November 13: Don’t let our county and country be carved up by factions

From: Geoffrey North, Silverdale Avenue, Guiseley, Leeds.

FOR the last few years, I have followed with increasing dismay the way politicians are playing about with our national and local authority boundaries.

Take Scotland. The SNP seem hell bent on self-destruction. In spite of a referendum which defeated their attempts to remove Scotland from the UK, they are relentlessly pursuing their fantasy.

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What if they had won? The decline in the price of North Sea oil, as well as depleting oil stocks, would have dire financial consequences. Separation would also threaten the national security of everyone in the truncated UK as well as Scotland. And for several decades the Scots have received very favourable financial support through the Barnett Formula. I sometimes wonder whether the SNP are thinking about the interests of the people they represent or more about their own self-aggrandisement.

But I am also concerned about what is happening to our great county of Yorkshire. During the last 50 years or more, it has been chopped and changed seemingly in the interests of political expediency. In the 1960s, the then government created Teesside County Borough. It lasted just six years before it was replaced by Cleveland County. At the same time the government created the metropolitan councils. Twelve years later, in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher abolished the metropolitan counties allegedly because they had become too powerful.

Today the present government is encouraging local authorities to accept directly-elected mayors. So far only 16 out of 326 local authorities in England have taken them on board. But in Yorkshire, the Government is pushing the model of “mayoral combined authority” whereby some urban authorities combine together to form a city region which would then elect its own mayor.

That is all right so far as it goes. But the process has created the unsavoury spectacle of some local authority politicians carving up chunks of Yorkshire into their own fiefdoms in which, incidentally, rural authorities become lost in political vacuums. City regions may well be a suitable concept but this is no way to reorganise our County.

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Let’s have an independent and reasoned review which analyses impartially the most appropriate structure of local government for Yorkshire. Otherwise we could be back to the drawing board in the years to come. In summary I am reminded of a line in a hymn: “Why must factions stir up conflict?”