It’s been a mixed picture so far. The new Prime Minister’s policy announcements about a bus fare price cap and cuts to Value Added Tax on electricity bills and to Business Rates for pubs, clubs and live music venues have the strengths of directly affecting everyday lives and being welcomed, albeit not euphorically. That’s an improvement and that’s fine.
Less agreeable was his response to complaints about the cost of setting up his Number 10 North in Manchester. Those were the gripes of “London-based” critics he declared. Put under a bit of pressure, the Left’s principal London-basher reverted to type. What followed was discouraging too: Andy Burnham described the new branch of his HQ as “the greatest rebalancing of power our country has seen”.
Oh, please. The mere creation of Number 10 North is nothing of the kind. It is some office space in a GCHQ building. It is, so far, but the most glamorous and conspicuous of the countless geographical redeployments of bits of national government that have been happening since at least the 1960s, when an earlier Labour government acted on its manifesto pledge to stop the “drift to the south”.
In more recent times we’ve heard everyone from Michael Gove to Pat McFadden proclaiming the virtues of moving civil service jobs out of the capital to other parts of the country. These included better value for money – rents are lower, for example – but also arguments about it ensuring that the voices of people who aren’t Londoners are heard more loudly in the corridors of power. Yet in terms of broad regional economic inequalities and the concentration of decision-making power in national government hands, none of these initiatives have “rebalanced” much at all.
The words “decentralisation” and “devolution” are sometimes used interchangeably, and sometimes that’s OK. But look closer, and the first means spreading the same government furniture out and the second means embedding new government institutions in the communities they serve with furniture all of their own.
The thinking is wrong, the language is wrong, the framing is wrong.
Yes, it is significant that a Whitehall department has been set-up in a place that isn’t Whitehall, but it will still be a Whitehall department – still a piece of the UK’s hugely centralised political power structure, whether located in Manchester, Melksham or Margate.
Agreed, were I the new PM, with all that “King of North” hubris to live up to, I might have been tempted by the symbolism of the Manchester move, but in the end what matters most is not where Number 10 North is, but what it achieves.
True, the stated goals of Number 10 North are radical and welcome – to take big lumps of power out the hands of central government and redistribute them downwards to city, regional and local authorities – but dubbing the department responsible Number 10 North is and will remain a case of style over substance until substantial results are achieved.
What should those results be? Despite his post-Makerfield recognition that London government needs greater autonomy, just as everywhere else does, Burnham still characterises his mission as correcting a reversible “north-south divide” that has unjustly damaged all those on one side of it and benefited all those on the other, with Londoners in particular winning big at neglected northerners’ expense.
But the job is not to “rebalance” Britain away from London and the South East for the sake of righting some historic geographical wrong, but to help other cities and regions become more successful in their own individual ways for their own and for the national good – and not only in the North, but in the Midlands, the East and the West too.
That does not mean the PM penalising or making a display of picking on whatever it suits him to mean by “London” on any particular day. Apart from anything else, Greater London’s economy contributes a “fiscal surplus” – taxes raised in the city but spent elsewhere – very adjacent to £50 billion at the last count. It is also a strange way for Burnham to go about nurturing the national unity he says he desires.
On Friday, I was one of the guests on BBC Radio 4’s AntiSocial show, paired with Jamie Eastlake the award-winning leading light of theatre in the North East. I’m pleased to say that any hopes or expectations that he and I would spend an hour going for each other’s throats were not fulfilled. My closing line was that London is not the enemy of other cities in England growing, and growing well, but vital to helping it happen. I hope the PM was listening.
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