From Gladstone and Home Rule, Grimond and Regionalism, Ashdown and Devolution and even Daisy’s plan to move the Treasury,decentralising the British state has always been a Liberal Democrat ambition. Glad to see Andy Burnham and the Labour Party are finally catching up. The right’s Brexit warcry of Take Back Control can be repelled like a skilled Jiu-Jitsu practitioner and transformed from scapegoating minorities to truly rebalancing our country.
However in our algorithm-driven age, the British people are unfamiliar with our approach to place, devolution,federalism or electoral reform. As Mark Carney has told us ‘Nostalgia is not a strategy! We must regain the initiative on the devolution debate and expose Labour’s belief in the State being the answer with a more considered approach. Modern politics is a battle of stories and we need to become better storytellers because we have a great story to tell.
While we should welcome Burnham’s conversion, we should push him to make truly meaningful change. Metro Mayoralties and Combined Authorities face a democratic deficit with only the Mayors facing their entire regional electorate. London is a better model with a London-wide Assembly and elected Mayor. For English regions from the South East to the North West to the Senedd and Scottish Parliament, it is time to devolve all domestic policy to regional assemblies with elected First Ministers and tax-raising powers.
Let Westminster set minimum standards but the regions and nations decide what their NHS, Health and Social Care, Housing and Infrastructure policy should look like. English Regional Assemblies will require a smaller Westminster focused on national taxation, foreign affairs and defence and finally an elected Upper House under a reformed voting system. But why should the British people care?
As the supermarkets will tell you, the closer you are to the customer the more responsive you are to their needs. Our different nations and regions require a different response crafted, created and delivered locally, a song all Liberal Democrats love to sing. Let’s push Burnham to be bolder and reclaim our mantle as the Devolution Party.
As a London Liberal Democrat, I would say far too often Westminster is mistaken for our City, they are not the same thing. With Whitehall Ministries based in our City, with a stroke of the pen, Burnham could turn over control of domestic policy to the Mayor and London Assembly. There is sufficient time to double the size of the London Assembly to 50 members by the 2028 election to ensure sufficient scrutiny.
As the heatwave has shown our infrastructure is unfit to face the ongoing climate disaster. Our unsatisfactory and unaffordable homes, sauna-like public transport, closing schools exposing our absurdly costly childcare all deserve local solutions. Let London pilot the opportunities of a devolved Britain and let us as Liberal Democrats go all out to win the Mayoralty and show what Liberal Democrat government can look like for nearly 10 million people.
Rather than simply increasing national borrowing let’s use devolution as an opportunity to develop a domestic municipal bond market. After Gordon Brown decimated private pensions, municipal bonds for infrastructure offer an asset for British pension funds and investment for a cleaner, greener, more affordable future. Higher education colleges teaching the skills to equip workers to build the affordable homes, supply affordable childcare and revitalise schools and hospitals.Now that is a better story, a Liberal Democrat story we can tell on leaflets, in video and across social media.Fiscal discipline and social justice or simply Security, Opportunity and Freedom.
* John Armah is a member of City of Westminster Liberal Democrats and a digital transformation consultant based in London.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
"Winston and David" on stage
The Joy of Six 1551
Reform MP starts digging her own Standards hole
Labour councillor joins Lib Dems in Portsmouth
Andy Burnham's Big Promises - Now Comes the Difficult Part
After the murder of Ann Widdecombe, we must all be more careful of the language we use in political life
George Thomas
John Reed
Alex Macfie
9 Comments
Devolution shouldn’t just be a slogan; it must be the core engine for modernising our crumbling infrastructure and public services.
“ Rather than simply increasing national borrowing let’s use devolution as an opportunity to develop a domestic municipal bond market”
Whether more is borrowed at UK level by a devolved government or by a local authority, it would still be increasing public borrowing that is ultimately backed by the State.
I always worry when Lib Dems come out with a single concept and imply it is the answer to a profound problem. Devolution is a vital part of our party’s beliefs, but let’s not pretend it is a one word cure all for our nation’s ills.
