Manchester

Want Devolution? Then get an Elected Mayor!

Whitehall

So, it couldn’t be clearer. If city regions and county’s want what Manchester has in terms of devolved powers and additional resources, then they will have to adopt a governance model that includes an elected mayor.

George Osborne has thrown down the gauntlet to the likes of Leeds and Liverpool, who had indicated outright opposition to such a proposition; and he has provided counties such as Lancashire with the opportunity of genuinely getting involved in the Northern Powerhouse project.

It didn’t take Leeds long to accept that, with a majority Tory government in situ for the next five years (and way beyond that if the Labour Party continues to act as it is at the moment), a more pragmatic approach to the ‘metro mayor’ idea was required. The chairman of the Leeds Combined Authority, Peter Box, has conceded that it is something that must be explored, and I would expect progress to be made fairly quickly in terms of a West Yorkshire deal with central government. I am certainly looking forward to hearing the thoughts of Leeds City Council chief executive Tom Riordan at our forthcoming City of Leeds Business Awards evening on the 4th June.

Liverpool has remained virtually silent on the issue post-election, with city mayor Joe Anderson continuing his call for the other local authority leaders from across Merseyside to accept reality, but his comments seemingly falling on deaf ears. Unless and until the leaders from Halton, St Helens, Wirral and Knowsley demonstrate a more mature and practical response to the Osborne agenda than has thus far been the case, then the Liverpool City Region risks being side-lined from this hugely important agenda; and an increasingly frustrated business community may just start to agitate far more vociferously than has been the case so far.

For Lancashire, the chancellor’s latest speech in Manchester on the ‘devo’ subject last week gave the county some clarity and, hopefully, the reason for a collective and cohesive response to a debate that, up until now, had appeared to focus exclusively on city regions.

A ‘One Lancashire’ model, based on the boundaries currently operated by the Local Enterprise Partnership, is what Ministers prefer. Time will only tell if Lancashire’s political leaders do a ‘Leeds’ or do a ‘Liverpool’.

Burying heads in the sand, hoping for a different Whitehall policy on local government and devolution was barely credible before the General Election – it is beyond stupid now.

Politics just got Interesting

Politics Interesting

As the old saying goes a week is a long time in politics, but it will take longer than seven days for political pundits and commentators to get over the shock General Election result witnessed on May 7th – and it will take the Labour Party much, much longer than that.

It was a devastating result for Ed Miliband and his team, made worse by its unexpectedness, but had we all looked at the campaign less tribally and more objectively, then the Tory victory, actually, should not have come as that much of a surprise.

No party in modern times that has gone to the electorate offering tax increases has been successful at the polls; wheeling out a cross dressing celebrity to campaign in Glasgow and getting the leader to have a cup of coffee with an elitist hippy shouted ‘out of touch Londoners’ to even the most traditional of Labour supporters; and the less said about the ‘Ed Stone’ the better.

Labour must now get itself up and dust itself off as quickly as it can practically do – and if the party has any sense they will leave the Blair/Brown days behind, jump a generation and take a risk of one of its up and coming young guns to lead it into the 2020 General Election. Labour needs a leader that can beat Boris – not someone who can go head to head with Cameron.

Talking of the Prime Minister, there was probably nobody more surprised, and relieved, than him when the ballot papers had all been counted.

Only a fortnight ago I and many others were predicting an early demise for Dave, as predators such as BoJo and Theresa May eyed his job. The election victory has bought him some time, but he will be more aware than anyone that he has a difficult balancing act of chastising his swivel eyed backwoodsmen and keeping his modern Conservatism agenda on track.

The EU in/out referendum was a panic promise too far, as he must surely realise when now analysing the UKIP performance, but he must go ahead with this folly now, risking the ire of both business and his own Europhile MPs.

His majority is far from huge, and therefore the chances of him going through the lifetime of this parliament without experiencing his own ‘bastards’ moment is highly unlikely. However, he has two big advantages over John Major. First, he has already announced he will not be fighting the next election, so on a personal level he has nothing to lose. Second, the official opposition will take some time to recover from what was a massive and unexpected setback.

