This month’s publication of research into how Britons feel about the region in which they live makes fascinating reading. It also contains a warning for champions of local government reorganisation and planning reform in England.
Only in one English region, the North-East, does the research show that people have a strong attachment (48%) to their region. Midlanders show the least feeling for where they live.
Just 13% of West Midlanders and 11% of East Midlanders hold a very strong attachment to their respective region. Only 7% of people in the West Midlands believe our region is a better place to live in than other parts of the country. 37% of people here think it is worse.
However, would Aynuk and Ayli, two fictional Black Country comic characters, be bothered? Probably not. But they should be.
At the heart of liberal democracy is a belief that the best decisions are those that are made closest to the communities that will be impacted by those decisions. Which is why liberal democrats favour devolution and federal structures of governance as an antidote to power resting in the centre either with an overreaching State, autocracy or kleptocratic cabal, no matter how populist and trustworthy the latter may seem.
In England, recent attempts to devolve power have hardly proved themselves capable of catching the imagination of those who are governed. The turnout in the West Midlands mayoral election last year was less than 30%. In the eight mayoral elections in 2021 the average turnout was only 35%.
The current government’s plans for local government reorganisation over the next four years may not have been raised unsolicited on doorsteps by voters in the recent local elections campaign. Compared to the immediacy of addressing social care issues, SEND services and repairing potholes, local government reorganisation appears opaque and meaningless. The potential benefits are both complicated and complex, both interconnected and hard to understand. The plans cannot easily be reduced to simple binary choices, and the focus on different unitary authority options rather than the creation of new strategic authorities does not help either.
But, notwithstanding these issues, the sums involved are huge and, if we’re to prevent those with extreme views getting their hands of the levers of power, we have to engage.
So, what’s to be done? Without wishing to endorse his later support for tariffs and empire building, Joseph Chamberlain’s electoral success in Birmingham in the late nineteenth century resonated across all classes and interests. The colonisation of school boards, libraries and other municipal utilities were the pillars of an inclusive civic gospel aimed at creating places where people are active in their community, where great buildings and green spaces are built, where people are housed in affordable and sustainable homes, where high quality education is available for everybody at all levels and where strangers are welcomed.
Chamberlain and his colleagues didn’t wait for local government to come down from on high in Westminster. They just got on with it, locally. Quite what they’d think of the current paltry state of local government in Birmingham doesn’t bear consideration. I don’t doubt they’d be sounding warnings of how it encourages politicians who sow division and offer a false vision based on a misplaced nostalgia for national exceptionalism.
The YouGov research shows that artificial regional constructs imposed from on high fail to inspire. As David Goodhart wrote in ‘The Road To Somewhere’ (2017 Hurst) ‘the small scale and particular is what matters to most people’. Devolving power and resources to regions through centrally-created federal structures will not in themselves result in a country that is more peaceful and more prosperous; let alone create a country that is more at ease with itself and reconciled to its past. It needs much more than that.
If, as we should be, Liberal Democrats are to make a success of local government reorganisation and planning changes, we need to give the reforms meaning to the public services provided to local residents and to the communities in which they live. We need to make the abstract real, the intangible tangible.
Reform works best when it’s done from the bottom up. When it’s transparent and oiled by the resources needed to make the reform work. When it’s communicated in ways in which everybody can understand and trust. Which is a lesson also for the much-needed reform of our English Party. But that’s a subject for another article.
* Richard Dickson joined the West Midlands Liberal Democrat Regional Executive in 2021 and became Chair in January 2022. He is a District Councillor in Warwick and a Warwickshire County Councillor. Richard Dickson is a Lib Dem Councillor in Warwickshire.
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12 Comments
I was struck by the text quoted below.
Only 7% of people in the West Midlands believe our region is a better place to live in than other parts of the country. 37% of people here think it is worse.
Logically, there can only be one “best” place to live in the country. Why should a West Midlands resident be expected to believe that it happens to be the place where they live?
You can feel attached to place, as I am to Manchester having lived there for 72 years, and appreciate its virtues, while recognising that other places such as central London (where I also live half the time) have far more amenities and interesting things to do than Manchester.
