Douglas Alexander was Labour MP for Paisley South 1997-2015. He served in a series of ministerial posts under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown including Minister for Competitiveness (2001-02), Trade Minister (2004-05), Europe Minister (2005-06) and Secretary of State for International Development (2007-10).
This interview was conducted on 16 December 2021
Q: Could you tell us about your role in growth and regional policy over the past few decades?
I was parliamentary researcher to Gordon Brown when he was shadow regional affairs spokesman from 1990 and then Shadow Chancellor. I was elected in November 1997 in a by-election in a constituency, then called Paisley South. That was in Renfrewshire, the community in which I had grown up, which was suffering deindustrialisation that was very characteristic of the deindustrialisation afflicting west central Scotland at the time. I had been in part inspired to join the Labour Party as a 14 year old in 1982 as a consequence of the closure of the Linwood car plant, one of Harold Wilson’s regional development initiatives to try and bring new industries to the community in which I grew up in Renfrewshire.
We then had the advent of the Scottish Parliament and, working with colleagues, we gave quite a lot of thought to how to facilitate economic development in the context of a devolved political structure. My first ministerial appointment followed in 2001 when I was appointed to the Department of Trade and Industry as Minister for E-commerce and Competitiveness, and that naturally gave me a lens by which to see the regional development work that was by then underway. Partly for reasons of the constituency that I represented, regional development has been an abiding interest in the years that followed until I left Parliament in 2015.
Q: What do you think have been the key policy successes and the key frustrations over that period?
I think there has been a pretty consistent understanding, certainly during the years that I was in office, as to the importance of regional policy. There has been a constant description of the problem. I think that there have been different waves of public policy seeking to make sense of how to address this problem most effectively. By chance I was in Cambridge last night, and when you step out of the station in Cambridge, you’re struck by the wealth creation and university-inspired opportunity that literally confronts you. When I used to step out of the Paisley Gilmour Street station, you would be confronted by closed shops and empty mill buildings.
In that sense, understanding whether regional policy was a social imperative, driven by a concern for equalising opportunity, or a means of building on existing success, has been a debate within regional policy consistently. Do you spend money on the Golden Triangle – Oxford, Cambridge, London – to build the United Kingdom’s capabilities in certain key technologies? Or do you, as was the case with Harold Wilson, say we are going to try and take a car plant to a previously greenfield site in West Central Scotland and take the industry? There’s been clarity on the description, but there has been divergence on prescription – as to whether it’s motivated by concerns of equity or growth.
Secondly, I would say I came into public life at the tail-end of confidence that inward investment was the single most effective instrument of regional policy. I had observed, during those decades of deindustrialisation in Scotland, the success first of the Scottish Development Agency, and then Locate in Scotland, as a source of inward investment and new jobs. But even while studying at university myself, I worked for Compaq Computers, who built a new manufacturing facility in Renfrewshire. I was badge number 12 in the factory that summer and yet, within my working life, those jobs moved first to the Czech Republic and then from the Czech Republic to Asia. And with that transnational movement of jobs, I think there has been a haemorrhaging of confidence that inward investment is a shortcut to regional balance. If you like, there’s been an uncertainty as to whether it is equity or growth. There has been shifting perceptions of the place of inward investment.
I think when we were in government, the government of which I was part, there was a sincere and determined commitment to try and make regional policy work effectively from the ground up by building on the skills and the capability and talents of individual communities. But we struggled to reconcile ourselves to the depth of the inequity in terms of place that we were confronting. I feel proud but not satisfied by the efforts that we made, and I don’t think anybody can feel satisfied when one looks at the GDP numbers or at the relative economic imbalances that endure, despite sincere attempts over many years to try and address it.
It feels to me it’s still a public policy challenge that is multidimensional and can be inspired by a commitment to fairness, a commitment to balanced economic growth, and a commitment to a sense of national cohesion. Over the years I’ve observed this debate, politicians have ranged from focusing on deep attributes of regional productivity, to superficial aspects of hanging baskets in town centres, from a deep commitment to fairness, to a concern to amplify and build on success that’s already been achieved. I think one of the challenges is to try and discern below the headline language of regional policy. Different politicians have meant quite different things by regional policies over those years.