Devolution remains a big part of the chancellor’s agenda, so opportunities for the north will offer themselves; whilst the whole issue of the Union, in light of the SNP’s surge, will keep the new government busy on many a front – and give us all plenty to talk about, and keep us interested over the next five years.

As for Farage and Co, and the almost extinct Liberal Democrats, for me, they got what they deserved.

Five Things we’ve learned from The Election Campaign

Election 2015
  1. Ed Miliband isn’t as daft as he looks

Before the campaign it was generally acknowledged, even by some of his closest allies, that as far as profile and image were concerned, Ed Miliband was hardly ‘A’ list Hollywood. However, more in hope than expectation, they hoped that his intellectual capacity and his genuine ‘niceness’ would win over sceptics. To a large extent, he has. Even if you don’t like his policies, or find him the least attractive political leader you have cast your eyes on, Miliband is hard to dislike. He has had a good campaign, articulating his party’s case in a firm, direct and effective manner. The Conservatives personal attacks on him, in particular the crass ’back stabber’ accusation, backfired on the Tories spectacularly. Even if he doesn’t get the keys to Number 10, Ed has done a decent job.

  1. The case against voting reform is weakening

The big argument that is always used against changing our existing ‘first past the post’ electoral system is that it provides a process that results in strong, single party government. However, we are heading for a second consecutive hung parliament, and if voting intentions continue to be as transient among a new generation of voters in the future as they appear to me now, then the days of one party government are well and truly behind us. At least a new proportional voting system would give voters in cities like Liverpool and Manchester, where they weigh rather than count the Labour vote, a reason to visit their local polling station.

  1. UKIP are as daft as they look

I have now lost count of the number of candidates and members who have been removed, suspended and expelled from a party whose main influence has been to drive the Conservative party to the right on the issue of Europe, and the Labour Party to run scared of this issue of immigration. It must be with regret that Cameron and Miliband now look at the past five years and wonder why they didn’t apply a far more robust and aggressive strategy to rebut some of the utter crap that UKIP has been allowed to get away with on both of these key areas of policy. That the wheels would fall off the Farage bandwagon was inevitable in my opinion, and they will be lucky to retain their existing two parliamentary seats, whilst Farage is looking less likely to win in the constituency of South Thanet, where the voters appear to have more sense than the owner of the Daily Express!

  1. Cameron won’t be Tory Leader for much longer

His admission that he would only want to be Prime Minister for one more term of office may have been honest, but it was also a mistake. As soon as those words and that statement was broadcast, David Cameron was a dead man walking. Last weekend’s newspapers were packed full of stories about the runners and riders for the Tory leadership, with Dave’s campaign considered by many a Tory donor to lack energy, focus and passion. That ‘Team Cameron’ have attempted to address that this week by taking off his tie and rolling up his sleeves is, I fear, too little too late. His failure to deliver the Conservatives an overall majority, which is what they really crave, is what will cost him in the end though. Boris, Teresa May and George Osborne are the early frontrunners; but don’t rule out a ‘dark horse’ emerging from the pack. Cameron beat more favoured candidates – and who can forget John Major’s surprise succession of Maggie?

  1. If a week is a long time in politics – 5 week’s is a lifetime

The campaign has been too long, a bit boring even for political anoraks like me – and it appears that it has failed to have much, if any, influence on people’s voting intentions anyway. A piece of advice for all the parties for the next election – which may be far sooner than was planned – keep it short. Less is sometimes more!

And finally my prediction for the 7th May: I’m sticking with what I have been saying for some months now. Conservatives the biggest party, but lacking a credible coalition partner to be able to form a government for more than a few months; and the spectacle of a second election highly likely as many Labour MPs’ would find it hard to stomach any sort of arrangement with the SNP.

Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies

Ballot

“The truth – you can’t handle the truth.” So responded Jack Nicholson to a question posed to him by Tom Cruise in the movie ‘A Few Good Men.’

It is a line that David Cameron and George Osborne would probably articulate to the great British public given half a chance, because it is the very fact that they have been telling ‘the truth’, as they see it at least, that they have not moved significantly ahead in the polls as they had anticipated by this stage of the General Election campaign.

The downbeat message of Osborne and the Prime Minister may paint an accurate picture of where the UK Plc’s finances are, but it is difficult to get anyone particularly enthused to support another five years of hard slog and austerity.

