Taking the mickey out of devolution

Lessons from Hartlepool

We are in the first month of government by Sue Gray and it should be of no surprise to any of us that she is busy tearing fiscal sovereignty away from Westminster and distributing it to regional authorities, on the proviso that they spend it on ‘investment’ and are not allowed to give it back to the middle class. The constitutional outrages which J’accuse predicted in 2023-4 are back and more fearsome than ever.

Many of the problems which we spoke about then – such as the ‘fiscal lock’ – were implemented by the Starmer regime, but the most appalling Grayite innovations such as citizen’s assemblies were dispatched by Starmer’s Hitlerian David Brent cosplay.

This time around we do not have a scheming Irishman to protect us from Sue Gray by winning a power struggle at the eleventh hour. Purnell is a has-been who became a member of Parliament around the time that McSweeney was first working as a receptionist in Milbank, he has been mucking about in the world of centre-left retirement jobs like the BBC, chairing the IPPR, ‘consultancy’ and overseeing universities. He will not obstruct Sue, who has been working towards a Burnham takeover since she was defenestrated in Autumn 2024.

Burnham is now saying that his devolution opens up the case for a full written constitution, without the need for another general election. This will be where ‘values’ like ‘inclusion’ and ‘propriety’ are given legal weight. It is something that the left has been calling for aggressively once the prospect of a Reform victory came into view. They do not want to risk a reforming government using Parliamentary sovereignty to upend the constitutional order of 1997. It will become illegal to practically challenge concepts like human rights or Net Zero. That means that even Kemi Badenoch’s political programme will become impossible. Even milder ‘one-nation’ politics like tax cuts or introducing the private sector into the NHS could become impossible if Westminster is denuded of these powers. Given that the government is trying to legally and constitutionally checkmate the politics of everybody from Mel Stride to Rupert Lowe it is hoped that minds will be focused.

So what is to be done? First we must understand the purpose of devolution. It is to disperse popular sovereignty against issues like immigration or energy policy amongst various local stakeholders, which having an empowered layer of ‘regional government’ can multiply by the thousand. Regional government can form multitudes of stakeholder relationships with other nodes of the public sector. They ‘form partnerships’ with the (unelected) ‘leaders’ in the local NHS, or the Local Education Authority, the regional police force. They form direct relationships with trade unions, who hold the same values as Burnham and Gray. These byzantine stakeholder networks draw resources and decision-making away from Westminster, and as turnout for ‘local elections’ is almost always appalling (Bev Craig has just been elected on 25.1% turnout) the end result is a less democratic system which is more insulated to demagogic appeals to the people, and radical politics.

I have said before that Reform should introduce a new law stipulating that all non-Westminster elections will in perpetuity be referendums on the continued existence of that branch of local government, e.g, if less than 50% of registered voters bother to turn out for the Holyrood elections the whole rotten structure should be abolished. Only 250,000 people in a city with an electorate of over two million named Bev Craig as their first choice for Mayor and she now gets to control £3bn of taxpayer’s money. All of these Potemkin political structures should be swept away but we can also resist them whilst Burnham is in power.

How could this be done? History is instructive. In the early 2000s New Labour posed ‘the Mayor question’ to Hartlepool in a referendum. ‘Yes’ passed by a squeaky margin of 373. Their first direct Mayoral election took place in May 2002. Into the frame came H’Angus the Monkey, the mascot of the local football team, played by Stuart Drummond.

Drummond was a local celebrity who became loved locally for turning up to matches drunk and simulating sex acts on female stewards. He ran on a platform of giving out free bananas and then, aged 28, beat Labour by a healthy majority of 500. After the count Peter Mandelson, who was the local MP, came up to him in a fit of white hot rage and screamed that he was a ‘disgrace’. It was an absolute humiliation for New Labour, even the Guardian joined in the mocking, saying Labour had slipped ‘on mayoral banana skin.