Transport powers the key to devolution for the North

This week's Journal column, focusing on the long-running saga of the A1 dualling project and what it tells us about the need for greater regional devolution.

http://www.thejournal.co.uk/opinion/paul-linford-dual-a1-give-7995809

Is a Parliament for the North the answer to the English Question?

Well, on the basis that the North has 15m people in it and Scotland has 5m, it's one answer.

http://www.thejournal.co.uk/opinion/paul-linford-answer-english-question-7955796

A welcome report - but why is Heseltine having to reinvent the wheel?

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.

It's regional devolution, Jim, but not as we knew it

Writing last Saturday, the Newcastle Journal's regional affairs correspondent Adrian Pearson opened his column with the words: "If an elected mayor is the answer, what could possibly have been the question in North Tyneside?"

Well, allow me to have at least a stab at providing an answer.

There are plenty of cynical explanations. Elected mayors were originally the brainchild of the Tory cabinet minister Michael Heseltine in the early 1990s, and were seen by some at the time as an attempt to circumvent the power of high-spending, left-wing Labour councils.

Indeed, as Adrian pointed out in his column, this was precisely what later happened in North Tyneside, where Labour's stranglehold on local politics was finally thwarted by a succession of Conservative mayors in what became a recipe for decade-long infighting.

By the time New Labour came to enact Heseltine's proposed reforms, though, the agenda had changed somewhat. I believe Tony Blair's primary motivation for implementing elected mayors was simply to try to revive flagging voter interest in local government by, well, sexing it up.

In that sense, it was no more than a reflection of the trend towards ‘presidential’ politics that reached its apogee under Mr Blair, and which continues, though to a slightly lesser degree, under David Cameron.

The sorts of arguments that were heard then - "increased accountability through increased visibility" - are still used to promote the elected mayoral idea today - but a decade or more on, the debate has now become much more bound up with economic development and in particular with redressing regional economic disparities.

It is now very much part and parcel of the "city regions" concept that emerged from the wreckage of the regional government debate after the North East Assembly referendum debacle, with elected mayors seen as a way of giving their areas the kind of clout that properly-empowered assemblies might once have exercised.

This argument is already very much to the fore in the debate over whether there should be an elected mayor of Newcastle, for instance.

The city has yet to even make a decision on the issue - but already people such as Lewis Goodall of the regional policy think-tank IPPR North are talking openly about a directly-elected leader or 'metro mayor' not just for Newcastle but for the entire Tyneside conurbation.

"To really counterbalance the power of London, mayors need to have real powers to forge the destiny of their area," he wrote in Good Friday's Journal.

"Over time, this might mean a move towards a metro mayor for the wider city area - not just Newcastle but the surrounding conurbation too, with powers over economic development and transport."

To those of us with long memories, what is particularly interesting about that comment is that it was precisely those powers that the proponents of an elected regional assembly demanded - and failed to get - prior to the 2004 referendum.

I have always believed that had Mr Blair been more inclined to hand such powers to a regional body, the public might well have been more inclined to vote for it.

But regional government was only ever a means towards the greater end of tackling the North-South prosperity divide.

And as Lewis Goodall also pointed out in his piece, this is still very much with us, with the government planning to spend £2,700 per head on infrastructure projects in London compared to £5 a head in the North-East.

Looming over the whole debate over elected mayors is the larger-than-life figure of London Mayor Boris Johnson.

Not only has he enhanced the ‘accountability’ argument in favour of mayors by being a highly visible elected figurehead, he has also enhanced the economic argument by using his undoubted clout to further deepen that imbalance.

Mr Cameron’s own decision to axe regional development agency One NorthEast didn’t help matters either – but a gaggle of elected mayors flying the flag for the region could go some way towards filling that gap.

It isn’t regional devolution as we once knew it, Jim, but it might turn out to be the best form of regional devolution on offer.