Q: Do you think that the issue was that the scale of the problem was not sufficiently recognised or that there was insufficient mobilisation of resources to meet that problem?
I think there is a bandwidth challenge when you come into office after 18 years. You reach for what levers are immediately available to you. Honourably, if you have the facility at the centre to redistribute wealth and tackle child poverty, tackle pensioner poverty, provide a new pipeline of funding both for classroom assistants and teachers and then in time the capital build in schools, the fierce urgency of now dictates that you pull those levers rapidly.
At the same time, you have – certainly I felt in the case of our government – a deep understanding that regional balances had to be addressed, the creation of structures that over a longer period would be effective in addressing those challenges. But the immediacy of central government action is very appealing in circumstances where you want to get on with addressing many of the inequities that you’re confronting.
I remember when I was the e-commerce minister in 2001 to 2002, travelling to Bangalore in India for a trade fair and seeing most of the RDAs [Regional Development Agencies] that we had just created in the previous parliament represented at this trade fair in Bangalore, essentially seeking to compete with each other for inward investment from the global software community. Even as early as 2001, I was questioning whether that was the optimal public policy model, to have effectively common structures but then internal competition between those regions to secure passing global investment. And in that sense, the balance between inward investment or, dare I say it, indigenously created economic growth, was a tension I think the RDAs and the devolved administrations lived with from day one.
Q: This administrative competition is common, though, it happens between US states?
That’s exactly right. Jennifer Granholm, the former Governor of Michigan, who’s just been appointed Biden’s Energy Secretary, gave a brilliant speech where she described the challenges she had leading Michigan during the Great Recession. She said, ‘The job of most state governments and governors was essentially a beggar-thy-neighbour race to win the latest investment from Amazon or from Tesla,’ exactly what we’re witnessing now. And she said, ‘There has to be a better model, even within 50 devolved entities or federal entities within the United States, than creating structures that then find themselves in a beggar-thy-neighbour battle against each other.’ I have to say, when she made that observation about the challenge she faced providing decent manufacturing jobs in Michigan, my mind turned back to that trade fair in Bangalore and I thought, we inadvertently and unconsciously left ourselves vulnerable to that dynamic. Even having created RDAs at an early stage in the government.
Q: How did your analysis of Scotland’s trajectory in the 1990s shape your views on UK-wide regional policy?
Scotland has always been bespoke, both in terms of the pre-devolution structures of the Scottish Office, where essentially there was a high degree of policy autonomy, and from a recognition that deindustrialisation needed to be tackled, particularly in Harold Wilson’s period. Some of the structures of regional development predated devolution but were then overlain by a new level of democratic accountability.
That being said, devolution effectively created a mindset that said the devolved unit of 5.4 million people was the organising unit for public policy, despite the fact that, in reality, there is regional inequity within Scotland as well as across the United Kingdom. The challenges that you face in a relatively deprived deindustrialised community in west central Scotland is radically different from, before the Financial Crisis, a financial services-driven model of economic development for the capital city in Edinburgh.
The two pre-devolution trends led to the creation of Scotland-wide structures, such as the Scottish Development Agency pre-devolution, Locate in Scotland, or then Scottish Enterprise. I think one of the most challenging critiques of devolution has been how unsuccessful devolved structures have been in addressing the regional productivity challenges that the Scottish economy certainly faced pre-devolution, but many of us hoped could be addressed more effectively with devolved structures. That in part explains my concern: you can create structures, but the capacity of those structures to have either sufficient resource or sufficient agency to meaningfully address those regional inequalities is, I think, a more open question.
Q: How have new political accountabilities shaped Scottish policy? How has devolution interacted with these economic development structures?
It’s very difficult to discuss policy accountability shorn of political context. What we have seen over the last 20 to 25 years in Scotland has been the replacement of economics and class as the organising structures of political affinities by identity and culture. That has found its purest expression in the divide within Scotland on Scotland’s constitutional future between independence or staying part of the United Kingdom. One of the features of a deeply polarised politics – as argued by Ezra Klein in his book on the United States – is that a polarised polity breaks the feedback loop at the heart of conventional democracy: policy delivery yields electoral support.
