“George Osborne knows it, Theresa May knows it, the Hillsborough families know it. We all know it. Britain’s national government may be a democracy, but its local government is a failed state.
There were plenty of moments in the Hillsborough saga when local accountability could have lanced the boil. Local pressure could have forced the Sheffield police chief to resign after the Taylor report, not to wait until his successor resigned. A district attorney could have prosecuted the police for gross negligence. An elected mayor of Sheffield could have sacked the police chief or, if need be, been voted out of office.
Such customary processes of democracy do not obtain in Britain. Instead, we must wait for a shambolic quarter-century of bumbling and costly inquiries, inquests, lobbying and lawyers. Still they leave a lingering sense of justice unfulfilled. No one has been properly blamed and punished.
Some ministers, we thought, had got the point. In 2012 Theresa May introduced locally elected police and crime commissioners. Their impact has been derisory. Voter turnouts have been between 10 and 20%. The police commissioners have dispersed electorates and minimal powers.
The concept works only in London, where the mayor is also commissioner and can bring the political weight of his mandate to bear.
Osborne seized on Manchester as the base for his northern powerhouse, and showered it with powers and money, provided it accepted his newfound fascination with elected mayors. In Manchester, at least, this made sense. Soon other cities were clamouring and were told to reorganise themselves into city regions and accept elected mayors. Osborne was forced to offer everyone more power, until England is on the brink of reordering itself into mini-regions, run by a third tier of local government under mayors, however inappropriate the political geography.
Osborne told Bristol to merge with Bath and Suffolk with Norfolk.
In doing so, the chancellor was reviving the various attempts at sub-regional government that have started and failed since 1974. Britain hates provinces. It knows and prefers cities and counties. Regions may reflect Whitehall’s bureaucratic convenience, but they are poor substitutes for local identity. The former local government secretary, Eric Pickles, understood this. He wisely said he “kept a pearl-handled revolver in my drawer to use on the first person who suggests local government reorganisation”.
Despite his good intentions, Osborne’s bid to restore local accountability to English government has hit trouble. It is unresearched and unconsulted, advancing in fits and starts.
Above all, he lacks a consistent concept of distributing power. His new planning regime obliterates local opinion. He intends, so far, to seize local councils’ most prized institutions, their schools, declaring local councillors unfit to run them. He is dumping NHS services on to local care authorities, with no extra money.
The result has been a fierce reaction from within the Tory party, from an alliance of county leaders, such as Kent’s Paul Carter and Norfolk’s Cliff Jordan, with disgruntled Tory backbenchers and peers. They see a prime minister and a chancellor in thrall to green-belt speculators and academy chains, careless of the countryside and of local people.
Now these county leaders are told they are to be overruled by “strategic” mayors for whom few will bother to vote. The Norfolk MP Sir Henry Bellingham compared the mayors to central government gauleiters. This alliance is now strong enough to veto Osborne’s reforms; it is torturing his budget aftermath and is rendering Cameron a minority prime minister in all but name.
Whenever asked, Britons say one thing loud and clear: they want more local accountability, not less. Their faith in modern government diminishes the closer it gets to the centre. An Ipsos Mori poll three years ago put trust in local government at 79% and in central government at 11%.
When offered more local devolution in the past, the public has tended to say no, thank you – as with John Prescott’s elected regional authorities in 2004. Locally elected mayors have won scant support in referendums, for instance in Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds, which remain firmly under party control. But people are keen on mayors where city government is seen as failing in the past, and where there is a strong sense of civic identity. Bristol’s George Ferguson, Middlesbrough’s Ray Mallon and Leicester’s Peter Soulsby stand out in this respect.
Next week London voters go to the polls to choose a successor to Boris Johnson. London’s two elected mayors have been an undeniable success. Johnson and Ken Livingstone may have fumbled reform of the capital’s police and transport unions. Johnson has left a metropolis forever scarred with planning disasters. But everyone knows whom to blame. London’s rash of luxury high-rises will forever be Johnson’s follies. No one wants the capital to go back under the control of a junior environment minister, as under Thatcher and Major.
Local government makes most sense when rooted in locality, in coherent communities used to running their own affairs. The cities and county boroughs inherited from the 19th century were such bodies. They attracted good local people to serve their councils, as happens today in Germany, France and the US. Local turnouts in the first two are between 60 and 80%. In Britain it is nearer 35%, a sure sign of democratic failure. Osborne’s random scatter of mayoralties is unlikely to stir the juices of accountability.
Proper democrats want someone local to hear and act on their complaints. They do not want to be perpetual supplicants at the gates of Whitehall, as the Hillsborough families have been. They want someone to blame, someone to sack, someone they know. Only in England is that someone denied them.”
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East Devon Watch 