Scottish independence won't be the end of the devolution 'process'

Back in 1998, a now almost-forgotten former Labour cabinet minister coined the phrase: "Devolution is a process, not an event."

They were in fact the words of Ron Davies, the architect of the Welsh Assembly who is now primarily remembered for his 'moment of madness' on Clapham Common and subsequent 'badger-watching' escapades near the M4.

But as the repercussions of New Labour's devolution reforms of the late 1990s continue to reverberate around the body politic, it is clearer than ever that Mr Davies was spot-on in his analysis.

Just as the former Cabinet secretary Gus O'Donnell predicted in his series of 'exit interviews' before retiring last month, the future of the Union has suddenly become one of the hottest of political hot potatoes.

The extent of the Prime Minister's gamble in seeking to strong-arm the Scottish government into holding a straight yes-no vote on independence within the next 18 months should not be underestimated.

A less risky strategy would surely have been for the Westminster government to carry on doing what it has been doing to the Scots for the past 30 years, namely try to buy them off.

The carrot on this occasion would not have been money in the form of the highly-advantageous Barnett Formula of public spending, but rather the promise of more powers – or “devo max” as it is termed.

By handing significant financial autonomy and accountability to the Scottish government while allowing it to remain in the UK, the government would surely have satisfied all but a minority of pro-independence diehards.

But Mr Cameron appears to have eschewed that option in what appears to be an all-out bid to destroy the Scottish Nationalist First Minister Alex Salmond and kill the idea of independence stone dead for a generation or more.

His attempt to set the timetable for the referendum as well as fixing the question is designed to pitchfork the Scots into an early vote in the hope that they will reject independence.

But will it actually have the opposite effect? Will the Scots simply see it as yet more unwanted meddling in their affairs by a distant English premier whose party enjoys so little support north of the border it nearly decided to change its name?

If so, then Mr Cameron is going to look remarkably stupid before this game of political chess is played out. So stupid, in fact, that it could be he, rather than Mr Salmond, who finds himself out of a job.

The future constitutional position of Scotland may seem like a rather arid subject to those of us south of the border, but for the North-East, it could have some rather interesting political repercussions to say the least.

For starters, an independent Scotland would be more likely to compete aggressively against the Northern English regions for inward investment – an issue that has reared its head from time to time even within the existing Union.

The wider implications, though, would be in the change in political balance within England and the impact that this would have on traditionally Labour-supporting areas.

The secession of the Scots would mortally Labour south of the border, ending any prospect of it holding power alone at Westminster again and permanently shifting the centre of political gravity to the right.

The Labour-supporting regions of the North - whose political cultures in fact have more in common with the Scots than with the Southern English – may well then find themselves even more marginalised by the Westminster Parliament.

This, in turn, might well lead to a revival of interest in the idea of devolution within England, perhaps within a pan-Northern context this time round rather than individual assemblies for the North-East, North-West and Yorkshire.

My guess is that if Mr Cameron’s gamble does backfire, and the Scots ultimately vote for independence, it won’t be too many years before we see calls for some sort of 'Council of the North' encompassing all three regions.

Fanciful? Well, maybe. But devolution is, after all, a process, not an event.

Could boundary review put regional governance back on agenda?

Over the course of the long debate about North-East regional governance, one of the most oft-heard arguments was that the region lacked the clout to make its voice heard at Westminster.

Well, if that was true then, when the region sent 30 MPs to the Commons, it will be even more the case after the next election when its representation will fall to just 26.

This week’s review of the Parliamentary boundaries will leave no part of the region untouched, with every single one of its current 29 constituencies affected.

Some constituency names – Blaydon, Wansbeck, Stockton South – will disappear from the electoral map altogether. Others will be variously merged, dismembered or renamed.

In sub-regional terms, the impact of the Boundary Commission’s proposed changes will be fairly evenly spread.

Northumberland and Teesside will each suffer a net loss of half a seat, while Durham and South Tyne and Wear will each suffer a net loss of one.

