Three years ago, Ipsos asked Britons a simple question: does the government care about places like yours? Eighty per cent said no. Not eighty per cent of the North, or of the poorest areas – eighty per cent of everyone, comfortable and struggling, north and south alike. In a few weeks, Andy Burnham will enter Downing Street with an answer to that number: move power out of Westminster, to regions and towns, and people will feel they count again. He is right that place sits at the heart of Britain’s unhappiness, but the cure he is carrying into No. 10 is a fantasy.
It is no accident that people in Scotland and Wales remain lukewarm about devolution
Ask people what they want from the place they live, and they’ll tell you they want more say, more control, more power over their own area. But keep talking to them – as I have for four years while researching a book on this – and they’ll tell you what they actually mean. They want their place to feel looked after. They want it to be somewhere that still works. They want, in short, what that Ipsos question asked about: to feel that somebody cares.
Start with power. Pushing it out of Whitehall is now something many politicians agree on. The theory is that bringing decisions closer will make people feel heard. Which sounds obvious. It is also wrong.
Scotland and Wales have held real power for more than 25 years but only around a third of people in Wales and fewer than half in Scotland think it has been a good thing. Offered more power, people often decline to use it: turnout for police and crime commissioners – an office invented to hand policing to local voters and soon to be scrapped – has struggled to reach a third of voters.
This is how democracy works. Most people don’t experience politics through institutions. Many struggle to name their MP while voters blame Westminster for potholes and the council for cuts decided in Westminster. We experience politics through what is directly in front of us – what we can see, hear and touch, the way places like ours get talked about, not who pulls which lever.
Look at what people actually notice. Ask voters what England’s mayors have done and the answers are all tangible: capped fares, new trams, Manchester’s yellow buses. Andy Burnham is the proof of this. His popularity is cited as the case for moving power. It is really the case for delivery. Power does nothing on its own; only when the bus comes does anyone notice and takes as evidence that somebody cares. It is no accident that people in Scotland and Wales remain lukewarm about devolution. Holyrood and the Senedd have real power and more money per head than England – some of what Burnham is promising – but if you struggle to wield that power, as many governments do, then people will question what it is for.
Maybe you think all this is all rather depressing. It isn’t. This is a cry for politicians to stop rearranging the furniture and fix the roof. It means the answer has never been that complicated. If you want voters to notice you, make their lives better.
So far, this has been about power. The second mistake is the belief that place matters only for some of us. That the question devolution answers is asked only in the North and answered with money moved north. But our love of where we live and the wish to see it looked after is not something you can only find in one place. The commuter in Surrey is as attached to his town as the ex-miner in Doncaster is to his. In fact, more Britons say they belong to their neighbourhood than support a football team or support the monarchy.
Go back to that Ipsos number. Eighty per cent is enormous: a number that size leaves no room for a contented south. You might ask what a prosperous southern town could have to complain about, but that is missing the point. The complaint is not really about hardship or money. It is about respect: the sense that somebody, somewhere, has decided which places count and yours is not among them.
And people learn whether their place counts the same way they learn everything else: from what is done where they live and what is said about it. Northern towns learned they did not count by watching money, attention and respect go to somewhere else. For a decade, British politics has answered with a vocabulary of place that names only some places: the ‘left-behind’ town, the ‘Red Wall’, ‘levelling up’.
Those places are in genuine need, and need more. But the danger of answering one injustice by speaking only to some places is that you teach that same lesson to all the others. Gallup sadly found exactly that since 2011, satisfaction with local communities has fallen across the board, wherever you live, whatever you earn, however you vote.
Devolution alone will not solve our problems. The transfer of power will not, on its own, make people feel heard
And that vocabulary is not even a reliable guide to need: the most deprived neighbourhood in England is not in Manchester or Middlesbrough but on the Essex coast. Burnham says he will speak to places like these, and he must. But the answer cannot be simply to redraw the map of favoured places, telling a struggling town in Kent or Essex that its turn has passed so that Manchester’s can come. And handing every place power over its own purse comes with a choice too: let the south keep more of what it raises and you will take money from the North, which it subsidises. A politics that believes otherwise will keep manufacturing the very grievance it is trying to cure.
None of this means devolution is worthless. Burnham’s buses needed mayoral powers, and a mayor is itself a statement that a place counts. If moving power gets things built, move it. But that is using power to improve people’s lives. Devolution alone will not solve our problems. The transfer of power will not, on its own, make people feel heard.
The test of Burnham’s government is not how much power moves or how much money is spent. It is whether people can look at the place they love and see that it is being looked after. Ipsos will ask its question again. In five or ten years we will find out whether eighty per cent of Britain still gives the same answer.
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