Long live a stubbornly centralised England

MATTHEW PARRIS

Unlike forks in the road, important junctures in human affairs are often identified only in retrospect: often years after the event. An example, I believe, is the referendum in the north-east of England whose result you may know by the time you read this, Voters are being asked to decide whether or not the region should proceed to the establishment of an elected authority.

The referendum has elicited scant interest outside the region, and until the last couple of weeks the debate was pretty muted within it. Politics, of course, has been full of the American presidential election, but there are other reasons, too, for the campaign never really catching fire.

The first I shall suggest only in passing, as a curious footnote. Our continuing 'experiment' with postal voting has been intended as a means of increasing voter turnout — on the grounds, indeed, that turning out is what voters are no longer being asked to do: to tick a box at home will suffice, and it has been supposed that, because this requires less effort than trotting down to a polling station, more people will participate.

They may — a few more, anyway. It looks as though the turnout in this referendum may approach 40 per cent: a respectable enough showing for a local election, But when I was in Newcastle during the campaign I heard the complaint (and it rang true) that as political theatre this referendum has lacked shape: the beginning, middle and end, the final curtain, which give life to a debate and weight to its conclusion.

An election used to be an event. An extended period in which individuals may or may not be ticking a box on a form at home is not an event. The referendum campaign has therefore lacked the natural focus — the sporting climax — which a polling day provides. By robbing the election of its real-life, real-time, observable culmination known as 'going to the polls' we may have scored the perverse double of having made it easier to vote yet dampening voters' sense of involvement in the vote.

Many people have not felt that the result — either way — will make much difference to their lives. Even the promoters of a northeastern assembly do not pretend that their campaign has been driven by popular demand; instead they say that this is a good idea which people will come to support once it is explained and tried. Opponents have countered with the claim that the assembly will be a pointless expense. As though what we were discussing were the purchase of a small water feature for the garden: for or against, it isn't the end of the world.

Or is it? It could be the end of a world. The elected body proposed would be a paltry thing but it would be a first step on an enormous journey. If voters in the region judged more likely than any other to vote Yes cannot be persuaded to take that first step, then no further proposals will be made for any other region. The Tories are opposed in principle, and Labour is at best lukewarm, The idea's only significant Cabinet enthusiast (John Prescott) will be silenced near the end of his career; the next government will drop the proposals; and it is hard to imagine that for many years, perhaps decades, any future government will want to return to the issue. The whole project will have been smashed.

If, on the other hand. the answer is Yes, then it is hard to imagine that the growth of regional government in England would stop here. Mr Prescott has said he intends that other referendums would follow suit — this one was not originally planned to stand alone — and that is what logic would dictate. Regional government for England must be, in the end, an all-or-nothing affair.

If the north-east is offered, and takes, a democratic identity, then Yorkshire and the north-west would want the same. The greater the preponderance of regions which did have assemblies, the greater the pressure on the remainder to follow suit. Finally, the ragbag of localities which fell outside any obvious region would feel so left out that regions would have to he invented for them.

Something like this has happened in Spain, led by regional autonomy for the obvious candidates, the Basque country and Catalonia, and followed by (at first) joke assemblies in other regions, which are gradually gathering credibility.

Which way this north-east referendum has swung carries potentially huge consequences outside England as well as within it. At present, a powerful brake on the granting of further autonomy to Scotland and Wales is that this would only intensify the constitutional incongruity with England. It would further expose the asymmetry between English Westminster MPs' powers over the affairs of the Celtic fringe, and the Celtic fringe's Westminster MPs' powers over English affairs: the so-called Midlothian Question.

English regional assemblies would mark the beginning of an answer to the Midlothian Question. Call it 'divide and rule' if you like, but the canton isation of England will provide Scots MPs with an easy answer to demands for a national identity for England. 'You've got your assemblies and we've got ours' may not, as a response, bear scrutiny of the precise nature and powers of those very different sorts of assemblies, hut it would be effective in debate, especially if coupled with the thought that English regional government was 'still developing' as a force. Indeed, the government (and Scots MPs) have already been answering complaints about England's anomalous position by claiming that regional assemblies for England will draw the sting. If this first proposal is voted down, ministers will be denied that argument. The end of the dream of regional English government will give impetus to those who campaign for a national political identity for England.

Nor need one join those Europhobes, who see an EU plot under every stone, to observe that whether or not the European Union has any conscious plan to encourage a Europe des Regions, the existence of democratic entities other than national governments will tempt Brussels to appeal over the heads of national parliaments to regional politicians; and it will flatter regional politicians to return the compliment. A stubbornly centralised England (and France) has been a block to that.

You may know as you read this what I do not know as I write it: whether that block and that stubbornness are to persist. I hope so.

Matthew Parris is a political columnist of the Times