Faced with the choice of having constituencies that crossed county boundaries, or ones that crossed the River Tyne, the commissioners somewhat bizarrely opted for the former.

The result is a series of new seats – for example Newcastle North and Cramlington – where the traditional divide between metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas will be breached.

In terms of the impact on individual careers, one odd, but surely unintended consequence of the proposals is that two of the region’s ‘awkward squad’ – Wansbeck’s Ian Lavery and Blaydon’s Dave Anderson – are among those most at risk.

And those MPs which survive are likely to find themselves standing for re-election in constituencies which are almost unrecognisable from their existing ones.

Much of Nick Brown’s Newcastle East constituency, for instance, will go into the newly-created seat of Newcastle South.

It remains to be seen whether Mr Brown, who will be a month short of his 65th birthday by the time of the next election, will see that as an appropriate moment to call time on his long and distinguished career.

So much for individuals – what of the impact on the electoral politics of the region?

Well, for all the widespread assumption nationally that the changes are designed to clobber the Labour Party, this seems unlikely to be the case here.

The Liberal Democrats have been Labour’s main challengers in many of the region’s inner-city seats, but given their collapse in support in the North of England generally, Labour have little to fear in this regard.

While Hexham can be expected to remain solidly Conservative, and Berwick and Morpeth is likely to remain Lib Dem at least as long as Sir Alan Beith is its MP, the proposed changes appear to create few obvious opportunities for the Tories and Lib Dems elsewhere.

The biggest impact of the changes is likely to be on the influence of the region as a whole.

In terms of Parliamentary representation, it already lacked the critical mass to do much to influence the overall direction of government policy, as was seen during the Blair years when the region was effectively taken for granted.

This gradual loss of influence coincides with another broader trend, namely the increasing divergence between domestic policy in England and in other parts of the UK.

Post-devolution, Scotland and Wales had already begun to develop policies on health and education that are well to the left of the UK’s as a whole, and the Coalition’s public services reforms in England are further widening the gap.

The end result of all this may well see the North-East increasingly out of sympathy with the political consensus within England, yet unable to do much about it.

With its predominantly left-of-centre political culture, the region might start to look longingly in the direction of Scotland and Wales and the devolved powers which they enjoy.

It was widely assumed that the resounding no vote in the November 2004 regional government referendum had settled this question for a generation, perhaps even for eternity.

Seven years on, the day when it starts to creep back onto the agenda may not now be too far-off

'Gunboat diplomat' leaves Coalition in a pickle

More than 20 years ago, a young , Conservative council leader gained a measure of notoriety after unexpectedly seizing control of the hitherto safe Labour authority of Bradford.

Storming into office at the May 1988 local elections, he announced a five-year plan to cut the council's budget by £50m, slash the workforce by a third, and outsource most council-run services to private operators.

For a while, 'Bradford-style Toryism' became something of a by-word in local government circles, with some like-minded authorities modelling themselves on it, while others cited it as a warning of what happened when Tories took control.

After its brief flirtation with uber-Thatcherism, Bradford soon returned to the Labour fold - but that Tory council leader went on to become probably the most influential politician to emerge from local government since Labour's David Blunkett.

His name was of course Eric Pickles and, as Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government in the coalition administration, he is now in ultimate charge not just of Bradford but of every town and city hall in the country.

Among grassroots Tories, Mr Pickles is a hugely popular figure – but it is fair to say those feelings are not always shared by his Liberal Democrat Cabinet colleagues – or by political leaders in the North-East region.

During the early months of the Coalition, he fought a running battle with Business Secretary Vince Cable over whether the North-East should retain a distinctive regional voice – a battle characterised by briefing and counter-briefing on both sides.

It did not help that Prime Minister David Cameron was bored by the stalemate and told the protagonists to sort it out between themselves rather than taking sides.

