Gordon Brown calls for a people’s convention to brainstorm ways of reducing the growing economic gap between the south-east and the rest of Britain (Any Brexit deal must seek to mend the north-south divide, 9 November). As he notes, recent governments – Labour and Tory – have exacerbated the problem by reducing regional aid and skewing both transport and R&D investment toward the south. However well northern schools and universities perform, the productivity and skills gap will persist in northern cities due to the brain drain of skilled workers to better-paid jobs, usually service not manufacturing, in southern England. The pro-Trump US rustbelt, and much of southern and eastern Europe, face similarly intractable brain drains.
Breaking the vicious circle will require, as well as devolving power to cities and regions, better focused central government intervention.
First, it should prioritise improved northern transport, within and between cities, over the dubious benefits of HS2, which has been rushed through without rigorous cost-benefit examination and against the advice of most experts. Having chosen Hinkley Point and Heathrow over better-value, greener alternatives, Theresa May needs to avoid an HS2 triple whammy.
Second, it should recognise that hi-tech service industries can be as productive as manufacturing, and that most of the growth will come from a march of services rather than makers.
One example would be to accelerate the growing media industry hub in Manchester by persuading, if necessary cajoling, the BBC to move many more staff out of London. Where the BBC goes, production companies will follow. Though London film studios may protest, establishing a large movie studio rather than just a TV studio in Manchester would be another key step toward a British Hollywood. It seems unlikely to happen without state aid despite Mrs May’s mooted post-Brexit, industrial strategy and reassurance to Nissan.
Joseph Palley
Richmond, Surrey
• Gordon Brown says that “Britain now has the most extreme inter-regional inequalities of any country in western Europe”. The problem is that England has geographical but no politically defined regions. The first and last time that was understood and a workable solution proposed was by the Royal Commission on Local Government. This reported in June 1969. The commission concluded that local government required a legislatively grounded regional system. This would have to apply to the whole of England, not just to parts of it.
The commission rejected the idea of city regions (“powerhouses”) strongly advocated by the then ministry for local government. Then as now, that system could not sensibly be applied to wide areas of the country such as the south-west and large swaths of the north.
The commission decided that, outside London, England should be divided into eight regions, each managed by a provincial council. Within these eight provinces, local authorities with populations of between 250,000 and 500,000 would be large enough to carry out their functions efficiently. These local authorities would appoint representatives to serve on the provincial councils. Provincial councils would deal with issues cutting across local authority boundaries such as transport, land use, economic strategy and, perhaps in future, health services.
Any serious effort to devolve powers from central government should start with that royal commission report. The commission, for example, did not mention mayors. Its members knew that mayors are an urban concept and have a place in somewhere like Greater London but none in a province with a large rural hinterland that, economically and industrially, could be as large as Scotland.
The commission concluded that, if the devolved arrangements it proposed were not made, “local government will be swamped … and a highly centralised form of government will result”. That has now happened. No recent government has made any serious effort to reverse that process. Governments have come to believe that their right to rule is close to absolute. So power will not willingly be devolved. Whether rule of a fractured country by a prime minister will survive remains uncertain.
Sir Peter Newsam
Thornton le Dale, North Yorkshire
• Gordon Brown fails to acknowledge that the Scottish constitutional convention of 1989 ignored the need for a coherent layer of English regional government to resolve the West Lothian question. Without this, British democracy remains a rotten onion: over the last century, layers of local government have been whittled away and left without real tax-raising powers by Westminster.
Out of fear of being attacked over the cost of real democratic reform in 1997, Labour dithered and lost the necessary momentum. Even Greater London was only given a titular assembly without the normal powers for a simple majority to overrule the last mayor, Boris Johnson, over a garden bridge.
Twice the Labour party cynically offered a referendum on electoral reform, in their 1997 and 2001 manifestoes, which it failed to hold even after persuading Roy Jenkins to drop the single transferable vote. Why should we trust Labour now when only a coherent system could replace the House of Lords with an indirectly elected upper chamber like the German Bundesrat?
David Nowell
New Barnet, Hertfordshire
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