Once you move to a politics that is sufficiently polarised, that feedback just stops working because politics becomes an expression of who you are more than what they [politicians] do. One of the striking features of post-devolution politics has been the extent to which regional politics, far from being amplified and rendered more central by the creation of devolved structures with the democratic accountability that came with it, regional policy has been submerged below icons of nationhood and symbols of identity.
That has two dimensions. It has submerged the conversation within Scotland about regional inequalities between communities within Scotland, because with a nationalist administration, they resist intermediate affinities, whether that is, ‘I’m a Glaswegian’, or ‘I’m from Edinburgh’, ‘I’m from the Highlands’, because your primary political association is with the nation. ‘I’m Scottish’ – according to their philosophy
At the same time, the Scottish Nationalist Party proved over the last 14 or 15 years to be highly centralising, creating, as part of their political project, close affinities between the institutions of the state and the loyalties of the system. They have very little interest in devolving structures of accountability and power beyond Holyrood. In fact, one of the great ironies of post-devolution Scotland has been the extent to which the government has been centralising in an era of decentralisation in many other polities.
For those of us who came into politics and experienced election campaigns defined by the size of the state, relative levels of employment or of taxation, it’s been a quite disorienting experience to realise that those are no longer – certainly in Scotland today – the currency and the defining attributes of politics. One of the casualties of the rise of identity politics has been regional policy both across the UK and within Scotland, as far as Scottish politics is concerned. You might have imagined that devolution would have provoked a very lively debate about the relative economic performance of Scotland compared with the North West, North East, South East, or even England in its totality, or Wales or Northern Ireland. In fact, it has created a more inwardly focused political dialogue defined by us and them, rather than a political economy of comparison.
Q: How do you reconcile this narrative with the ‘identity-based’ EU referendum vote leading to a subsequent emphasis on regional inequalities?
It’s different. If you try and understand the coincidence of economic anger, cultural anxiety and political alienation that found expression in huge votes for Brexit in Sunderland or in the North East or the North West, then relative economic opportunity is a central part not just of the understanding but of the prescription. When the UK government talks about Levelling Up – it is at least central to their sloganising – Scotland stands apart from that discourse. When the government talks about Levelling Up, it doesn’t really know whether to include Scotland or ignore Scotland. There is no equivalent discourse of levelling up either within Scotland or between Scotland and the rest of the UK because a nationalist administration is conflicted between saying, ‘We are suffering relative economic deprivation, it’s outrageous that Westminster is holding us back from achieving the levels of prosperity we would otherwise,’ and saying, ‘England is not like us, we have nothing to learn or nothing to benefit from what’s happening south of the border. Independence is inevitable.’ What’s striking about Scottish politics today is how much less rooted in economics it is than politics in England, where the strain of populism that has been in the ascendancy has a stronger relative economic dimension to it than is the case in Scotland.
Historically, the SNP were a nationalist party defined by economics more than by culture. Unlike the Welsh nationalists – where language and culture were central – the Scottish independence case in the 1970s and 1980s was largely one of relative economic injustice. ‘It’s Scotland’s oil. England is denying us this.’ That has shifted though with the ascendancy of culture. I think the best reading I found on this was in the United States in the aftermath of Trump’s victory, which would argue that Scotland is a leading indicator rather than a lagging indicator of where UK politics is moving. In the US, they argue we have two forms of identity as human beings that find expression in our politics. The first of those is what this article I have in mind called achieved identity. If you take the example of the constituents I represented, to be working class in Scotland in Paisley in most of the 20th century was an achieved identity. You made things that mattered with your hands. You probably had secure tenure in a council house or you owned your own home. You went on foreign holidays and owned a car for the first time in your family’s history, and you had a reasonable expectation that your kids were going to do better than yourself. The cumulative effect of globalisation and the consequent deindustrialisation was to strip away all of those achievements. What happens when you lose your achieved identity is not that you default to ‘no identity’, but you default to a deeper assigned identity. In Scotland’s case, that is: ‘I’m Scottish. You can take everything else away from me, but I’m Scottish.’
