OPINION: Why our national politicians lose sight of regional concerns

In a country ruled from the centre, power resides at the centre. Ambitious politicians may start their careers in the provinces, but the centre beckons, and when they arrive there, national issues come to dominate any regional concerns that may have stimulated their careers in the early days.
The task of reconciling many conflicting regional claims is an onerous one. A policy success for the nation as a whole can be celebrated by all. A policy win for a specific region often generates hostility in what is interpreted as a zero sum game, i.e., one region’s gain comes at the expense of another region’s loss. Regional policy tends to be highly contested territory. Which is why decisions are frequently permitted to emerge through market forces rather than as a result of deliberative policy actions. And this tends to benefit developed regions more than poorer ones.

Parallels
The recently published book, ‘Go North’, by Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram, provides interesting English insights into this process that are also relevant to development in the west of Ireland.
Burnham is currently the mayor of the Greater Manchester region and Rotheram the Mayor of Liverpool. These metropolitan regions were created in 2015 as a way of providing England with some of the desirable devolved functions of the parliaments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The powers of both mayors are wide-ranging and include spatial planning, housing, transport, policing, waste management and skills. In addition to setting the policy direction of their city regions, the mayors serve as ambassadors and public figureheads for their regions. Their budgets are substantial, but not overly generous.
The curious thing about Burnham and Rotherham is that both were Labour Party MPs before swapping Westminster for a role in their regions. In the case of Burnham, he held Cabinet Minister (Secretary of State) offices in the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and almost became Leader of the Labour Party in a 2015 leadership election (won by Jeremy Corbin).
Burnham and Rotherham’s abandonment of Westminster came about through many factors, both political and emotional. They came to realise that the problems of their respective city regions were not being addressed by the national government. Indeed, under Margaret Thatcher Liverpool was destined for ‘managed decline’ after the Toxteth riots of 1981 and over in Manchester, about a quarter of a million jobs were lost between 1971 and 1984. Recovery in both cities was slow and painful.
As Burnham said: “The more I came to understand the system of government within which I had to work, the less I liked it. It simply wasn’t set up to advance the kind of changes I wanted to see.”

Power plays
A specific example relates to the manner in which the UK Treasury evaluates public investment policies (the so-called Green Book). This is designed to give a higher score to projects which will produce the most returns for UK plc in the shortest possible time. In other words, it is a formula to give most to the already affluent parts of the UK – mainly in London and the South-East – and least to peripheral areas that are struggling. So while £19 billion was spent on the new Elizabeth Line in London, the rail link between Liverpool and Manchester was neglected.
Burnham observed that the moment newly elected MPs enter Westminster to take their seats, the power given to them by the public is removed and effectively handed to a small number of their elected colleagues and many more unelected advisers who set the party lines and positions for which they are required to vote.
“Our political system has evolved in such a way so as to minimise change to the centuries-way of doing things,” says Burnham. “It keeps power in the hands of the powerful. It has the effect of transferring power from elected representatives to Whitehall mandarins and makes you vote for things you don’t believe in.”
There was a strong emotional force driving Burnham and Rotheram away from Westminster. Rotheram had been in the Hillsborough Stadium on 15th April 1989, when 97 Liverpool fans died and 766 were injured. The subsequent criminal cover-up of the botched policing role and the blaming of fans dragged on for decades under Labour and Tory governments and national agencies.

Long way to go
The fact that the newly established city-based administrations in Liverpool and Manchester had power and authority made it possible for two senior MPs to build careers in the regions where they had a degree of independence.
Here in Ireland, we recently established our first directly elected mayor in the city of Limerick. However, examination of the new Limerick arrangement suggests that it has minimal new powers and the mayor’s budget and actions will be closely administered and controlled by central government. Compared to the UK, we have a very long way to go before we have genuine local government institutions.
It is worth repeating: In a country ruled from the centre, power resides at the centre and is focused on the concerns of the centre. And the most peripheral regions are the ones which lose out most.

John Bradley is a former ESRI professor and has published on the island economy of Ireland, EU development policy, industrial strategy and economic modelling.