As wiser people than me have often said – You may want something to be quick, cheap and fast, you may even need it to be quick, cheap and fast, but you can’t have them all.
Anything like real devolution is a fundamental change to how we organise things in the UK and doing it properly will take huge amounts of determination, careful planning and effort. It is not a quick fix, but Burnham’s need is to do something quickly and what he delivers will be quick and he will call it devolution, but it will be nothing more than a bodge.
Jana , the point of a municipal bond market consisting of AAA rated asset backed securities is to reduce the risk to the state. The return on investment from rent paid would be far more constructive than our current system. Housing Benefit often paid to private landlords on former council houses and flats sold under right to buy.
If we are going to incur debt a definable, measurable social return on investment is the most responsible approach.
“Whether more is borrowed at UK level by a devolved government or by a local authority, it would still be increasing public borrowing that is ultimately backed by the State.”
It would depend on whether the debts were guaranteed by central government. Probably they would have to be because of the consequences of letting a major city or a devolved national or regional government go bust. It’s the old problem of “too big to fail”.
The concern of most is over the level of central government borrowing. The level of non-government borrowing or private sector borrowing is, to our peril, largely ignored. High levels of private sector debt can become high levels of bad private sector debt during an economic down turn and cause a near collapse of the whole economy, forcing the government to bail out the system as happening in 2008. The desire to shift borrowing away from government, to make it someone else’s responsibility, is also behind such ill advised concepts as the so-called private finance iniatives, or PFI schemes.
They are a false economy.
@John Armagh
“ the point of a municipal bond market consisting of AAA rated asset backed securities is to reduce the risk to the state”
Of course, a country’s municipal bond market will not have a better credit rating than the country itself. Indeed, municipal bonds could easily attract a lower credit rating if the markets believe that it were possible that a municipal authority could be allowed to go bankrupt by central government.
@John Armah
Apologies – it automatically changed my spelling to Armagh on my last post….
Devolution to the regions of England (let’s call them ‘provinces’) as well as to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, is greatly to be welcomed to break up the over-centralised British state. But let’s be clear – it’s all a question of accountability. Simply installing regional mayors, but making their finances dependent on Treasury handouts (as has happened with the Barnett formula) is NOT, repeat NOT, devolution but is simply a means of replacing local self-government with outposts of Whitehall. This is why our demand for genuine federation, guaranteed by a written constitution, becomes essential. A welcome development, based on Burnham’s previous calls for proportional representation, should replace 650 single-member seats under FPTP by a structure of about 100 multi-member constituences, each electing 6 or 7 members by STV (going down to 5 members in the sparely-populated Scottish Highlands and Islands, and perhaps going up to 8 in some of the metropolitan areas (including London, which would sensibly be extended out to the more easily-understood line of the M25). But it all comes back to giving the provinces their own fund-raising powers, and making their finances accountable to proper provincial assemlies.
John is right to distinguish between devolution and federalism. They are related but not identical. Devolution is about bringing decisions closer to the people now, while federalism provides the long-term constitutional framework that secures those powers. Confusing the two risks obscuring the practical case for change.
The strongest argument for federalism is not that it solves every problem, but that it consistently produces better decisions because those making them better understand local needs. Westminster should set national standards, but communities are far better placed to determine how those standards are achieved. That is a principle of democratic accountability as much as administrative efficiency.
The concerns raised about borrowing and implementation are worth taking seriously, but they are arguments for designing federalism well, not against it. Every successful reform has required careful planning. Both Manchester’s and London’s government shows that devolved institutions, with elected executives and meaningful scrutiny, can deliver strategic transport, housing and economic development in ways Whitehall never could. Across Europe, cities and regions use municipal finance responsibly to invest in infrastructure that supports long-term growth.
The Liberal Democrats should tell a confident story: federalism is not a constitutional hobby or a quick fix. It is about trusting people, strengthening democracy, encouraging innovation and allowing successful local solutions to spread nationally. That is a positive vision of a stronger United Kingdom built from the bottom up, rather than governed from the centre.