11.11.2004

Referendum debacle

On November 4, the people of the North East delivered a humiliating blow to John Prescott’s dream of an elected assembly for the region, which he hoped would generate demand for the creation of similar bodies throughout England.

Of those who voted 78% were against the government’s proposals. This was the one region where it was believed there was a genuine sense of regional identity, but the surprisingly high turnout, by recent standards, of 48% left no room for doubt that, however distinctively ‘north eastern’ they may have felt, the electorate did not see any need for a new layer of government to be established.

According to its supporters in the official ‘Yes for the North East’ campaign, the proposed 25-member assembly would have “take[n] power from government in London and hand[ed] it to the people of the North East”, enabling them to “support jobs in our home-grown industries, provide affordable homes for first-time buyers and create better public transport”.

The reality of the product on offer was rather different and utterly pathetic, when compared with the legislative powers of the Scottish parliament and even the limited policy remits of the Welsh assembly and the Greater London Authority.

The £500 million annual budget envisaged for the assembly would have come primarily from central government and been subject to whatever conditions the secretary of state saw fit. Its putative role in determining the strategy of the existing regional development quango would have been undermined by a government veto and compulsory revision if the secretary of state considered that its policies failed to “address national priorities”, were “inconsistent” with them or “likely to have a detrimental effect on areas outside the region” (a remarkable restriction, considering that the assembly’s raison d’être was to help the North East increase its economic competitiveness and narrow the productivity gap between it and other parts of the country).

Contrary to the claims of the ‘yes’ camp, the assembly would have had no meaningful powers over transport, housing and the environment either - merely a right to be “consulted” on these issues by the bodies already responsible for them.

Even the claim that this body would give the region a “louder and stronger voice because its representatives would have a democratic legitimacy” is tenuous, because representatives without significant power are unlikely to earn more than token respect, no matter how many people have voted for them. The unelected bureaucrats that these elected ‘ambassadors’ were supposed to replace would still have made the real decisions in accordance with the guidelines set by Whitehall.
The assembly would, therefore, have been little more than a pension-accruing talk shop for former council leaders and a training ground for would-be career politicians.

However, while communists may be pleased with the outcome of the referendum, it does not follow that we have any time for the arguments of those who led the campaign against the proposals. North East Says No, the anti-assembly lobby given official recognition and public funding by the electoral commission (through a ludicrous process via which a statutory agency decides which critique should be awarded the ‘no’ franchise), was supported by many reactionary elements, including the Conservatives and the United Kingdom Independence Party. Its campaign emphasised the opposition of business leaders and whipped up fears of increased council taxes.

In the last couple of weeks before the poll, it was revealed that the campaign’s official information line was a UKIP call centre in Preston, whose operators were telling enquirers that the base for the assembly would be a purpose-built complex in the North Yorkshire hamlet of Littlethorpe - which is not even within the region.

Communists support the right of nations to self-determination. In the case of Scotland and Wales we call for a parliament with real powers - and, perfectly consistently, advocate that they use that power in favour of unity in a federal republic with England.

But Prescott’s so-called regional devolution debate has been a distraction from the real crisis of local democracy in the UK state. New Labour has continued the trend established by the Tory governments of the 80s and 90s of undermining local government by stripping away its powers. Councils are now merely the municipal managers of central government policy, permitted only to apply local nuances to tightly prescribed diktats from Whitehall.

The role of local authorities is likely to diminish further in the next few years, as the government takes decision-making powers away from democratically elected councillors and gives them to local ‘partnership bodies’, where the elected element is outnumbered by senior bureaucrats from statutory agencies, business leaders and a voluntary sector that is increasingly driven by petty bourgeois commercial imperatives rather than a public service ethos.

The capacity for local people to change things at a municipal level is further restricted by the requirement for all major public projects to obtain finance from the private sector and a multiplicity of government-appointed agencies, each with their own stipulations and national targets.
We are for genuine local autonomy, with councils - run by accountable and recallable elected representatives - having real decision-making and financial powers.