What sort of regional political institutions will emerge from that process is still unclear. Many hope the proposed local economic partnership covering Durham, Northumberland and Tyne and Wear will be able to take on at least some of the role of axed regional development agency One NorthEast.

But the limitations of the scorched earth approach to all things regional employed by Mr Pickles and others in the Coalition's early days are already becoming clear.

As was revealed in a parliamentary answer this week, Dr Cable's department for Business, Innovation and Skills is having to create new local offices to carry out work previously carried out by the regional government offices.

This provides further proof of what some of us were saying all along: that if the regional tier of governance did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.

But if Mr Pickles' pathological hatred of regionalism has caused controversy in the North-East, his attitude to local government spending has caused ripples on a far wider scale.

Newcastle council leader David Faulkner was only one of more than 90 Liberal Democrat councillors who signed a letter to The Times this week protesting at the scale and pace of cuts to their authorities.

Part of their anger stems from Mr Pickles' uncompromising political style, which they described as 'gunboat diplomacy.'

"The secretary of state's role should be to facilitate necessary savings while promoting the advance of localism and the Big Society. Unfortunately, Eric Pickles has felt it better to shake a stick at councillors than work with us," said the letter.

The reference to the Big Society was illuminating, in the context of Labour-run Liverpool's recent refusal to co-operate with Mr Cameron's flagship initiative.

But the wider political significance of the row over local government spending is that it plays into the area of relations between the two governing parties.

Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg needs to be able to take his party with him if the Coalition is to survive long-term, and on this issue he is clearly some way from succeeding.

And there is only one place that will ultimately leave the government: in a pickle.

Region losing its voice as cuts start to bite

The day after David Miliband stepped aside from the Shadow Cabinet and Nick Brown was axed as Chief Whip, a Newcastle Journal headline posed the question: "Has the North East lost its political voice?"

If that was a pertinent question to ask then in the wake of the departure from frontline politics of two genuine regional heavyweights, it is even more so now.

Since then, we have seen the Parliamentary Labour Party fail to elect any of the four North-East MPs who stood for the Shadow Cabinet while choosing no fewer than seven from Yorkshire and Humberside.

And on Thursday, final confirmation that One North East, the development agency which has presided over a regional economic renaissance, is among the 192 quangos being axed by the coalition government.

The contrast with the regional political scene of a decade ago could not be greater. We regularly saw five or six North-East MPs occupying seats around the Cabinet table – depending on whether Peter Mandelson was in or out at any given time.

Their value has been long debated. Tony Blair admitted in his memoirs that he dared not be seen to favour his home region, and at least one of those Cabinet ministers admitted the same to me.

There was also the now largely dismantled regional political infrastructure – ONE, the regional government office created under John Major, and the regional assembly made up of senior councillors and other representatives.

Later on, under Gordon Brown, the North-East had its own minister in Nick Brown. Now it does not even have a single MP in government, let alone someone dedicated to sticking up for its interests.

In retrospect, it is clear that a more concerted effort should have been made to get behind a single North-East candidate in the Shadow Cabinet elections, probably Helen Goodman as she came closest to being elected.

But as it has turned out, the region is fairly well-represented in the middle ranks of Labour leader Ed Miliband's new team unveiled last weekend.

Ms Goodman joins Kevan Jones, Sharon Hodgson, Roberta Blackman-Woods and new MPs Chi Onwurah and Catherine McKinnell as shadow ministers, while Alan Campbell has been promoted to Deputy Chief Whip.

None of them, as yet, has the parliamentary stature of a Nick Brown or a David Miliband, but at least there is hope there for the future.

But if new leadership is going to come from anywhere, it surely needs to come from within the region itself, and here the picture is much less promising.

The moreorless wholesale disappearance of region-wide political institutions has left a void which the coalition's plans for yet more elected mayors will not begin to address.

One of the arguments made at the time of the regional assembly referendum was that a future Conservative administration would find it harder to get rid of an elected body than a panoply of unelected ones.

