have policies that central government disagrees with.

Osborne described the move as “the biggest transfer of power to our local government in living memory".  So it is, for those whose memory extends no further back than 1990, when the Thatcher government, as part of its poll tax legislation, nationalised business rates, before which they had been set locally for centuries.  For Thatcher, this counter-revolution against democracy was entirely justified, to prevent representatives elected locally raising the money locally to do locally what they’d been elected to do.  To say that hard-Left Labour councils weren’t as democratic as they claimed to be was a fair point, but one that could easily have been corrected by moving to proportional representation.  Now that would have been a radical change.  One that would have permanently denied the Tories a majority at Westminster level too.

Not that the Tories have ever been that keen on local democracy, given that collective decision-making is prima facie socialist.  But just fine if it involves awarding public sector contracts to national or global business chains with no long-term commitment to the area.  When council services do fail, the answer should be to let elections sort things out, as we do when promises made nationally are broken.  Not for the Tories, who’d rather undermine, then seize and privatise.  Very localist that.  With that kind of encouragement, don’t be at all surprised if the calibre of local councillors isn’t what it was.

There’s a theme developing.  Labour offered ‘regionalism’ that was nothing of the sort.  The Tories offered ‘localism’ that was nothing of the sort.  And now we have ‘devolution’.  Which is…?  Well, usually understood as involving directly elected national or regional assemblies, able to take over whole swaths of Whitehall power, leaving most of Osborne’s Cabinet colleagues redundant.  Not the creation of a condition of national amnesia in which the return of recently stolen powers, with strings attached, can be hailed as ground-breaking generosity.  That’s quite some conjuring trick and the sad fact is that so many supposedly intelligent and well-read folk will fall for it.  The proof of that is that they continue to vote for the London parties that all offer only marginally different versions of the same sleight of hand.

The law of the political jungle being to define or be defined, it’s only natural that the London regime should wish to colonise the language of its enemies.  Words like ‘regionalism’ and ‘localism’ can be chewed up and spat out, but only if we deferentially accept the regime’s right to define them for us.

When John Prescott made a mess of regionalism, there were those urging us to find new conceptual ground, untainted by failure.  ‘Provincialism’, perhaps, or maybe ‘areaism’.  It’s an easy thing to do and the wrong thing.  Those who retreat in the face of adversity show only their unfitness for public office.  Those who see only a debate about the internal administrative nomenclature of England don’t see that the Europe of regions is about bigger issues in an unstable world.  (‘Provincialism’ doesn’t work in that context, where provinces are the county-sized units into which Belgian, Italian and Spanish regions are sub-divided.)  Those who think that a little local set-back in the North East referendum of 2004 marks the end of the road don’t see the historical timescale over which devolutionary issues unfold, and have always unfolded.  Generations come and go but the battle over power’s location continues.

So when Osborne attempts to present his nannying of local democracy as a ‘devolution revolution’ we don’t just have the right to say ‘hands off a word that means much more than you can imagine’.  We have the duty to do so too.  The current issue of Plaid Cymru’s magazine, The Welsh Nation, describes Welsh political life today as ‘post-nationalist’.  Did we miss something?  Enough of this nonsense!  Let’s not vote for parties who don’t know what they stand for and therefore can’t be trusted to stick to it.  Let’s leave the conjuring tricks to the Blairites and supplant a dishonest past that’s over-run its allotted hour.

The Founding Fixers

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.