Independencia para el Norte!

 

Some good news from the Old Country, at last. The increasing pace of Scottish and Welsh devolution has got people thinking about self-government for the North of England, and a think tank has been established to pursue a devolved legislature, either for the North or for each of its three regions. According to the Guardian, the Hannah Mitchell Foundation (named for the legendary Mancunian socialist and suffragette) was launched in Huddersfield two weeks ago, and is linked to a number of northern Labour politicians, including former deputy prime minister John Prescott.

In recent decades, the domination of the British economy by the financial services sector in the City has led to what was once the world’s greatest empire becoming a banana republic. The belligerent attitudes of successive governments towards European integration are the most obvious manifestation of this – Westminster and Whitehall will throw any other sector of the economy, and any other part of the country, under the bus in order to protect the status of the Square Mile. And of course, the links between the City’s money and the think tanks and lobby groups which facilitated the rise of Thatcherism are well-documented. The North, which was the economic engine of the British Empire at its height, suffers from de-industrialisation, urban blight, and racial conflict, while its economy has become so dependent on public spending that over half of the North-East’s GDP comes in the form of handouts from Westminster and Brussels.

As Simon Jenkins pointed out in his book Big Bang Localism: A rescue plan for British democracy, far from being a harbinger of freedom, the Thatcher government destroyed local self-government in the name of cutting costs. The most well-known example of this was its running battles with the metropolitan county councils, most notably in Ken Livingston’s Greater London and in Merseyside (run by the Labour ‘loony left’), which were abolished in 1986. But more importantly, and largely occurring under the radar, were the changes in the powers of local councils around Britain. More and more, the central government gave itself the power to limit the actions of councils to spend and to deliver services, by limiting rate-raising and transferring councils’ powers to unelected government agencies. The British people were no longer trusted to vote out a profligate or badly-performing council. The Jacobin attitude of Westminster was summed up by Thatcher’s Chancellor, Nigel Lawson (father of TV chef Nigella), who said that “so long as public services exist, Treasury control is essential. The alternative is no financial discipline at all.” The Thatcher government’s anti-localist stance has been continued, with only minor and symbolic reversals, under Major, Blair, Brown, and Cameron.

While all this was going on, other parts of Europe came to enjoy increased autonomy. The incoming Socialist government in France in 1981 ditched that country’s Jacobin, centralising traditions and granted sweeping powers to elected regional councils. Spain’s post-Franco transition to democracy led to Catalonia and the Basque Country having two of the most devolved regional governments on the continent. (The latter keeps all the tax revenue raised in its jurisdiction, a privilege also accorded to Sicily.) And, of course, Belgium’s transfer of powers to its regions has been remarkable. Centralisation of power increasingly appears to be a disease which only afflicts the Anglo-Saxon world – witness the Reagan Administration’s bullying of Vermont over its legal drinking age, or the Australian High Court’s ridiculously broad interpretation of the corporations power in the 2006 Workchoices case. Westminster’s denial of autonomy to the English regions and denial of pan-metropolitan government to provincial centres is out of step with its European neighbours, and leaves the North without the tools to rebuild its economy and move out of the shadow of the City.

While Scotland will likely end this decade with either independence or the power to legislate for virtually everything except foreign affairs and defence, and Wales follows a few steps behind Scotland, the North has little control over its own affairs. In 2004, voters rejected a plan for an elected legislature in the North-East, one of the nine artificial regions into which most public matters are now organised in England. The prospect of Scottish and Welsh independence leaving northerners at the whim of a Conservative-dominated Westminster, however, may lead to a re-think, which the founders of the Hannah Mitchell Foundation are hoping for. But why stop at devolution? Why should northerners allow English patriotism to keep them under the domination of the financiers in the City? Why not an independent northern republic, proudly taking its place at the European Council table alongside its Celtic and Nordic neighbours?