In retrospect, this was surely right. After all, the coalition is not abolishing the Welsh Assembly or the Scottish Parliament, even though those institutions cost many times more than the RDAs.

Hopes continue to linger that the government may yet allow the creation of a region-wide Local Economic Partnership to provide a single regional perspective where necessary.

But Whitehall's signals on this have been mixed to say the least and while Business Secretary Vince Cable may be supportive, it is clear that not all of his colleagues share his viewpoint.

Much of the debate around the governance of the North-East over recent decades has essentially been about the need for a distinctive regional political voice.

It is no exaggeration to say that, in a few short months, the coalition has managed to set back that cause by at least 20 years.

North-East referendum defeat was Prescott's "greatest regret"

Having closely followed the long debate over North-East regional devolution in my old role as Political Editor of the Newcastle Journal, I was intrigued to read this story in today's Guardian, in which John Prescott speaks of the failure to win the 2004 regional assembly referendum as his "greatest regret" in politics.

It was obvious all along that Prescott attached huge importance to the issue. Unfortunately for him, no one else in the Blair Cabinet thought it was remotely important, including of course the then Prime Minister himself.

Prescott is often derided as a figure of fun, but it is a measure of his underlying seriousness of purpose as a politician that he should regret this policy failure more than, say, the Prescott punch, the Tracey Temple affair, and building on the green belt, all of which had a much bigger impact on the way he was viewed by the press and public.

Regional government is now about as fashionable as a Spam fritter-eating Phil Collins fan in hot pants, but I for one have to admire Prezza for the fact that he is still happy to be identified with such an unpopular cause.

So much for the new localism

Local government reform is a notoriously difficult area and one in which you are inevitably going to end up upsetting one group or another. But I for one am surprised by the thrust of the latest proposals for unitary councils announced this week.

This government - both before and after the Blair-Brown handover - has made great play of its commitment to "new localism," and to devolving decision-making down to the lowest possible level. So it is disappointing that the big losers in this week's plans seem to be the district councils rather than the counties.

Cornwall, Durham, Northumberland, Shropshire and Wiltshire county councils will all become giant all-purpose authorities, with the districts in those areas disappearing. Two other county councils - Cheshire and Bedfordshire - will cease to exist in their current form, but other large single-purpose authorities will be created in those areas.

Why is the government doing this? Well, larger authorities tend to cost the taxpayer less, both in terms of administrative overheads and through economies of scale. I think what this goes to show is that when push comes to shove, governments will always put saving money before the importance of local democracy.

There may be another, less obvious explanation, and that is that the government is seeking to compensate for the loss of the regional assemblies whose abolition was announced the week before last. This will require the creation of "joint boards" of local authorities to oversee region-wide functions such as transport planning, and this will be far simpler with two or three counties than with 15-20 districts.

If I am right about this, it is surely another example of the operation of the law of unintended consequences - how abolishing an admittedly unpopular regional tier of governance actually ends up not bringing decision-making closer to the people, but taking it further away.

Unelected regional assemblies to be scrapped

My old paper The Journal has a bit of a scoop here with the news that the unelected North-East Assembly is set to be scrapped and its powers returned to local authorities. I am assuming that if true this will also sound the death-knell for other similar bodies across England.

The rationale appears to be that Gordon Brown is putting new forms of regional accountability in place through the new regional ministers, proposed regional "Question Times" and regional select committees.

The assemblies, which were set up by John Prescott and Dick Caborn as forerunners for what they hoped would be democratically elected regional bodies, will die a very unlamented death.

Although their members were drawn mainly from local authorities, they always lacked democratic legitimacy and have been living on borrowed political time since the overwhelming no vote in the 2004 North-East referendum put the coffin lid on the regional devolution project.

The fact that some of their powers are now set to be devolved to local authorities will no doubt be presented as an example of the government's new "localism" agenda, but this does not tell the full picture.

