England's northern towns need real power [View all]
... 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
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