Will Prescott Survive this?

Yorkshire Post
6th November
Enforcer Prescott will survive
SO THAT, then, is that. The North-East's thumbs-down to a regional assembly must surely mark the end of John Prescott's devolution dream, mustn't it?
Indeed, some might say that it should mark the end of the Deputy Prime Minister's political career. For, coming on top of the decision to call off similar referendums in Yorkshire and Humber and the North-West, this latest blow is nothing less than political humiliation for Mr Prescott.If anywhere was predicted to have enough popular enthusiasm for a regional mini-parliament, it was the North-East where disillusion with government by London runs deep. So if a regional assembly is rejected there – and by such an overwhelming margin – what future can devolution have anywhere else?

Fortunately for the Deputy Prime Minister, however, the North-East is far enough away from the Westminster village for this decision to have little impact there. For much of the London political and media establishment, places such as Sunderland and Middlesbrough might as well be in Outer Mongolia for all the relevance they are thought to have to national life.So Mr Prescott might be humiliated, but few in the capital will have noticed. And in any case, his importance to Tony Blair is not based on the success or failure of his policies – if it were, he would have been sacked long ago – but on the influence he wields in Cabinet and with the Prime Minister's truculent backbenchers. And for this reason the MP for Hull East will carry on in Government for as long as Mr Blair does.But if Mr Prescott will survive, what of the dream he has had for the best part of 30 years, of devolving power to the regions?Perhaps surprisingly, given the apparent depth of public antipathy to the idea, that, too, will refuse to go away.For the atrocious way in which Mr Prescott has handled the regional-assembly debate so far does not mean that devolution is not desirable, or even necessary.Instead of playing the canny game that was necessary if his ideas were to have any hope of exciting public imagination, the Deputy Prime Minister blundered into the debate with all the subtlety of the surly shop steward that he once was.At no time did he commission the private opinion polls that would have signified early on the level of public interest in devolution. Instead, he soldiered on with his much trumpeted, but somewhat unscientific, soundings exercise and when even this showed that the level of support for devolution was derisory – and also, crucially, that few people had any real knowledge or understanding of what was on offer – he chose to ignore it.

Many of the seasoned pro-devolution supporters, such as the Yes 4 Yorkshire movement, believed that the regional-assembly campaign was winnable, but only if it was handled correctly which in the end was anything but the case.This was why Lord Haskins, a fervent advocate of devolution, admitted, shortly before the Yorkshire referendum was called off, that it was unwinnable.For he and other devolution purists always believed that the powers talked about in the regional assembly White Paper were hopelessly inadequate. And Lord Haskins, as an adviser to Mr Blair, is likely to have witnessed at first-hand the difficulties that Mr Prescott was having in wringing anything more meaningful out of central government.

In the end, a titanic struggle was reported to have gone on between Mr Prescott and Charles Clarke over whether Learning and Skills Councils should be put under the control of the assemblies or should remain with the Education Department. But if central government was reluctant to let such a comparatively minor responsibility go to the regions, then clearly the notion of any real power being devolved was just not on.

In other words, what was being offered to the public was a sham, an exercise in words, a new and costly tier of government which would have little if any relevance to most people's lives. But what if this were not the case? What if devolution involved real powers being transferred from Whitehall into regional control. This remains the dream of Yes 4 Yorkshire and the other campaigners and it will refuse to die.Were a regional assembly to have teeth, it would have been far more likely to have won support and far harder to make a case against it. A Yorkshire parliament which took real powers from Westminster and Whitehall, or from unaccountable quangos, rather than vacuuming a few responsibilities from local councils – and which therefore meant huge savings in bureaucracy – would have been a proposal which might have ignited the popular imagination.

One argument used to justify the creation of elected assemblies – but one that never really completed the difficult journey from Mr Prescott's brain to mass public comprehension – was that they would provide oversight and democratic accountability for the regional development agencies, such as Yorkshire Forward.There is, however, a much wider democrat deficit building up, involving far more than the RDAs. Quietly, almost unnoticed, powers over planning, transport and other issues are being given to the shadowy, unelected regional assemblies, many of which are dominated by New Labour's placemen.At the same time, local democracy is being hollowed out. What were once proudly independent town and city halls are becoming little more than colonial outposts of the Treasury, their spending levels and their council-tax charges determined by Whitehall.Against this background, the last thing needed was another costly tier of government that would have been both unpopular and powerless.However, had Mr Prescott tried to win the hearts and minds of people in the regions by boosting the powers of local government, to the extent of transferring tax-raising powers from central government, it could have been a different story. Even if Mr Prescott and his sidekick, Nick Raynsford, had wanted to do this, however, they would have been no match for Gordon Brown.For not only is the Chancellor determined never to relax his vice-like grip on the nation's purse-strings, he is also intent on personally driving forward the regional agenda.In the gospel according to Mr Brown and his acolytes, such as Ed Balls, his former adviser and now prospective Labour candidate for Normanton, the RDAs, the unelected assemblies and new initiatives such as the so-called Northern Way are all tools of economic regeneration to be controlled by the Treasury.Under what Mr Brown calls Regional Spatial Strategies, these unelected quangos are acquiring enormous powers over planning and their role can only grow bigger now that the idea of democratically elected assemblies has bitten the dust.This huge job-creation programme has been developing over several years and the tide, quite clearly, is not now going to be turned. But what is essential is that it is made accountable to the people it is supposed to serve.The Northern Way notion of boosting city-regions, led in Yorkshire by Leeds and Sheffield, is one way of addressing this through the boosting of local councils. But this idea is already being badly handled and creating acute resentment in those authorities, such as Bradford and Wakefield, who are appalled at the idea of being subsumed into a region known by the name Leeds.Public money is being pumped into these enterprises, but while it is winning over some local policymakers, it is failing to win over the public and threatening to repeat the fiasco over elected regional assemblies

.Democratic accountability is desperately needed, but while any campaign to introduce it is handled with all the tact and sensitivity of a sledgehammer in the hands of John Prescott, the empire of Gordon Brown will continue to expand, with quangos and bureaucracies growing untrammelled by public consultation.richard.hopwood@ypn.co.uk