I have always rather doubted the ability of local authorities to think beyond their own boundaries and take into account the regional dimensions in policy making, for instance in areas such as strategic transport planning. This will ultimately create a political vacuum into which Whitehall will gratefully step.

That said, it's a reform which, as well as providing another symbolic break with one of the failures of the Blair era, will lose the new government very few votes in most parts of the country.

What it does not do, of course, is leave us any the wiser about what, if anything, El Gordo plans to do about the wider democratic deficit in England, although it does suggest he now accepts that regional assemblies - elected or otherwise - are not part of that solution.

Trust me, I'm not Tony

I passed up the opportunity to blog on the details of Gordon Brown's constitutional reform proposals this week because I wanted to save it for my weekend columns (for which I get paid!) Anyway here is my preliminary verdict, as published in this morning's Newcastle Journal. Some of it may be of particular interest to readers of Anglospheric tendencies.

***

During the course of the long debate over whether the North-East should have an elected assembly, one of the most oft-heard criticisms of the idea was that “it isn’t what they’re talking about down the Dog and Duck.”

If the truth be told, it wasn’t, as the November 2004 referendum result seemed to demonstrate.

Today, you can hear the same arguments being made about the wider constitutional reform agenda – that it isn’t a subject uppermost in people’s minds, that it “butters no parsnips” as Tony Blair rather unkindly put it.

Maybe so, but one issue they are certainly talking about down the mythical Dog and Duck is trust in politicians - or rather the lack of it.

So it is against that backdrop that Gordon Brown’s decision to make constitutional reform the subject of his first Commons’ statement as Prime Minister on Tuesday has to be seen.

It was always likely that Mr Brown's first big political initiative as premier would be designed to tackle the "trust" issue, for the simple reason that it was fundamentally this that forced his predecessor out before his time.

By handing over power to Parliament, and ultimately the people, Mr Brown thinks he can restore the public’s confidence in Labour after the spin and sleaze of the Blair years.

So the underlying message on Tuesday was not so much "I am a political anorak who sits up at night worrying about how to change our system of government," but simply "I am not like Tony Blair."

Mr Blair, of course, never had any time for constitutional matters. The Scottish and Welsh devolution agenda was the legacy of John Smith, and Mr Blair had little alternative but to implement it.

English regional government was an anathema to him and he actively sought to hobble the project by refusing to grant the proposed assembly anything like enough power.

Meanwhile House of Lords reform was left unfinished, and the House of Commons largely marginalised during his ten years in office.

And far from giving away powers as Mr Brown is now attempting to do, he positively revelled in the exercise of them, from waging war to appointing Church of England bishops.

The most predictable element of Mr Brown’s statement on Tuesday was that the power to declare war would be handed to Parliament – but in effect, this change has already taken place.

After the last time, if Mr Brown were now to try to wage war without a vote in the Commons, there would undoubtedly be rioting in the streets.

Potentially much more significant, in my view, is Mr Brown’s proposal to give up the right to recommend a dissolution of Parliament – namely, to decide when a general election should be held.

In a majority government situation, it is unlikely to mean much. But in a hung Parliament, it could dramatically limit a Prime Minister’s room for manoeuvre.

Among the other main proposals, moving election days from Thursdays to the weekend and lowering the voting age to 16 may or may not boost the percentage turnout that has steadily declining since 1992.

A more interesting way forward here might have been to announce a further pilot project on electronic voting, or, God forbid, reform of the electoral system itself.

But on the plus side, holding US-style hearings on key public appointments like the Governorship of the Bank of England is surely an idea whose time has come.

And by giving up the power to appoint bishops, Mr Brown has moved to address one of those peculiar British anachronisms that somehow seem to survive all attempts at modernisation.

For me, though, the most disappointing aspect of the package was the rather dismissive air that the new Prime Minister adopted towards the plight of four fifths of the UK population – the English.

Mr Brown was right to say that the Tory proposal of “English votes for English laws” makes little sense, but neither does the current status quo of Scottish votes for English laws.

