The worm is not for turning. Perhaps I was excited by Tony Blair taking the hallowed stage of the Old Vic. Perhaps I had been told to expect something new. There had been murmurings of a new radicalism, decentralist, even localist. The control-freak accusation had apparently struck home. There would be no neo-Maoist harping on reform and modernisation. A more humble Tony Blair — perhaps returning to his communitarian past — would be on display.
It was not. Mr Blair’s Fabian Society lecture was the usual litany of statistical boasts, anti-Tory gibes and promises of more upheaval in public services. There was the familiar chant — social justice, “progressive politics maturing”, “extending choice for the many, not the few” — that now accompanies the Blairite liturgy like a sung Mass.
This week Mr Blair’s Britain seems a parody of a banana republic. The leader returns from globe-trotting to sack the head of the Supreme Court and finds himself without a Speaker of a House of Parliament. He appoints in his place an old law crony, and gives him the sort of title, Secretary for Constitutional Affairs, that Idi Amin might have given his batman.
Meanwhile, the Home Secretary prances about Whitehall declaring that he wants to be a judge and means to make himself one. The Transport Secretary promises to make the trains run on time. The Schools Minister promises to employ more teachers, although he employs none. The Planning Minister wants power to force every village in the land to build an allotted number of homes. These are the responses of the old Blairite apparat.
Mr Blair has apparently come to believe, like his hero Margaret Thatcher, that Britain is best ruled from his office. There lies the fount of power, so he presses the buttons and brooks no opposition. There is only one check that Mr Blair has always recognised. It lies buried in what scholars should recognise as the key document of 20th-century constitutionalism, the “Granita guarantee” of May 1994.
This Magna Carta of our age was reached between Mr Blair and Gordon Brown when in Opposition. Publicised in documentary form last week, it stipulated that, in the event of a Labour government, power over the economy would be ceded by Mr Blair to Mr Brown at the Treasury. Not only economic management but control over the entire public sector was to be regarded as a Treasury province. The impact of that concession has become apparent over the past six years. It has established the most centralised and authoritarian public administration in Europe.
It has also failed to work. The capacity of central government to micromanage the government of 60 million people has been tested to destruction. The political crossed wires behind Mr Blair’s control panel now spark and short with increasing frequency. He pours money in the petrol tank and it still registers empty. He turns the wheel right and it goes left. Nothing responds. Not only are schools, hospitals, trains, police not performing well, but the public blames nobody but him.
There is one good reason no other democratic government in Europe believes it can rule a nation the size of Britain from the centre. Human beings do not like being governed from a distance. From such crooked timber cannot any straight thing be made, least of all on a Treasury computer screen. After years of neurotic, restless reform, Britain’s services seem utterly stuck.
You only have to go into the offices of any hospital, any school, any university or any police force. Men and women are floundering in a morass of targets and bumf. Trained to perform a public service, they find themselves performing only a bureaucratic one. The best are shackled and the worst demoralised. That is what Mr Blair conceded to Mr Brown under the Granita accord.
What is Mr Blair’s response now? Does his former localism constantly nag at him? A tear almost came to his eye as he inveighed against “monolithic systems”. He incanted “new forms of civic engagement” and institutions “truly accountable to their local communities”. Five years ago it was he who wanted to devolve power to elected mayors, until Mr Brown stopped him. He wanted to hand London Underground over to Ken Livingstone, until Mr Brown stopped him. He fought for autonomous foundation hospitals, and lost to Mr Brown, losing his Health Secretary into the bargain.
Some of his colleagues seem to have heard this message. David Blunkett returned from America this month surprised to find that local accountability of the police can be popular and effective. Alan Milburn, the former Health Secretary, found that running every hospital waiting list from the centre did not work. On radio yesterday, David Miliband, the centralist Schools Minister, felt moved to declare that schools might well be tailored to local and individual needs.
I expected Mr Blair to develop these themes. He did not. He did not even pick up on what his deputy, John Prescott, clearly regards as the talisman of the new localism: devolution to the English regions. If this devolution is to mean anything, it would be a more significant constitutional reform than any tinkering with the House of Lords and judiciary.
On Monday Mr Prescott announced referendums on devolved assemblies for the North East, the North West and Yorkshire. If successful, the innovation might be extended to other existing Whitehall regions, in the East and West Midlands and the South. Such regional government would, so Mr Prescott intends, supplant English counties and cities as a substantive focus of political identity, replacing them with an English Bavaria or Saxony.
Mr Prescott may be as sincere as once was Mr Blair. But he could have restored democratic autonomy to properly elected counties and cities, as in America, France or Germany. He prefers to canonise his own planning regions. The only ones likely to prove popular are the proxy counties: a merging of Northumberland and Durham in the North East and of the ridings of Yorkshire. The rest are bureaucratic conveniences that will not achieve geographical identity or accountability. With just 30 members to “represent” areas from Buckingham to Dover, or Penzance to Tewkesbury, the new regions have no more coherence than if northern Norway and Sweden were designated Upper Scandinavia.
The truth is that Mr Prescott’s regions will always be creatures of central patronage, not local mandate. Proof of this, and the real test of this Government’s localism, is a lethal piece of legislation passing through Parliament. It is the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill. The Bill requires “regional spacial strategies” that are to “set out the Secretary of State’s policies (however expressed) in relation to the development and use of land in the region”. The force is in that “however expressed”.
These plans are the blueprints for the shape of Britain. They will be prepared by central government civil servants and have no trace of local democracy in them. They will stipulate the fate of green belts, farmland, housing and industrial estates, down to the level of the smallest district. They will abolish counties as democratic forums in all but name and intend to establish single-tier administration across the whole of England. The people of Kent, Norfolk, Cornwall or Cheshire will cease to have any control over the development of their towns or country: cardinal right of localities throughout the history of democracy. They will be at the mercy of the developer interest now dominant in the Treasury and Department of Trade and Industry.
This Bill, prepared under the smokescreen of “regional devolution”, is the greatest centralisation of town and country planning since the Second World War. Together with the abolition of county government it represents an astonishing accretion of power to the Treasury. Mr Blair may claim that his Government has rediscovered localism. He would do well to do so, because it is only through localism that he can hope to re-engage the public properly in running better public services.
The message of this wretched Bill is that Mr Blair simply cannot halt the centralist drift of his Government, led as it is by his deal with Mr Brown. He is caught by the Granita accord. He cannot devolve what is not his to devolve. He is trapped. Small wonder Mr Brown looks so pleased with himself these days.
Send your questions to Simon Jenkins: see www.timesonline.co.uk/talkingpoint
