Andy Burnham’s devolution plans will rile the nation

Alarm bells are now ringing loudly over new prime minister Andy Burnham’s lack of any detailed vision for Britain. Yet amid the vague promises of ending the politics of division, and the usual platitudes that Burnham has somehow managed to rebrand as ‘doing politics differently’, he has offered one relatively clear new proposal. Namely, that the UK would have a second No10 in Manchester, and Whitehall’s power would be decentralised and dispersed across the regions. It is, in short, a vision of a devolved and federalised English state.

This is a peculiar prescription for the nation’s ills. No one has asked for such a radical constitutional shake-up. Nearly 30 years of national devolution in the UK have achieved little beyond emboldening regional nationalists who loathe England and Westminster intensely. And beyond Andy Burnham himself, few see local government as benevolent, and certainly don’t want to give it more power.

Indeed, local government is renowned among the British public for its inefficiency, unaccountability and pettiness. I speak daily to hundreds of members of the public in my job in broadcast media, and people certainly get vexed by, say, the senseless handing over of the Chagos Islands, or the appointment of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador. But it’s the issues that materially affect people’s day-to-day lives that really get people angry: infrequent bin collections, overzealous parking restrictions sold off to detestable third-party enforcers, 20mph zones, ULEZ, low-traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) and being fined for pouring coffee down a drain. And yet it’s the bodies responsible for these policies that are to be given more control over our lives under Andy Burnham’s Labour.

I suspect that there are very few members of the general public who want to increase local-government power. Once people realise that Burnham’s devolution plans entail exactly that, they will soon run out of patience with a PM who promises to do things oh-so differently.

Burnham’s plans for English devolution will also further fragment the nation, one already struggling with regional disparities in industry, population, wealth and resources. The reasons why certain towns and areas are poorer than others are complicated, multifaceted and historic. It’s not clear how Burnham’s devolution vision will change this. What sets back Middlesbrough, Blackpool and Redcar now will not change when councils or regional mayors have the ability to tax local residents further.

Furthermore, the consultation process for councils to inform and ask the public what they think of the proposals is desperately wanting. Councils are not required to advertise the consultations, nor are they legally bound to follow the public’s findings. A broken local-media landscape means there will be even less accountability.

Britain is in trouble. The economy is seemingly endlessly stagnant, and sources of common national identity are increasingly thin on the ground. Devolution for Scotland and Wales, and the endless erosion of England’s institutions, mean there is even less to unite the regions today. Burnham’s ultra-regionalised national project will surely only make that situation worse.

The risks of these devolution plans are myriad. If MPs want to get a sense of them, they could do worse than look at the fate of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia over three decades ago. While Britain and England are very different historically, culturally and politically to Yugoslavia, the break-up of the latter during the 1990s should still serve as a partial warning.

In the mid-to-late 20th century, Yugoslavia faced some of the same problems that England faces today. As the Yugoslav economy struggled during the 1960s, Yugoslavia’s leader, Marshal Tito, set up a centrally planned federal wealth fund which slowly ate the country alive from the inside. Wealthier regions paid extra in taxes to give dispensation to the poorer regions. Over time, this simply increased the gap between the rich and poor. Moreover, the wealthier regions of Slovenia and Croatia began to resent the poorer eastern and southern provinces, where abject poverty persisted. By 1980, Tito was dead, and with him a belief in Yugoslavia, and its regional and federalised structure. He left a nation whose constituent parts were increasingly at odds with each other. The writing was on the wall, long before the bloody break-up of the 1990s.

And so a nation vanished, amid economic decline and a rapid deindustrialisation that the state could no longer support. The People’s Republic failed its people and gave way to a vicious ethno-nationalism.

Burnham, of course, is no Marshal Tito, and Britain and England are not Yugoslavia. But in an economically challenged nation, riven with regional disparities and tensions, Burnham’s plan for devolution is only likely to power those forces that would tear us apart.