OF all leading Conservative politicians of the past half
century, the former Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine is perhaps the one
who has enjoyed the most complex relationship with his own party.
To some, he will be remembered as a spellbinding orator and party
conference crowd-pleaser par excellence – or as the late former MP Julian
Critchley memorably put it, the man who “always knew where the find the
clitoris of the Tory Party.”
To others, he will forever be the dark villain at the centre
of what they would see as the most shameful episode in the party’s recent
history – the defenestration of Margaret Thatcher after 11 years as Prime
Minister in 1990.
Perhaps his most lasting legacy to the party, though, will
be to have kept the flag flying for what became some distinctly unfashionable
causes in Conservative circles – Europe, state intervention, and above all,
regionalism.
Lord Heseltine’s long advocacy of regional policy as a way
of promoting both economic growth and social cohesion dates back to his time as
the ‘Minister for Merseyside’ in the wake of the Toxteth riots in the early
1980s.
But is a concept that fell so far out of favour among his
colleagues that practically the first thing the Tory-led Coalition did on
coming to power in 2010 was to abolish the regional development agencies.
In the light of this, perhaps the most surprising thing
about Lord Heseltine’s report on industrial strategy published this week under
the title ‘No Stone Unturned’ is that he was asked to write it at all.
Is it a sign of a new open-mindedness on the part of Prime
Minister David Cameron and his Chancellor George Osborne - or merely a sign of desperation
in the face of the country’s continuing economic plight?
Either way, it was inevitable that Labour would seize on Lord
Heseltine’s headline statement that the UK currently “does not have a strategy
for growth and wealth creation.”
This is, after all, exactly what Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls
has been saying all along – that the government needs an economic ‘Plan B’ that
puts more emphasis on generating growth and slightly less on cutting the
deficit.
Labour leader Ed Miliband is also understandably keen to
appropriate the ideas of a One Nation Tory like Heseltine in order to bolster
his own attempts to seize the ‘One Nation’ mantle from the Conservatives.
Indeed, it is a measure of how far politics has shifted on
its axis since the early 1980s that talk of measures to promote economic growth
and wealth creation is now regarded in some circles as “left-wing.”
Some of Lord Heseltine’s proposals have a familiar ring to
them. Since the early 1990s he has
viewed elected mayors as a general panacea for everything wrong with local
government, and it was no surprise to see him giving this another airing.
The idea of conurbation-wide or even region-wide mayors have
also been batted around before, and has some attractions as a halfway house
between an elected regional assembly which might be too big to care and local
authorities which are too small to cope.
A Mayor of Tyneside, for instance, would have the requisite critical
mass of political and financial clout to make a difference while still retaining
an element of local accountability.
As I have noted before in this column, it isn’t regional
government as we once knew it, but it may be the best, or indeed only, form of
regional government that’s ever likely to be on offer.
Lord Heseltine has also advocated handing over
responsibility for billions of pounds of central government expenditure to the
Local Enterprise Partnerships set up last year following the demise of the
RDAs.
But this nothing terribly new either. Moving power and budgets out of Whitehall
was exactly the idea behind the creation of the Government Offices for the
Regions in 1994 by the Major administration in which Lord Heseltine served, and
also New Labour’s establishment of the RDAs in 1999.
The GORs were wound up by the Coalition in March 2011,
exactly a year before the RDAs closed for business, but now Lord Heseltine proposes
to turn the LEPs into something that looks suspiciously like a recreation of
the two.
While it will be welcomed by those who bemoaned the loss of
this institutions, it surely also begs the question why it has been necessary
for him to reinvent the wheel.
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