England's northern towns need real power

[Ghost Dog]

... When they finally noticed the discontent raging in places like this, people with power assumed it could be put right using money. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did it through welfare payments. Even now, as she flails around over Brexit, Theresa May wants to do it through a billion-pound bribe to former mining towns. I propose putting it right by giving them power. What’s missing is the power to take decisions about the most important things in their lives: whether a local hospital should close; how often the bins should be emptied; whether a school should be under the control of the local authority or a faceless corporation; where the infrastructure should go that might – just might- attract investment in something other than vape shops and slave-driving sports-goods empires.

What form of constitutional change is best suited to delivering power to English towns such as Wigan? In this part of England – which has seen power drain towards London, wealth flow upwards into the hands of asset holders and technological change driven mainly from abroad – we are going to need something close to regime change to flatten the socio-economic divide between north and south.

The first building block has to be a national industrial strategy. The government claims to have one in the “northern powerhouse”. But in large parts of the actual north, the phrase is regarded as a sick joke. And that’s because there is not really a strategy – only a document setting out vague aspirations. Meanwhile, the “industrial strategy council”, headed by the Bank of England’s visionary chief economist Andy Haldane, is a club of powerless retreads from the era of Blair and David Cameron. All talk of a Green New Deal remains just that. Because there is no intention at the heart of government to use its power to coerce and shape private investment to deliver lasting change and revive the north.

Right now, all 38 of England’s local enterprise partnerships (LEPs) are pointlessly competing with each other to become high-tech hubs in the industries favoured by the government, wasting time and energy. Some even overlap. The perverse result is that nowhere is really allowed to emerge as a power centre beyond London. In the north-west, for example, there are no fewer than four LEPs covering the urban space west of the Pennines, between Crewe, Liverpool, Manchester and Preston. Turf wars have broken out, and as someone who spent their youth traipsing between the rugby league grounds and nightclubs of these towns, I understand why. North-west England has intense local cultures, with enmities stretching from the English civil war to the English Premier League...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/09/england-northern-towns-power-may

[PSPS]

1. Putin couldn't have written this better himself.

UK version of "states' rights." Dismantle national government. Blah, blah. Fortunately, the UK has a parliamentary system. Otherwise, this silly path could lead to the situation where tiny villages like Wigan would have a de-facto veto power over national policy despite their insignificant portion of the country's population (something the US has been saddled with forever.)

[Denzil_DC]

3. In the UK, we call it devolution. Invoking Putin and calling it a "silly path" is, well, silly.

It's been in operation in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland for quite some time. We also have city mayoralties in some places in England with devolved powers, and part of what Mason's calling for is an increase in those powers to fulfil local needs to match the devolution in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. It's sometimes called federalism.

Mason's right. The UK is too London/Westminster-centric, and areas far from that power base have fared badly, which is part of what fueled Brexit.

In the EU, the principle is known as subsidiarity. It's functioned well enough over the years. Certainly, the problems that beset European countries can't traced to devolving power away from centres of government.

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. Nothing like "Putin". Thatcher was a major centralizer of power, and the country hasn't recovered

completely. London (ie the city, not the Westminster parliament or civil service Whitehall) got its power back, and as Mason says, it's doing better. Devolution to Scotland and Wales has helped (Northern Ireland is a special case).

But cities (or large towns like Wigan - the "tiny village" has a population of 100,000, and the borough 300,000) can have very little control over all sorts of things that most countries do have local control of - and councils and areas often just get played off one another in a game of "chase the central government grant for implementing the latest favoured way of doing something", because their standard budgets are so restricted.

[T_i_B]

6. Also worth remembering what happened to the economy in that time

During the Thatcher era the British economy moved away from manufacturing towards financial services, which benefitted the South East of England over the North with a number of knock on effects.

[msongs]

2. sounds like those areas are tribal and that's not such a good strategy these days nt

[T_i_B]

4. Tribalism is part of human nature everywhere

Last edited Fri May 10, 2019, 03:59 PM - Edit history (1)

However, as someone who lives in a Northern City and has previously lived in the Home Counties and an (admittedly gentrifying) old coal mining area, I can assure you that for the most part Northern Cities are nowhere near as bad for political tribalism as elsewhere in Britain. I used to live down in Essex for example and much of Essex is tribally right wing.

Tribalism has become a major factor in British politics of late. And it's had an entirely negative effect. Too many people out there voting on the basis of spitefulness towards other groups in society instead of who has the best policies.