Renouncing power may sound like a good idea on paper. There may be plenty of sound reasons to share decision making and spread respons-ibility. In practice, though, it can be hard to let go. And so with Labour and devolution. The Government’s history of devolving powers from Westminster has been, at best, messy. The process of introducing supposedly “local choice” has witnessed egregious bouts of control freakery: the foisting, for instance, of the hapless Alun Michael on the people of Wales, an arrangement with which neither party was happy. The results have led to confusion: Labour is braced for an apparently fierce anti-Blair vote in the elections next spring to the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly, even though the Prime Minister has nothing to do with the business or policies of either.
Mr Blair was never a particular fan of Scottish and Welsh devolution, one of the few policies he inherited from John Smith that he felt unable to junk. But the Government is now going cold on Mr Blair’s one genuinely sound devolutionary idea, that of directly elected mayors to wield some executive power. That would be a shame.
The local government White Paper, at inception, was envisaged as a radical document that would galvanise councils into thinking more innovatively about the provision of local services. The promotion of elected mayors was central to such a vision. If granted powers and money to enact distinctive and imaginative policies, mayors would, for instance, help to ensure that local elections were fought over local issues rather than being a miniature snapshot of national sentiment. This would, in theory, galvanise voters and make local government more sensitive to their wishes.
Elected mayors, though, have had powerful enemies. John Prescott, when he presided over a Whitehall empire that included responsibility for local government, was not a fan. His big, bad idea of regional assemblies was so popular that in the only part of the country in which popular opinion was tested, the allegedly enthusiastic North East, it was defeated in a referendum by 4-1. MPs have also been cool, suspicious of creating powerful local figures who may compete for local newspaper headlines.
Some will doubtless choose to view the change in policy as the first sign of the Brown premiership as the Chancellor works to ensure he does not inherit policies that are not precisely to his taste. Such a view is not necessarily correct. This would not be the first time that Mr Brown had felt the need to intervene in another department’s minutiae. Charles Clarke is not the only minister to have suffered such indignity. Some of Mr Brown’s instincts are sound. Giving taxpayers’ money to neighbourhood groups, even if representative, would not be desirable if that group were, for instance, the British National Party.
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One of the unfortunate results of the lousy way in which elected mayors were initially presented is that many voters in the dozen cities that already have them are in revolt at the idea, when all they have to do is elect a different mayor. The case for elected mayors needs to be remade. There should be enough evidence from London to interest other big cities. And suspicious voters can rest assured on one point: because Ken Livingstone is busy running London, he will not be able to run their city.