So, with this, the Tories, with almost gay abandon, decided to go on a bit of a spending spree this week, promising a host of positives including Rail fare freezes, £8 Billion extra for the NHS and a big announcement offering everyone in the public sector 3 days off to volunteer during the year, at a cost of – well who knows?

The Conservatives lead when it comes to ‘managing the economy’ is fairly healthy in all opinion polls; but even so these ‘bag of a fag packet’ commitments have allowed Labour to level the charge of a Tory Party scrabbling around for attractive goodies to hand out before the election, without having any clue as to how they will be paid for.

Labour itself is so paranoid about its reputation in managing the country’s finances, that they have put themselves into a ‘triple lock’ discipline over future fiscal policy that was spelt out on the first page of its Manifesto, launched in Manchester on Monday.

Other than protecting the NHS budget and overseas aid, you will go a long way to find any Labour spending commitment worth talking about.

Not quite ‘carry on regardless’ more ‘re -arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic’ would be a fairly accurate description of the oppositions approach to its economic policy offer to the electorate, with the usual rhetoric of hammering those with ‘the broadest shoulders’. An increasingly confident looking Ed Miliband and his would be Chancellor Ed Balls will be hoping that they don’t meet the same resistance to a very similar Labour message trotted out by Neil Kinnock and John Smith in 1992. History tells us that parties that promise tax rises have not fared particularly well in UK General Elections.

The lack of ambition contained within the Manifestos of the only two political parties who can form a government basically demonstrates a realistic view from them as to where we are in terms of public finances. But, it is not a particularly exciting message, and it is failing to turn the voters on.

Instead, for ‘vision’ and fantasy politics, those who have a wanton desire for radicalism over reality have opted to support fringe parties who, quite frankly, can say what they want and promise what you want with no fear of having to carry out their barmy policies. It was a trap the Liberal Democrats fell into five years ago but, unusually for them, it came back to bite them on the bum – no tuition fees anyone?

This time around it is the Greens offering billions of pounds of public spending; Farage’s mob promising to rid the country of pesky foreigners and the SNP building a whole nation’s economy on oil, despite the falling price of the black stuff in recent months.

Between them, the so-called minor parties are currently polling around 35% of the vote accumulatively, which tells me that a significant number of UK citizens do, indeed, prefer ‘sweet little lies’ to the brutal truth. Who would be a politician?

Why devolution will be more important on May 8th

Downtow Manifesto

We are now less than a month away before the country goes to the polls for a General Election that is heading for a very predictable stalemate.

A hung parliament seems almost inevitable, with opinion poll after opinion poll showing the two major parties neck and neck for months now.

I have long believed that the eventual outcome will see us in virtually the same place we are at now, with the Conservatives as the largest party, and the Liberal Democrats doing better than expected. The surge of support for the SNP in Scotland has done for any slim chance Labour had of forming a majority administration. What happens once all the backroom deals and horse trading have taken place is anyone’s guess, but another period of multi-party co-operation is certain.

Also certain is that the north of England will firmly reject the Tories, as will Scotland and Wales, making the political divide across Britain greater than ever.

As democracies go, the UK is the most centralised of any comparable governance structure in Europe, but the Scottish devolution debate has led to a George Osborne led devolution strategy that, thus far, has only really hit his own backyard of Manchester.

An election result that puts David Cameron back in number 10, but that leaves his party without any significant representation either from the north at Westminster or in the Town Halls of Liverpool, Leeds, Newcastle or Sheffield will simply add to the weight of argument for an acceleration of decentralisation and genuine devolved powers to city regions, and potentially county regions such as Lancashire too.

The price for such a shift in governance structures should be elected leaders, or elected mayors (the title shouldn’t much matter), because, quite rightly, no government should concede the sort of powers that Manchester will benefit from without strengthening the democratic accountability of those who will take those powers. There is also an urgent need to slim down and streamline existing local government structures.

As we argue in Downtown’s ‘Manifesto’ we are currently trying to deliver a 21st Century economy with 19th Century structures, and this has to change.

The discussion and debate as to what that change should be will begin in earnest on 8th May. Downtown is looking forward to being part of that important conversation.