I think you need to understand the rise of political affinities as being the other side of the coin of loss. And there is a direct correlation between the loss of affinity, belonging, confidence felt in many communities, and the embrace of nationalism in Scotland’s case, or populism more broadly. I think you have to understand contemporary politics and its focus on regional policy as being in part a crisis of money, but also a crisis of meaning. It was about a sense of, ‘Does our community matter?’ And ‘Can we see ourselves in the country’s future or not?’ In too many post-industrial communities, despite our best policy efforts through Regional Development Agencies and other initiatives, they were communities that lived more on their memories than on their dreams.
I was very struck, in the community I represented, that the mills had closed at the end of the 1970s – they hadn’t closed in 2000 or 2005 or 2010. And yet, within the folk memory of that community, a proper job was working in a cotton mill, despite the danger, the contingency and all of the hardship associated with that. Even before the Global Financial Crisis, we had delivered effectively full employment in that community but there was no lyricism or poetry associated with those new jobs. Again, I think the question is, ‘What problem is regional policy seeking to solve?’ Is it relative economic opportunity? Is it a sense of accountability and democratic leadership for a sense of place? Or is it to give a sense of control and confidence to communities that they have a place in the country’s future?
Q: Have reforms in England – especially the emergence of directly-elected Mayors – helped create that sense of agency?
Yes. England is a lumpy country, in the sense that the hunger for devolved government varies regionally. There’s no great demand in the Home Counties. But on the other hand, if you look at the combined authority in the West Midlands, you look at the work that Andy Burnham is doing in Manchester, or indeed, communities like Liverpool or West Yorkshire, it strikes me that we have reached an inflection point: even within a traditionally centralised state structure within the United Kingdom, there is a momentum and an understanding towards decentralisation that we always believed. We were knocked backwards in the initial 2002 referendum in the North East as to the willingness with which communities would embrace those opportunities. I think in some ways we’re observing a very organic and English version of devolving power, because it is lumpy, it’s varied, but it seems to me to be taking root and is and will be irreversible in a way that wasn’t clear 20 years ago.
Q: Did you find Whitehall to have a common position with respect to devolution?
I’m probably sensitised to this, given that that it is an easy and familiar trope used in Scotland to criticise the UK government. But it’s not a description that I recognise. I think, if we used central levers in our time in office, it was out of a sincere and earnest desire to get things done quickly and to address inequalities that demanded action. At the same time, there was, really from the outset of the Labour government of which I was part, an intellectual commitment to decentralisation, first in Scotland and Wales but then seeking to move that forward in England.
I sensed amongst the political leadership of the governments, of which I was part, a genuine and earnest desire to support devolved decision making within England as well as within Scotland and Wales. I don’t recognise some of the characterisations or mischaracterisations that are offered, certainly of the politicians. Similarly, on Whitehall, the Department of Trade and Industry, of which I was part, believed in regional development because the ministers who led it believed in regional development. I don’t recollect institutional or official resistance to those directions.
There was always a need to accommodate varied levels of appetite for regional decision making, even during our time in office, with devolved mayoralties in Manchester and London or elsewhere. There was the natural give and take of those conversations, but the characterisation, that Whitehall ‘was opposed to decentralisation’ – I think that’s a disservice to Whitehall.
Even, if you like, the ‘high priests’ of Whitehall in the Treasury: if they had a bias, it was towards action and delivery – and frankly, intellectual rigour – rather than a bias towards inaction. I remember, when I was in the DTI, being sent like a lamb to the slaughter to a trilateral meeting with the Prime Minister and the Chancellor. Coincidentally, Patricia Hewitt, my boss, found herself inexplicably delayed and not able to attend the meeting that day when I turned up in Tony Blair’s office to argue the case for many billions of pounds worth of spending on a broadband fibre network that would stretch the length of the United Kingdom. I turned up with my, I don’t know, 5- or 10-page DTI brief as to why these billions of pounds were worth spending. Gordon turned up with his 80- or 90-page Treasury public expenditure brief on why that didn’t actually make sense in terms of value for money. That reflects a rigour and capacity to win arguments within Whitehall that reflected a lot of the strength of the Treasury’s policy making.
