I’m a proud Yorkshireman – but does it need so many councils? – Yorkshire Post Letters

An émigré Yorkshireman living in London, I am delighted to be able to enjoy the pages of The Yorkshire Post by means of the smartphone app – not least for the editorial, opinion, and letters pages on the frustrating but fascinating debate over the re-constitution of local authorities within Yorkshire.

I have watched the haphazard, tactical and illogical lurching of our local authority structures since my teens in the early 1970s (Craven District, and a move of my native Skipton from the West Riding into the new North Yorkshire being seminal events in my political awareness).

At no point over the intervening decades has anything remotely resembling a comprehensive, system-wide blueprint been revealed (and I am sure there never was one). Authorities such as Avon, Cleveland, West Midlands etc have come and gone. The boundaries and structures, and budget responsibilities, have constantly shifted; but there’s less and less sense of cohesion in the system and still less understanding of it in the minds of most UK subjects (sadly, in what is still – incredibly – a monarchy, one cannot write “citizens”).

My adopted home in Beckenham has been in the enlarged London since the 1965 boundary changes, yet people born here long since still refer to it as part of Kent.

I have long felt that counties are a Norman, feudal anachronism – excellent for geographical identity and tradition but inappropriate in size, style and nature for the purposes of good governance and administration. I will always be a Yorkshireman – but that does not make me yearn for a Yorkshire local authority. Therein lies the same fallacy as led half the population to vote for the delusional folly of Brexit.

Instead, in a near future in which England comes closer and closer to eventual independence from the UK, it needs to be governed away from Whitehall and this requires full devolution red in tooth and claw. Counties are too small for this purpose, yet too large in many cases as a sub-regional entity. England needs four regions, with proper parliaments, replacing the House of Commons: North; Midlands; South-East-including-London; and South-West.

Once we get this right, the constant unproductive tactical tinkering can be put to bed. I do wish there were a nationwide blueprint for this. Instead, we have the dismal sight of councils competing to save their own skin in each successive re-structuring.

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Thank you

James Mitchinson