Hi Mohammed,
I think there is one aspect of human nature you are missing out on here with your (very, very logical) statement “Logically, there can only be one “best” place to live in the country. Why should a West Midlands resident be expected to believe that it happens to be the place where they live?”
And it all goes back to an old story – A poll of residents of all the major cities in the UK were asked “What is the second city of the United Kingdom?” To which all the cities bar two said their own. Liverpool answered London!
That’s diversity for you.
You have got to take into account that we Brummies (as well as our unfortunate benighted Yam Yam neighbours) are famously downbeat about, well, everything. We know that the West Midlands is not exactly California (although weirdly, we do have a California in Brum), and that Birmingham is not Florence (we don’t have one of those); not being proud of our Mordor is actually a perverse form of local patriotism. We do not brag like Mancunians or Scousers. We are awful, and we embrace our awfulness.
On a serious note, I am a new member, and one thing I am keen to do is to help reach out beyond the traditional Lib Dem demographic. Growing up in the industrial West Midlands, and seeing the shackles placed upon people of my class and region by a suffocating and infantilising Labour movement, coupled with a racist right wing English nationalism that is always bubbling under the surface in parts of Brum, has convinced me that liberalism is the way forward. Birmingham was the great Liberal city and could be again. The only way that can happen is by telling and showing people in every part and demographic of the city that liberalism is the best ideology for them. Build a Lib Dem base. Be unashamedly ideological.
“Why should a West Midlands resident be expected to believe that it happens to be the place where they live?”.
Assuming they have some choice in the matter, one might reasonably expect people who believe the West Midlands to be the best place in the country to me more likely to choose to live there than those that don’t.
Mark, as another Brummie (but with a massive soft spot for Milton Keynes, where I worked for 16 years, and for Norwich, near which I’ve lived for 15) may I observe that while Birmingham may not be Florence, it has more canals than Venice.
Birmingham’s glory years were under a Tory who described his policies as municipal socialism, so I’m sure you are right that it’s Liberalism’s turn.
Good luck.
Interesting results. My recollection of party policy on devolution is that it happens organically and bottom up, when a region is ready for it. By devolution I mean real devolution where decisions are made at the lowest practical level.
The North East was the first to have a referendum on devolution, and the survey referred to here resonates with the surveys we did both from our Focus leaflets to lots of cross/no party work asking people in various town centres across the region. People were overwhelmingly in favour, but as we know the referendum campaign in 2004 (?) was overwhelmed by the lies and visual campaigning of the NO campaign, supported by the worst of the media. the same set up and people who effectively supported the Brexit campaign, and at a guess, now Reform. None of it helped by Prescott only allowing partial devolution.
So it is more than how people feel, it is how effective a campaign can be for real devolution in a world of even more influence by those who deny the truth, ride roughshod over what people really want, and attract the media,
@mark paine – Birmingham may be the biggest city in the region but it is only part of the story. Warwickshire is just one of its rural counties and there are many other towns and cities. There are also many cultural offerings and several universities. There is however a lack of cohesiveness of what is generally considered to be the West Midlands region and, if there is a move towards federalism in England, the present boundaries may not be the best ones.
Waiting for things to happen organically is likely to result in nothing (good) happening. The central government needs to first decide what functions it needs to control centrally and then consult the people about what areas they would like the authority that controls everything else to cover. One obvious area that should be devolved to the second tier is the structure of local government below it.
And while we are on about comparisons between our own neighbourhoods and Europe’s greatest cities, can I point out that Saltaire has a Campanile in the Florentine style? It’s actually a mill chimney, but at that stage in his career Titus Salt wanted his New Mill to stand out in the countryside. One of the best villages to live in England…
I’m not sure that people are too bothered by a strong attachment to their region. They realise this is an administrative structure designed to allow economies of scale with local democracy. Many are members of distinct groups such as nature, conservation and historical. What matters to them is decent public services and some fairness in how everyone is treated.
The Economist seems to agree – see its article on 21st June ‘So central, yet so ignored’.