An English Constitutional Convention to examine ways of tackling the English democratic deficit is the obvious way forward, and it is disappointing that Mr Brown hasn’t established one.

He did announce the creation of Commons select committees for each of the English regions – but if he sees this as the way of rebalancing the constitution in the wake of Scottish and Welsh devolution, he is in for a rude shock.

Don’t get me wrong – the committees are a positive step, and together with the dedicated regional ministers, should ensure that issues of regional importance are taken more account of at Westminster.

But essentially, they are a means of helping to address regional economic inequalities, no more.

What they are emphatically not is an answer to the so-called West Lothian Question – namely why do Scottish and Welsh MPs still have a say over English-only issues when the reverse is no longer the case?

And I cannot help worrying that Mr Brown is getting into regionalism at just such a time as people are starting to think less about regional identity and more about Englishness.

What, briefly, of the rest of the week’s events? Well, Health Secretary Alan Johnson’s announcement of a moratorium on further NHS restructures will certainly help restore staff morale.

And giving local people in cities like Newcastle and Sunderland more say over council budgets is further proof of the new government’s determination to devolve power.

Attention over the past couple of days has focused on Mr Brown’s rather lacklustre performance at his first Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday - but that was never going to be his strength.

Launching a serious and policy-rich agenda was. And on that score, he is so far delivering.

State of the Union podcast

The Union between England and Scotland was 300 years old last Tuesday - but how much longer can it last in the face of the growing demands for independence north of the border and growing resentment south of it at the lack of an equivalent English voice?

Plenty of subject-matter there for my latest Week in Politics podcast which can now be heard HERE

The lone voice

I expect most bloggers will disagree or even laugh at this, but there is a certain, magnificent stubbornness about John Prescott which I can't help but admire. While the New Labour project as a whole has been all about shifting with the political wind, that is one thing you can't lay at Big John's door.

Two years and three months ago, the people of the North-East dealt a death-blow to the prospects for English regional government by voting 4-1 against plans for an elected North-East Assembly. It immediately became clear that the idea was dead in the water as far as other regions were concerned and it swiftly disappeared off the political agenda.

Those of us, amongst whom I include myself, who initially supported the idea as a way of rebalancing our lopsided constitution, were forced to reappraise our position. I eventually concluded that an English Parliament represented a more promising way forward for English devolution, and recent polls seem to have borne that out.

Yet, to listen to his speech to the New Local Government Network yesterday, none of it seems to have made the slightest dent in Mr Prescott's belief in the inevitability of his regionalist dream.

"A regional level of administration is necessary alongside the need for the new localism. Regional planning is an essential part of the accountability that is needed from elected representatives rather than appointed regional civil servants," he said.

"I'm sad that regional government was rejected in the North East, but I believe that England will eventually move to elected regional government - just as Scotland and Wales originally rejected devolution and then voted for it."

Some might call it contempt for the electorate. Others might call it losing touch with reality. Both would be justifiable accusations, but for me there is still something admirable about a politician who is prepared to say what he thinks in defiance of the conventional wisdom.

He may be wrong, he may even be stupid - but at least he's genuine.

Kenyon Wright, right, right

This was supposed to be embargoed until 5am tomorrow morning, but as reported in today's Glasgow Herald and on the Campaign for an English Parliament Newsblog, an English Constitutional Convention under Canon Kenyon Wright is to be launched at the House of Commons tomorrow afternoon to call for a "strong" English Parliament as part of a federal UK.

Canon Wright was of course the chair of the Scottish Constitutional Convention in the 1990s which helped pave the way for Scottish devolution, and was also, like me, a supporter of the North-East Constitutional Convention established in 1998 under the chairmanship of the then Bishop of Durham, which aimed to establish a North-East Assembly as a precursor to English regional government.

