Devolution. The end of Prescottism

The death of regional assemblies has killed off John Prescott's agenda

THE deputy prime minister is often portrayed as a fool, but, as the only Blair loyalist with deep roots in the old left, John Prescott is useful to the prime minister. He comes at a price, though: his expensive and disruptive regional policy.

Mr Prescott has set up quangos in the English regions to run development, housing, transport and the arts. They have serious money: the Regional Development Agencies alone spend £1.8 billion a year. These quangos were to be given democratic legitimacy by elected regional assemblies. The results of the referendum on the first of these, to be set up in the north-east, came through on November 5th. It was rejected so massively that Mr Prescott announced afterwards that similar planned polls in the north-west and Yorkshire have been scrapped. His regional agenda is, as a result, in tatters.

The scale of the rejection - 78% voted “no ” - -was as stunning as the fact that 48% - well above the usual turnout in local council elections and mayoral referendums - bothered to vote. “We completely under-estimated the resentment against politicians and the political process,” says a Prescott aide. “No” campaigners pointed to the £431m cost of the Scottish Parliament's new building and claimed a north-east assembly would be equally profligate.

But John Curtice of Strathclyde University says that the marginal increase in distrust of politicians is too small to explain why the government won the 1998 London mayoral referendum but lost the north-east referendum. He argues that support for regional devolution in England was never strong enough to persuade people to suspend their scepticism about politicians - especially for a scheme as weak as Mr Prescott's.

The problem now is how to give regional quangos democratic legitimacy. Tony Blair hopes to revive local politics through elected mayors, but that neither solves the regional problem nor arouses much enthusiasm: 30 places have held mayoral referendums since 2001, only 11 have opted to elect a mayor and none of them is a big city. Anyway, Mr Prescott has never thought much of mayors.

The Conservatives have spotted the weakness. Michael Howard, the Tory leader, said on November 10th that unelected regional assemblies, set up as a precursor to elected bodies, should be abolished. They have caused uproar among county councils in the south-east by ordering big increases in housebuilding. Bernard Jenkin, shadow regions secretary, says he wants to go further and reinvent civic Conservatism by decentralising power to city and county councils. If he comes up with a convincing agenda, he might just give Mr Blair a real headache.

The failure of the referendum on setting up a regional assembly in N.E. England, November 2004, has killed off the idea of regional assemblies in England.

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