Time for real devolution across Britain – Yorkshire Post Letters

UNDER David Cameron we heard a lot about the Northern Powerhouse, a vague aspirational term replaced by an even vaguer one worthy of Boris Johnson ‘levelling up’, but there is apparently no plan to create a coherent system of local government with real powers.

Anything we receive from London will therefore continue to be provided on the same old ad hoc basis: a large slice of fudge wrapped in recycled white paper. Metro mayors created “as part of the Government’s devolution agenda” with the power to tweak a bus timetable but no significance outside the electric fences which demarcate their little fiefdoms while stopping them from escaping.

Our masters allowed devolution in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales – each Parliament or Assembly with different powers and obligations to the rest – while denying the same thing to England: we must share our Parliament with the rest and like it. Even the constituent nations in truth hold their powers from Whitehall and have no influence on UK government policy, imparting the same sense of powerlessness felt by the English regions, and aggravating the Scots to the extent that nationalism has grown apace.

Faced with an enormous local democratic deficit and the prospect of the United Kingdom breaking up, what we desperately need is a new and consistent form of local government: a federal system based on regional parliaments with powers to raise and spend their own taxes, and with representation at UK level in an elected Senate to replace the House of Lords. Only something as far reaching as this can save and revitalise the nation.

From: Gareth Robson, Beckenham.

I WRITE in praise of the article by Philip Rycroft (The Yorkshire Post, January 23) on devolution. How I long for an open, public, UK-wide debate led by people with his grasp of the facts, difficulties and opportunities.

We have witnessed two decades of tinkering, involving haphazard bits of partial devolution. This has led to the “mess” of different authorities and geographies which Philip Rycroft describes superbly. It’s as though Whitehall didn’t really want power devolved at all.

We need that debate and it must deliver a new post-UK blueprint – one which prepares a gradual, planned, transition to a new four-nation reality: a re-united Ireland; an independent Scotland; a Wales free to decide whether to remain part of England or to become independent; and, finally, an England properly devolved to large regions rather than haphazardly-created local mayors and their fiefdoms.

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