In the press release announcing tomorrow's event, Canon Wright acknowledges that he was formerly an active campaigner for the regionalisation of England, but that he now believes only the establishment of a Parliament for England will answer "the so-called West Lothian Question."

He explains: "Two things have changed my personal view. First, it is now clear after the North East Referendum, that regional government is a non-starter in the foreseeable future, and we cannot wait for further change. Second, I have become convinced that England has a growing sense of national identity as strong as ours, and therefore that an English Parliament, if the people want it, is as much your right as we claimed it to be ours."

It is very hard to disagree with any of this. I myself reached the same conclusion within nine days of the referendum result, in a Newcastle Journal column published in November 2004 entitled England Expects a Fair Crack of the Whip.

People have asked me since how I could possibly be in favour of an English Parliament if I was also in favour of regional assemblies, but the point was that something needed to be done to give England/the English regions a stronger political voice as well as a fairer funding deal, and, bizarre as it may now seem, regional government looked for a long time like the most politically plausible means of achieving that.

Other members of the Great and the Good who have lent their support to the Convention include Iain Dale of the blogosphere, who recently cryptically hinted that he was up to something on the English devolution front and is clearly now one of the main proponents of the idea within the Tory Party.

His party leader, of course, disagrees, preferring to put his faith in the unworkable policy of English votes for English Laws. Canon Wright will argue tomorrow that simply banning Scottish MPs from voting in the Commons on English legislation will "create more problems than it solves."

It will also be interesting to see what Dr Vernon Coleman brings to the party. I still have a (review) copy of his book I Hope Your Penis Shrivels Up, in which he expresses the view that all supporters of foxhunting should be "buried from the neck down in the fast lane of the M4."

Whilst not fundamentally disagreeing with the gist of those sentiments, I suspect that slightly more sophisticated arguments will be required if the campaign is to succeed in getting an English Parliament firmly on the national political agenda.

Are city regions a runner for Labour?

In my newspaper columns at the weekend I focused on the Government's plans for "city regions" as outlined by Ruth Kelly in a speech last week.

The idea is to use the "London model" of an elected mayor with powers cutting across local authority areas to streamline accountability and galvanise economic development across eight major conurbations.

It's a good idea in theory, but to my mind, it raises different issues for different cities.

Manchester and Birmingham are already city regions and the plan makes a good deal of sense there. I am less sure whether it makes sense for Newcastle, and I am absolutely damned sure it makes no sense for Nottingham. Derby and Leicester, which was ludicrously labelled a potential "city region" by one of Ms Kelly's spokespeople, even though no-one in either city has actually suggested it.

Accordingly, the issue was given different treatment in each of the different columns I wrote about it.

The Newcastle Journal column can be read HEREwhile the North West Enquirer version can be viewed HERE. Unfortunately the other two are not online yet.

Regional government not dead then?

In a Guardian article guaranteed to raise the blood pressure of the Campaign for an English Parliament and others, UCL Constitution Unit head Robert Hazell has today argued that there is a future for regional government in England after all.

"Regional government in England is the only solution that offers an answer to both versions of the English question. It could help give England a louder voice within the union, and help decentralise the government of England. But defeat in the North East referendum in 2004 has raised the bar," he writes.

"Any future proposals for elected regional assemblies will need to offer a stronger set of powers and functions. The GLA provides a possible model, with London's Olympics bid showing that a strategic authority can make a difference in promoting a region, both within the UK and to the wider world."

I think I shall just light the blue touchpaper, and retire....

English Parliament campaigners put me on the spot!

As readers of this blog will know I support the Campaign for an English Parliament as a means of balancing our topsy-turvy constitution which gives Scottish and Welsh MPs a say over English affairs but no corresponding say for English MPs over Scotland and Wales. Now the CEP's Gareth Young has carried out a wide-ranging interview with me on the issue which can be read on the campaign newsblog.

In return Gareth has kindly admitted me to the Witanagemot Club which is a corner of the blogosphere devoted to exploring the issues around English political identity.