I think in retrospect, looking at, for example, Treasury rules around public expenditure and value for money when I was Transport Secretary, there are more questions that could have been asked. Looking back, were there assumptions on which Whitehall was operating that were centralising in character? It wasn’t that there were individual officials trying to stop this project or that project, but could we, in retrospect, have looked more fundamentally at some of the criteria by which public investment decisions were made? If you look, for example, at a decision like high-speed rail, which is a decision that I supported after my time as Transport Secretary. We undertook a network review led by Rod Eddington, formerly the chief executive of British Airways, which argued that it did not represent value for money relative to incremental investment in building capacity across the network. After the Financial Crisis, the geometry of the conversation shifted decisively, and it was only, I think, after the Financial Crisis that the rationale for HS2 would have got through. I’m glad that it did, but it seems to me a good example of where a public expenditure initiative that will have significant regional effect reflected a profound change in the assumptions that underpinned government policy, and probably a more permissive attitude, not simply towards public investment, because the numbers had shifted significantly after the crisis, but attitudes towards an active industrial policy.
Again, the responsibility for that rests primarily with the politicians in creating the conditions in which progressive policy can be advanced, rather than there being a hidden agenda or a hidden wiring within Whitehall.
Q: Were ‘delivery’ departments like the Department for Work and Pensions [DWP] or the Department for Education more centralising in their mindset?
Yes, but again I think the delivery imperative is a great phrase. That did not come from a prejudice against the regions but an aversion and a disgust with poverty. If you have within your hands the capacity to put income, whether in child tax credits or pension credits, into the hands of people who need it in the North West at the same time as you’re doing it in the South East or the South West, then most progressive politicians will err towards action rather than inaction. And again, truthfully, I think that during the entire time we were in government there was a constitutional journey underway, but we would have been failing in our responsibilities if we had said, ‘Well give it five or ten years and we’ll get serious about tackling poverty in this region or that region when the structures have caught up with the need.’ The reality is, when you’re sitting in the ministerial chair, you have a responsibility to act in ways that allow you to try and address those needs as timely as you can.
Q: What was your evaluation of the capability and capacity in local government and the Regional Development Agencies?
The determination was to build capability at a regional level. There was a general sense in the early years that we were achieving that, partly through the work that John Prescott had done, partly through a sense that there needed to be a tier of government or at least capability above local government that could have a broader regional perspective and bring to bear capabilities to address common challenges.
My worry is that we saw administrative structures as an alternative to democratic accountability, inevitably because there was not a conformity of view about democratic structures across England at the time. That led to a sense that the RDAs were either duplicating work that was already happening, or were implicitly in competition with each other, either for favour from central government or external inward investment.
I am instinctively more comfortable when structures of democratic accountability are mirrored and aligned with structures of economic development. If you take an example, when I was Transport Secretary, the standout local authority was Manchester, and that reflected the coincidence of really strong political leadership and, in Howard Bernstein, really strong official leadership. In competitive bidding processes, whether for money for the tram, whether for local development, Manchester had a capability that was certainly, to my mind, a standout capability compared with equivalent authorities at the time. That holds a lesson for me: if you want a region to really drive forward, you need both outstanding political leadership and outstanding official leadership. And there was a decade or more where Manchester was just better at that combination than most equivalent authorities who found themselves head-to-head with Manchester in competition for funds.
In retrospect I now look at that as an example of the combination that you’re looking for where mandate, structure and accountability align – all without diminishing the centrality of leadership. You need that strength of local political leadership to drive the machine, and my concern, when I reflect on RDAs, is that we created the regional structures, but absent the visible regional leadership. I think that was an inhibitor on them fulfilling their full capabilities.
Q: How should we think about this when administrative boundaries, functional economies and identities do not fully align?
