IT’S HILARIOUS, really. This week voters in the North East seem likely to fling the Government’s proposal for a regional assembly back in Westminster’s face. People in Newcastle and around, the backyard of Tony Blair, are expected to reject a plan developed and driven by John Prescott, “the people’s politician”. Here is the Government’s regional policy, in full, rejected. Two other referendums, in Yorkshire and Humberside and the North West, have already been abandoned. This was the only one left.
No 10 will not be unduly bothered by the result. It was never particularly keen on regional assemblies. They have always been seen as “John’s thing”, a way of keeping Mr Prescott happy with his own regional agenda. Now Mr Blair’s aides are scratching their heads about “how to keep John busy” next.
Gordon Brown and the Treasury were never going to allow the assemblies any real financial clout: the “no” campaign in the North East has rightly focused on the lack of real power that the assemblies will hold, portraying them as simply an expensive talking shop. Recent campaigning visits to the region by the Prime Minister and the Chancellor owe more to the pulling power of the Deputy Prime Minister, new Labour’s powerbroker, however hopeless a departmental minister he is, than to the draw of a new layer of regional government. They both had to be seen to be backing Mr Prescott’s campaign with more than warm words.
In the end the mighty forces of new Labour, spearheaded by the Deputy Prime Minister but endorsed by every senior politician in the North East and backed by a nationally led campaign, will have been faced down by a locally led attack fronted by a market trader and a businessman (though with close links to the UKIP). While opposed to the assembly, the Conservative Party was asked to refrain from campaigning locally as it might damage the chances of the “no” camp.
This has been a rejection of authority itself. Even if the “yes” campaigners were to pull off a last-minute victory, it would hardly be a valid endorsement, on a turnout expected to be under 50 per cent.
And not just a rejection of the state, but of party politics as well. The “no” campaign specifically branded the assembly not just an expensive talking shop, but a talking shop for party politicians. Hence their official distance from the Conservative Party. Some fascinating research by the Foreign Policy Centre think-tank earlier in the autumn suggested a similar unlinking between Mr Blair and the “Yes” campaign for the EU constitution, after it found that the Prime Minister risked turning off key voters. (How anyone — anyone — thinks the Government has a chance of winning that campaign, given the EU’s link in people’s minds to more of the same from meddling and self-interested politicians, is beyond me.)
This vote in the North East, then, bears a salutary message for politicians in Westminster: we don’t want any more of your sort. No 10 recognises this momentum. Hence, Mr Blair’s advisers would argue, its lack of enthusiasm for the assembly. What No 10 has come to recognise is that Labour must find a way of giving real power to people locally. Labour’s campaign co-ordinator, Alan Milburn, said this week that the general election campaign will be “as much fought locally as it is nationally. Messages about the record of national achievement tend to mean less than what is happening in Darlington, Derby or Dartford.”
Labour leaders have rejected the symbolic power of locally elected “boards” of hospitals and their like as a proper answer to the demand for real power on the ground. They want to go more local than that. The announcement by the Prime Minister last week that parish and town council wardens and officers will be able to hand out £100 on-the-spot fines for dog-fouling, littering, noise and other “antisocial behaviour” form a major part of this new agenda.
Everything is smaller now. Mr Milburn on Monday listed what he saw as the critical election issues. They are: crime, pensions, childcare, choice, equal pay and social mobility. No health, no education — although the choice agenda plays into both. Their absence from that list is in itself an amazing development, after two elections dominated by those public services.
The next election will be, instead, about the little things: the dog poo vote. If the US poll has been dominated by one major issue, security, in the UK the parties are likely to find themselves talking about a local school closure in one town, the lack (or profusion) of street lighting in the next. And everywhere, too, about antisocial behaviour and loitering young men, or “yobs” as some would have it.
What this scatter of issues lacks is any coherence and ideological purpose — what the Prime Minister used to call “narrative” and “vision” — and some see that as a problem. The Chancellor has been making speeches about the need to form what he calls the “progressive consensus”, “a set of progressive views and values embraced by the people . . . we wish to build for Britain a shared sense of national purpose that is so deeply held that it will become the common sense of the age and will sustain and outlast our generation”.
What sort of shared sense of national purpose, what inspired vision for the country, is embodied by the boast: “Look, we have issued 3,000 antisocial behaviour orders”? If you look at the Government’s existing programme, nothing gets any clearer. Current and forthcoming legislation is dominated by a hotchpotch of bitty social laws. There are Bills on smacking and gambling, drives against smoking and obesity. There are worthy Bills, aimed at protecting children, animals and victims of domestic violence, others promoting charity and gay rights. Human tissue and human remains get their own Bill. Yet more disability discrimination legislation, and a vast mental health Bill, languish in the sidings, awaiting timetabling.
It is as if the Government has given up on the big things, and taken refuge in the little ones. Making the next election, unlike the big US poll, lots of very little ones.
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