Helen Pidd reports that at the local government select committee on Monday Kieran Quinn, the Labour leader of Tameside council, praised George Osborne for being “very clever in as much as he has been able to bully, cajole, persuade other ministerial colleagues to give up some of their powers” (Labour should seize the day on elected mayors, 28 October). Other Labour council leaders throughout the north are lining up for what they see as more powers coming their way from Osborne’s “northern powerhouse”.
What is lacking is any democratic involvement in these devolution agreements. Pidd reports that Greater Manchester “gains control over the region’s £6bn health and social care budget”. So who will get the blame for cuts in health and social care? Labour council leaders.
We need an open, transparent and considered debate on democratic devolution. Administrative devolution behind closed doors runs the risk of bringing the whole principle of devolution into disrepute.
David Melvin
Ashton-under-Lyne
• Ed Cox, director of IPPR North, says the northern powerhouse will not become a reality without a generation of investment in the infrastructure and human capital in the area, including education and training, and points to low productivity and under-utilisation of the work-force leading to high levels of poverty and disadvantage (Report, 27 October).
But better education and training programmes, even investment in developing infrastructure and innovative projects, cannot deliver the desired outcomes when power, influence and nearly all the best-paid jobs are stubbornly tied to London, denying the rest of the country the benefits of that earning and spending capacity for local economies.
Unless and until there is some real regionalisation of the controlling bodies of public and private sector organisations, from government and its regulatory bodies, from corporations and the commercial sector, from the media (but thank you BBC for Salford Quays) and from major NGOs and charities, the unions and professional bodies, faith groups, regulatory bodies and all the big players that comprise the economy and organised society, there can never be anything to rival or compete with London in the UK.
That’s why so many of our north-west graduates leave for jobs in the capital or overseas. Many who stay staff supermarket tills, coffee shops, bars and call centres – the only function commonly outsourced to the regions (where building and rental costs are lower): there are far fewer well-paid, senior and influential jobs “up north”.
Delia Koczwara
Manchester
• George Osborne’s “northern powerhouse” policy is looking pretty useless in view of the government’s utter failure to protect steel workers against predatory pricing by their new “friends” in the Chinese Communist government, allowing two major steel processors to go bust in as many weeks. But even the Guardian pushed Jeremy Corbyn’s comments on the steel crisis to the bottom corner of page 17 – so much for your northern roots.
Of course one of the steel firms was owned by an Indian company and the other by one from Thailand. Do we own anything now? And couldn’t the £20bn subsidy for the Chinese to build the nuclear power station at Hinkley Point be better used?
David Reed
London
• Martin Kettle (The north awaits its own SNP, 30 October) is right that “political space” has opened up for a northern regionalist party – and there’s quite a lot happening already. At this year’s general election, Yorkshire First stood 14 candidates and averaged about 1% of the vote. The North East Party made a significant impact where it stood, while the Northern Party ran several candidates in Lancashire. Not a political earthquake, but winning votes of between 600 and 1,200 in a tightly fought election wasn’t bad. Yorkshire First has since won some local council seats and gained nearly 10% of the vote in a recent Barnsley council byelection, beating the Tories and coming within 25 votes of Ukip.
What is emerging is the potential for a northern alliance between the three regions across the north. Yorkshire has the same population as Scotland and a very strong historic identity. As an economic unit, it makes sense too, unlike the “city regions” being imposed on us. Trying to force all the north, with a population of over 15 million, into a single political party might not be the way forward. But a progressive northern regionalism that works collaboratively across the north-east, Yorkshire and north-west could start to make real headway if it can tap into the growing discontent about the north’s neglect by a centralised state whose promised “devolution” to the English regions is a pale shadow of what Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and even London already have. There is scope for working with sympathetic politicians in the existing parties on a shared agenda which should include PR and elected regional assemblies. A new kind of northern regionalism is possible which can make common cause with the already devolved nations of the UK and develop a politics that is inclusive, democratic and enterprising.
Professor Paul Salveson
Yorkshire First parliamentary candidate for Colne Valley (2015)
• Martin Kettle should get out more. One of the best plays about the north which played at the National was The Pitman Painters which started in Newcastle and then went to Broadway. There are things about the north which are better than the south – good local government which does involve people, and a good NHS which most people use – there is only a small private sector. It is a vision of a better society which I feel is best articulated by the Labour party.
David Taylor-Gooby
Peterlee, County Durham
• Helen Pidd has missed the point in criticising the parliamentary Labour party for being less than enthusiastic about George Osborne’s idea for elected mayors for northern cities. Unlike the devolution deals bequeathed by the Labour government to Scotland, Wales and London, northerners are being offered considerably less – and with much greater risks at a time when falling house prices illustrate the flight of their local economies in the face of the chancellor’s austerity programme.
Labour MPs are rightly wary of this chancellor, whom they see in action everyday, whereas ageing regional politicians can obviously see opportunity in ending their careers with a good pension in a mayoral contest that they can hardly lose, even though their share of the vote and their mandate will be minimal.
Unlike London, northern citizens are not being offered a London-type assembly, which sharpens the focus of the Tory mayor. In the meantime, the citizens represented by other parties in Southport, Bolton, Huddersfield and countless communities across the north are hardly looking forward to seeing their localities subjugated to the careers of what will be in effect self-appointed gauleiters in the big cities with no direct accountability to voters at all.
If Labour is to respond to Osborne’s idea, it should be offering the same level of democratic devolution as previously accorded to Scotland, Wales and London, via a directly elected northern assembly, through whose members, the elected mayors would be held to account.
Dr Jim Ford
Southport, Merseyside
• It is strange how often commentators on questions of the north and south, such as Martin Kettle, forget that the compass has four points. The West Country, as far or further, than the “north” from London, gets lumped with the “south”. Yet its identity, cultures, economies, and places of all kinds, especially market and coastal towns, get lost in these national conversations. Cornwall, up there with the poorer areas of the EU; Devon, the heartland of organic farming; Somerset and its infamous Levels; Bristol and its green-tinged, ideas, laden, west-of-Britain difference; and then Dorset and Wiltshire, count but are so often voiceless in these conversations about a different future for Britain. A quick suggestion then: the Guardian should appoint a south-west correspondent, whose job will be to tell stories of the place of this part of England’s compass in a brighter future.
Mark Robins
Exeter
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