Scotland is where my politics comes from. We sincerely believed the Scottish Parliament would be a workshop for social justice, including regional development within Scotland, and it became an emblem and an icon of national identity. I don’t think we get to choose whether regionally, democratically accountable regional structures become, as was the case with Richard Leese and Howard Bernstein, extraordinary workshops for economic development, laboratories of policy innovation, setting standards elsewhere or whether – because of the politics of that region – you have less focus on economic development and more focus on regional pride and regional identity.
My bias would still be towards aligning democratic accountability with regional structure and accepting that you don’t then get to prescribe the democratic outcome within those structures. I think the difficulty is: is there the willingness to accept the trade-off between a national vision of equality and a local vision of democratic accountability? The reason that in DWP we had a bias towards centralised action – a delivery imperative – was because I sense as politicians, we didn’t want to feel that the economic dignity enjoyed by a pensioner in one part of the country was going to be materially undermined by different policy priorities being identified.
I think for regional policy to fulfil its potential, ironically, it requires greater clarity from central government as well as greater autonomy to regional government. What are the common standards and expectations of the citizenry in every part of the country? What is the common floor on which regional structures of devolved economic policy or regional development can then operate? It seems to me that administrative devolution is a poor substitute for democratic devolution in that regard, as we are learning, although it was inevitable given the lack of appetite at the time we were there.
I think that there is still uncertainty as to whether this is a comparative or an absolute undertaking. Implicit in Levelling Up is, ‘Are we going to level up the North or the North West or North East to the standards of prosperity enjoyed in the South East or in London?’ Is that implicitly the goal? Or is it, let a thousand flowers bloom and we will benefit collectively from the diversity of policy approaches that are being taken? And even on the narrower canvas of regional development, there wasn’t clarity as to what the expectations was, other than every RDA would be seeking to raise levels of local productivity, investing in education, developing infrastructure, competing for inward investment, which takes you back to the implicit competition that doesn’t actually address historic inequities that we started with.
Q: Are we wrong to focus overly on economic policy levers in the devolution debate?
Yes. Again, I think the experience in Scotland is that fiscal devolution is the hardest to initiate, but it is one of the most important attributes of political accountability. If you are not prepared to devolve responsibilities and the fiscal means by which that responsibility can be discharged, you create a structural disequilibrium that finds expression in your politics. If it is possible for either regional mayors or combined authorities or RDA equivalents to simply blame the centre, that sets up a very different policy and political discourse than the assumption of responsibility inherent in wider powers.
That’s why I think that there needs to be clarity as to what are the expectations of the state at the centre which are non-negotiable; and against that floor, an ambitious degree of policy devolution to the ambitious responsibilities that are being provided.
I also think one of the risks of devolution which we’ve lived in Scotland could be characterised as ‘devolve and forget’. Even if you create effective structures of regional governance in England, and in particular on economic development, there is still a vital collaborative, catalysing, challenging role for ministers at the centre. If you move to stronger structures of regional economic development, the job of the centre changes to being the coach, the encourager, the challenger, the orchestra conductor, finding commonality amidst diversity.
The centre’s role needs to change in recognition of those devolved structures being created, because that’s the means by which you retain both an understanding of what holds the state together, and at best allows for effective learning across regional authorities and regional structures as to best policy making. To me, one of the measures of success for devolution in Scotland would be when a first minister stands up and says, ‘You know, they’re doing this much better in Greater Manchester or in Wales or in England or in Northern Ireland and we’re going to steal it as a policy.’ That’s inherently difficult in the politics of Scotland today, but my hope, as regional policy develops, would be that it would create a race-to-the-top rather than a race-to-the-bottom. Absent that central coordination function, my worry is that ‘devolve and forget’ leads to a default race to the bottom and actually ‘devolve and engage’ leads to a greater potential for a race-to-the-top.
Q: Were New Labour era coordination initiatives like Public Service Agreements a way towards this ‘devolve and engage’ approach?
They were certainly internally powerful instruments. Whether those were PSAs or other financial agreements that were put in place, they drove behaviours and policy outcomes. But they were an administrative response to a political challenge: we were dealing, overwhelmingly, with administrative regional structures rather than devolved political structures.
