A Bonfire? We have just the Guy.

Seems like a nice Guy...click here

November 10, 2004
The Times
Power to the people!
Make a bonfire of GONE, VONNE, CURDS and BECON
Simon Jenkins

LAST MONTH Vladimir Putin said that in future he and not Russia’s electors would choose their regional government. The news was deplored worldwide as a step towards autocracy.

This week John Prescott said he would do the same in England.

The news was greeted with a yawn. It was just boring British centralism. The autocracy is identical.

Labour’s stunning five-to-one defeat in the North East regional referendum last week ranks as the most misreported event of the year. Mr Prescott had promised he would not go ahead with his plan for regional government in England if he lost. He broke that promise. He is going ahead with it. The only difference is that he will punish Northumbria’s peasantry for giving him a bloody nose by leaving them no say in the matter. He will rule them from his Newcastle citadel but with no local control over his satrap, Jonathan Blackie. He will appoint his own regional board. It is pure Putin.To do Mr Prescott justice he did not want it this way. He did once believe in giving England something like the modest self-government allowed to the Scots. In the event he offered nothing of the sort, a mere consultative poodle. The saboteur was Gordon Brown. By ensuring that the regional assembly would have no power, no taxing authority and remain under the cosh of Whitehall targets, Mr Brown left Mr Prescott no answer to the question, “What is the point?” He also told local people that a “yes” vote would eliminate the counties of Northumberland and Durham or, if not, all their borough councils. He was offering less democracy not more, and at higher cost.

The North East, indeed the rest of England, will now see Mr Prescott’s revenge. The Government’s Office for the North East website (ironically acronymed GONE) shows that housing, planning, education, transport, health, economic development, all one-time local government functions, are now the job of regional officials. Mr Prescott’s board, substitute for the assembly, is called One North-East, another jeer at the localists.This is all such a Blairite parody that I thought the website might be satirical. It is a miasma of Strategy Cascades, Policy Implementation Frameworks and Regional Image Initiatives. North Easterners may think they voted against another tier of bureaucracy but they were fooled. They are silent subjects not just of GONE and ONE but of the impenetrable CURDS, ENCAMS, SHINE, BECON, VONNE and dreaded NorthSTAR. It is as if the Vikings were back.

Some regional agencies have even opened “embassies” in Brussels, Tokyo, Paris and Chicago.

These are children playing with expensive toys. So much for Mr Prescott’s pledge.The rejection of the North East assembly is a gift to Whitehall. If the people of the North East reject even a paltry voice in their local government, say ministers, why bother with local democracy at all? Tony Blair’s Sedgefield voted against his plan by 23,583 to 9,040. His response is not perhaps to offer more proper democracy for the putative referendums in Yorkshire and the North West, but less. He gives the Bourbon reply, “l’état c’est moi”.

I have a proposal for Mr Prescott (set out in a pamphlet published by Policy Exchange this week*). It would rescue his enthusiasm for devolution. It would turn the tables on his nemesis, Mr Brown, and it would be the democratic thing to do. Rather than offer the people of England a rubber stamp on regional officialdom, offer them true localism. Offer them the same participatory democracy now enjoyed by citizens in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Scandinavia and, for that matter, America. Offer them local government as practised throughout the free world, not the garbage served up to the Geordies last week.

Mr Prescott should plan a democratic “big bang” similar to that which revolutionised the City of London in October 1986. Then the City went from an introverted, cabalistic club, not unlike many English councils, to emphatically the premier financial centre in Europe. Markets were deregulated. Competition was freed. Frankfurt and Brussels were stopped in their tracks. The revolution merely took courage from Margaret Thatcher.

Almost all Europe’s governments realised back in the 1970s that they were overcentralised.

Formal devolution was introduced in France in 1982, Sweden in 1984, Spain in 1992 and Italy in 1993. Reforms handed most public services to provincial, municipal and communal councils, including housing, schools, public buildings and hospitals. Denmark, which decentralised in 1970, now runs one of the best hospital services in Europe, under the aegis of counties the same size as in England. The hospitals are the least costly, most efficient and most “popular” in Europe. When I told an NHS official this, he simply refused to believe counties could do such a thing.This is not about kicking a few bureaucrats out to regional offices. It involves forcefully restoring discretion and decision to communities, warts and all.

A recent Whitehall study of Swedish devolution showed that some variation in service quality (Britain’s “postcode lottery”) is not an issue provided local politicians are clearly responsible. Accountability must be decentralised with power.

Almost all Europeans now vote for local mayors and for two or three tiers of local government. The quality of most continental town centres shows the resultant civic pride. In France there is an elected official for every 116 electors, in Germany one for every 250. Britain’s “accountability gap” offers one for 2,600. Most Europeans can name who is in charge of their municipal services. Few Britons can. Small wonder Europe’s election turnouts are twice the size of Britain’s, while Britain declares the lowest satisfaction with public services in Europe. The British way does not work.

Mr Prescott should not reorganise local government yet again. He should leave local government to the cities, counties and parishes that reflect local loyalty and thus political identity. A Cornishman is a Cornishman, not a South Westerner; a Mancunian a Mancunian, not a North Westerner. Nor is size an issue. If Latvia and Luxembourg are big enough to govern themselves, why not the bigger Manchester and Kent? France’s mairies and Scandinavia’s “free communes” show that even the smallest political entity can deliver services if contracts and lines of responsibility are clear.All Mr Prescott needs to do is withdraw Whitehall interference.

Gradualism will never work. Localism needs a “big bang”. Mr Prescott should announce a bonfire of bumf in every community, a conflagration of targets and circulars like the Tory bonfire of controls in 1951. Teachers, doctors, farmers, small businesses should bring their red tape by the barrowload and burn the lot. Rural parishes and municipalities should be told to maintain their own primary schools, plan their environs, staff their clinics and raise at least some of the taxes to pay for them. Counties and cities should be given back the hospitals, secondary schools and police they ran before Whitehall seized and bureaucratised them.No, it would not all be popular. There would be losers as well as winners, corruption and some waste, as in every reform. But I repeat, local government works better when locally accountable. The London media may ridicule local politicians and “monkey mayors”. But there is no reason for Britain to be uniquely undemocratic. Only when responsibility is given to local citizens will citizens take it seriously. The Government’s best, if half-hearted, reform of elected mayors has been a surprising success.

If Mr Prescott can force regional government on England, why not force civic democracy by insisting on elected mayors? Mr Blair must now be reeling from his Northumbrian rebellion. He and Mr Brown are dyed-in-the-wool centralists. But Mr Prescott? I cannot believe he has much time for Whitehall’s “men in suits”. Behind that gruff exterior a democrat must be lurking somewhere? He has suffered a rebuff, but it was a rebuff not for him but for his control-freak colleagues. It was a vote not for apathy but against cynicism.So seize the moment, Mr Prescott. Go for a localist big bang. Liberate the little platoons. Why ape Mr Putin when you could be the hero of democracy and bring to Britain the true devolution that has worked across Europe?

*Big Bang Localism: A Rescue Plan for British Democracy, Policy Exchange, 10, Storey’s Gate, SW1P3AY