powers of each. Throughout my time in local newspapers and radio, I kept a dogeared copy of my public administration textbook by my desk in case of emergency.
The social and political turmoil of the 1980s saw the invention of a new and unofficial English boundary — the North-South divide. The
There were two important political consequences: northern England became increasingly resentful at the London-based government, while the Labour opposition became more interested in regional devolution. The party’s bookish leader Michael Foot asked an MP with impeccable northern working-class credentials, John Prescott, to produce an Alternative Regional Strategy, a task he undertook with enthusiasm.
Labour’s interest in regional policy also coincided with important changes on the international stage: the European Community had told member states that huge sums in development aid, so-called Structural Funds, would be channelled directly to regional bodies. To many UK Tories, this looked like the slippery slope to Euro-federalism and a threat to British sovereignty. So the politics of English administration became sharply polarised between the traditionalist instincts of the Conservative Party and the devolutionary demands of the Labour heartlands.
When John Major arrived at Number Ten, struggling with trunk-loads of anti-European baggage, he sought to emphasise his love for Olde England, ‘the country of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers’, as he later described it. It was vital he stressed his patriotic credentials as he negotiated Britain’s place in Europe. So, just as he was signing the Maastricht Treaty, which gave English regions a voice within the new European Union, Major also set up a commission to review the controversial changes to county boundaries that had so angered his party’s rural power base.
The chair of the commission, the business leader Sir John Banham, had been handed a poisoned chalice, of course. He said he hoped for some ‘early wins’ by abolishing the unloved new areas of Avon, Cleveland and Humberside, but he was quickly ensnared by the deep passions and ancient prejudices of local governance in England, as well as the complexities of Westminster politics.
The commission was unable to recruit enough willing staff, saw its funding squeezed, its terms of reference changed and its deadline brought forward. There was intense lobbying from MPs of all shades, trying to influence the new power structures within their constituencies, particularly the creation of authorities based around towns or smaller counties. Tempers became frayed and when Sir John Banham presented his plan in 1995, the government refused to accept all his recommendations. ‘I well recognise that the commission has not done the bidding either of the government or of the parliamentary Labour Party,’ Sir John wrote bitterly, as he cleared his desk.
From the tangled mess, the counties of Herefordshire and, yes, Rutland were awoken from their slumbers, restored as local government bodies. But Huntingdonshire was denied authority status because ‘there was no exceptional county allegiance’, Cumberland and Westmorland likewise. Lancashire and Derbyshire, fearing their abolition, went to the High Court and won a reprieve from total bureaucratic execution, but Somerset lost its case. Most of the historic counties saw chunks of their territory carved off or administered from town or city centres, a technocratic exercise based primarily on urban geography rather than English history.
The Conservatives attempted to defuse some of the simmering resentment in the Tory shires by quietly drawing up the Lieutenancies Act, legislation nodded through the House of Lords that consolidated the role of a county’s Lord Lieutenant — an office dating back to Tudor times. In an appendix, the Act defined English counties by their historic boundaries, thus ensuring that the existence of the ancient shires was retained within the legislative structure. The presence of a uniformed Lord Lieutenant with his (or her) responsibilities for arranging visits of the Royal Family, presenting medals, advising on honours and liaising with the local military, played elegantly to the traditionalist cause. But it also added to the general confusion.
When New Labour bounded to power in 1997, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott was rewarded with his own sprawling Whitehall empire, the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions. The letter ‘R’ in DETR gave him licence to dust off his Alternative Regional Strategy, creating nine agencies dotted around England to take control of billions in development funds.
By its second term, Tony Blair’s government was suggesting it might go much further: there was talk of a ‘regional renaissance’, with proposals for English regions to be put at the heart of ‘a modern and more prosperous society’. Prescott was the flag bearer of the plans for elected regional assemblies, but he faced some formidable obstacles. Not only did he have to convince the sceptical Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to relinquish some of their centrally based powers and resources; as he tried to draw the new regions, he re-awakened the traditionalists in the historic counties. ‘Is it not the case that whenever a boundary is drawn around anything, people on the edge of it believe that they should be on the other side?’ asked one MP. ‘In the end, no one is ever happy,’ advised another. ‘The solution is not simply for a minister or a civil servant to sit in an office in Whitehall with a map of England and a blue pen.’
The Deputy Prime Minister pressed ahead but, without enthusiastic backing from Brown and Blair, he was obliged to reign in his ambition for a speedy devolution of power to the English regions. He agreed to test his plans on the area of England he thought would be most receptive to the idea of regional government, the north-east. On 4 November 2004, the Great North Vote was held. The referendum had seen two distinct strategies: the ‘yes’ campaign (Be Proud, Be Positive, Vote Yes) was filled with uplifting anthems, balloons and local celebrities; the ‘no’ campaign (Vote No to More Politicians, More Bureaucracy, Extra Taxes) consisted largely of an inflatable white elephant plonked unceremoniously in shopping centres. When the votes were counted, the result was decisive: overwhelming rejection by a ratio of almost four to one.
It was a massive blow to John Prescott and his supporters, some of whom turned their fire on what they called the ‘Westminster class’. Kevin Meagher, a ministerial advisor and committed regionalist wrote: ‘The civil service smirked. You could sense their
It may have been a lack of Cabinet support, but the clear-cut nature of the result suggested something more: a profound distrust of bureaucrats, administrators and their political masters. Even in the north-east, with its powerful regional identity, the simple message contained in a blow-up pachyderm was enough to get people registering their opposition to the idea of an elected assembly.
Around the same time, some particularly irked traditionalists in the shires were embarking upon a counter- offensive. A group calling itself CountyWatch was promising ‘direct action’ in its fight to ‘keep alive and healthy the names and the real boundaries of our counties’. Television crews were on hand as members ripped out twelve signs that claimed to mark entry into ‘County Durham: Land of the Prince Bishops’, and then re-erected them along the historic border between Yorkshire and Durham, the River Tees. In another covert operation, a CountyWatch cell stole four ‘Welcome to Bedfordshire’ road signs from the edge of Luton (an independently administered town within the historic county) and re-erected them in front of ‘Welcome to Luton’ signs a few miles away. ‘This is absolutely crazy,’ a councillor complained.
Under the patronage of Count Nikolai Tolstoy, a colourful Anglo-Russian monarchist, CountyWatch claimed to have removed, re-sited or erected eighty county boundary signs in Dorset, County Durham, Greater Manchester, Hampshire, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, North Yorkshire, Somerset and Warwickshire. The campaign connected with a general anxiety that administrative change threatened to cut England off from its roots, and there was a series of parliamentary attempts to force local authorities and surveyors to respect historic boundaries when erecting traffic signs or drawing maps.
The member for the constituency of Romford was particularly exercised. ‘As I travel back after a busy week at Westminster to my home town,’ he said, ‘I enter the boundaries of Essex and Romford, but nowhere do I see a road sign welcoming me to either place. They have been written off the map by a dreadful local government culture that seems to recognise only the often made-up and artificial names of administrative boroughs or districts.’ An MP from Somerset blamed the ‘successive waves’ of local authority reformers: ‘People are not defined by the authority that collects their rubbish, but by the place in which they grew up and live.’
Efforts to win government support for the Historic Counties, Towns and Villages (Traffic Signs and Mapping) Bill got nowhere — the Labour Cabinet Office minister Gillian Merron said proposals to freeze-frame history were