Q: Before devolution, Members of Parliament formed Grand Committees for Wales and Scotland to provide some democratic scrutiny that way, is that what would more regional accountability might look like?
I think they were worthy but largely ineffectual attempts to render administrative structures accountable. My feeling going forward is that you need to more closely align accountability with decision-making authority. That, in itself, is not sufficient if you want to sustain the cohesion of your country. The way through that Gordian knot is greater clarity about what the centre does and what the region does; which in turn requires appropriate engagement by the centre and the region in a way that is anchored in and reflective of the enduring responsibilities of the centre.
There is a horizontal clarity between the centre and the region – which I don’t think we achieved – so that when individuals from the centre or MPs, select committees from the centre, sought to offer regional accountability, the legitimacy of those structures were called into question. I think clarity is the way to resolve the structural tension between the centre and the region, and accountability is the way to resolve the tension between administrative power and democratic accountability.
Q: That ends up being an argument for some kind of direct accountability tier at the subregional or the regional level like a directly elected regional assembly, distinct from national political accountabilities or those of local government?
Yes. I think that is correct, albeit we don’t live in a symmetrical country. An awful lot of what we’ve been discussing reflects the fact that serious, earnest, committed people wrestled with the asymmetry, the lumpiness of our country, in different ways over many years. Can combined authorities like the West Midlands or Manchester become beacons of how England can do its politics differently in the future and implicitly, how the United Kingdom can do its politics differently? That is not a lone responsibility on Manchester or the West Midlands. It requires imagination and creativity at the centre. But equally, I sense no appetite in the Home Counties to create a tier of regional government coming anytime soon. The reality is we will therefore be asking policymakers to reconcile themselves to a very varied spectrum of appetite and accountability relative to different regions of the country.
I think the challenge is that regional structures do not create regional affinity. Regional affinity demands regional structures that are accountable. And the reality is, if you live in Surrey, you see Westminster as your parliament, and you don’t see the idea of a regional assembly in Guilford as being particularly appealing.
If you take this back to economic development, is the exam question that policy makers are trying to solve relative economic development or absolute democratic accountability? Those take you in different directions. If you’re saying, ‘Listen, frankly with Oxford, with Cambridge, the east of England, the South East of England…the Home Counties are going to be broadly okay. They don’t need those structures to the same extent.’ That takes you to a very different conversation than, ‘We need to try and find a symmetry,’ which, frankly, doesn’t exist in a country as varied as England. In government, we experienced the inherent challenge of reconciling at times contradictory and competing goods – rather than enjoying the luxury of clarity in the academy that doesn’t work in terms of the politics of regions across England.
Q: How important is a new constitutional settlement for England for reconciling Scotland’s place in the United Kingdom?
I think it is very important. One of the reasons there was an overwhelming endorsement for devolution in 1997 was not simply the prospect of the old administrative structures being rendered accountable with the Scottish Parliament, but also the attractiveness of being part of a modernised, democratised United Kingdom with an assembly in Northern Ireland, an assembly in Wales. I think one of the challenges is to give Scots confidence that they have a habitable and attractive home in a reformed and modernised United Kingdom.
With humility, I think we did what we could to try to advance economic development and democracy amidst a very lumpy country. If we get a government that is sincerely committed to the same objectives as we were pursuing, they will face the same challenges and end up with the same outcome. I think the idea that, after our experience in government, you revert to an implicitly symmetrical uniform solution is not right. But on the other hand, I think if you look at what’s happened in the North West – you look at the general extent to which people want to feel agency, control, pride, affinity, dignity in a sense of place – then actually, structures need to be part of it. I think the challenge is, what are those structures that still map against identity and reality? As I say, my experience is, regional structures don’t create regional affinities. Regional affinities demand regional structures.
The combination of political and official leadership feels to me to be the Holy Grail. You can enable that, but you can’t guarantee it. The problem of the lack of uniformity endures, and to me it feels insoluble rather than being something that, just with a bit more effort by the politicians, you can wish away.
ENDS