Europe of the Regions...Not here mate! Booker in the Telegraph

Sunday Telegraph
Christopher Booker's Notebook
7th November 2004
A resounding No for Prescott's big scheme
It is hard to exaggerate the significance of the defeat inflicted by the voters of the North-East on John Prescott's plan to give them an elected regional assembly. Until last Thursday it used to be said that the largest margin of victory in any British election was the two-to-one vote in favour of staying in the Common Market in 1975. But the margin of Mr Prescott's defeat was almost four to one.

This marked the first serious rebuff for one of the most ambitious personal projects in our political history - Mr Prescott's plans for what Andrew Marr called on Friday the "Balkanisation" of Britain. In 1998, with scarcely a murmur of protest, Mr Prescott pushed through six Acts of Parliament all linked to his grand design - setting up regional governments for Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London, and unelected regional assemblies for the eight remaining English regions, and dividing the United Kingdom into 12 giant "regional constituencies" for elections to the European Parliament.

Curiously, the only senior politician to protest that this was all part of a hidden agenda to diminish the role of national governments in creating a "Europe of the Regions" was that great Europhile Michael Heseltine. This particular version of "European federalism", he said in 1998, was "totally unacceptable".

As the final piece in his jigsaw puzzle, Prescott intended to turn his appointed regional assembles into elected regional parliaments. Beginning with a referendum in the "safe" Labour heartland of the North-East, he hoped this would set off a domino effect across the rest of the English regions.

As readers of this column will know, if there is one man who, more than anyone else, stopped this plan in its tracks, it is Neil Herron. This former Sunderland market trader has been transformed by years of campaigning - first as leader of the "metric martyrs", then against Prescott's assembly - into something of a North-East folk hero. It was Mr Herron who, by repeatedly wrong-footing the local political establishment, managed to turn what had once seemed the unstoppable advance of an elected assembly into a rout.

Despite the best efforts of the BBC (see below) and the ineptitude of the Electoral Commission, Prescott's grand design is now in total disarray. The problem is that, having advanced so far towards his goal by stealth, we are left with eight wholly undemocratic regional assemblies, costing us £200 million a year and serving no useful purpose whatever. The only conclusion that can be drawn from the people's verdict on Thursday is that these absurd bodies, staffed by self-important placemen, must be scrapped.