Restoration of the old counties
Christopher Booker
It was the other day when I was reading a guide book to Somerset that the idea first struck me, like a flash of illumination. Although the book was published quite recently, it contained sections on Bath, Clevedors, Weston-super-Mare. There was only a rather pained appendix to say that, for purely bureaucratic reasons, these Places were actually no longer in Somerset but in some administrative fiction called 'Avon'. And I was then set to thinking of just what an extraordinary thing it had all been, that so-called 'reform' of local government which in the early Seventies wiped SC) many ancient counties, such as Huntingdonshire, Westmorland and Cumberland, off the map (quite apart from such grotesqueries as moving the 'Berkshire White Horse' into Oxfordshire). Who today, apart from a bureaucrat, thinks of 'Humberside' as being anything other than 'a bit of Yorkshire and a bit of north Lincs.'? Who seri°tIsly accepts 'Tyne and Wear' as a genuine county? The re-organisation of local government was typical of that wholesale flight from reality that we can now see constituted the late Sixties and early Seventies — a product Of the same dotty neophilia that produced decimal coinage and metrication, that littered the cities of Britain with tower blocks and half-finished motorway schemes, that Made the bureaucrats of the Church of England want to sweep away Cranmer and r,ePlace their old liturgies with the chatty nanalities of Series III. It was inevitable in lb at age of meaningless tinkering that 'cirileone would have the bright idea of PlaYing around with the system of local Pvernrnent, Like the Victorian terrace nouses that were then being demolished in tfheir hundreds of thousands to make way int new concrete housing estates, it was obsolete' simply because it had been around since the late 19th century. The idea of local government reform 2same to the surface in the Redeliffe Maud ePort of 1969. Around that time I occa8b1"ally used to see one of the senior mem. ers of the Maud Commission a successful nnsioessman, very much in the Sixties entode, with an exaggerated respect for ticiontputers, 'streamlining' and 'rationalise His argument was that what was 7eded in local government was much greaot !`efficiency' and 'democracy'. The essence hovv he and his colleagues suggested toliese ends might be achieved was that the _!(1 rural and urban districts should be rolished and merged into much larger _un,Its, and that England and Wales as a ol it,e should be re-organised into a series ttl), unitary authorities', each linking some ajor urban centre more closely with its surrounding ,area of countryside (on the grounds that the town had become much more important to people's lives than the country, and the structure of.local government should reflect that fact). Bournemouth, for instance, should be lumped in with Dorset, which otherwise lacked 'a major urban centre', to make 'Unitary Authority 31' (or was it 76, I cannot recall).
It was all, of course, a complete piece of Sixties wishful-thinking, as little based on any grasp of reality as Harold Wilson's dear old 'dynamic new Britain' or the flashing lights of the discotheques. In no way was this better summed up than by an ecstatic article welcoming the Maud recommendations by Professor David Donnison in the Guardian, who asked what was a 'rural district' anyway but simply something which flashed by in ten minutes (or was it ten seconds?) as you drove down the motorway.
Along came the Seventies, and the Heath government, which, as we can now see in retrospect, was in so many ways simply dedicated to continuing the Sixties by other means. The great bureaucratic fantasy of re-organising local government was revived, in slightly modified form, by Peter Walker and the result was the 1972 Local Government Act which abolished Radnorshire, set up 'Avon', 'Cleveland' and the rest, and covered the map with all those absurd and largely unidentifiable new 'Districts' with names like Tandridge, Kerrier, Gedling, Restormel and Tameside (which for some reason appears to be in Manchester and is not to be confused with Thamesdown, about whose whereabouts I haven't a clue).
Now, the point is not just that this bureaucratic imposition (particularly in respect of the counties) was and still is stupendously unpopular and unreal. It has totally failed to justify the original claim of its supporters that it would make local government either more efficient or more democratic. In terms of those deeper geographical loyalties which make living in one county or another so important to people, the bureaucratic readjustments have had little or no effect at all, except just to set up irritation and confusion. For most everyday social purposes, such as the playing of county cricket or the writing of guide hooks, no one has taken a blind bit of notice (Somerset, for instance, continues to play in Bath and Weston, just as the vanished Middlesex continues to play at Lords). In other words, the only practical result of the abolition and reshuffling of the counties has been to increase bureaucracy, to encourage extravagance and to diminish efficiency.
And here is where my blinding inspiration struck me. Normally, when we make a foolish mistake in life, we attempt, if it is possible, to cut our losses and go back to square one. Is there any reason at all why we should not do the same with our dismembered counties? Why should we not in fact simply restore them to where they were? It would of course be inconvenient for the bureaucratic empire-builders. It would involve a certain amount of initial expense — the repainting of signposts and council vehicles — but these are things which would eventually have to be done anyway. On the other hand, particularly in places like North Somerset and what is today laughably known as 'Cumbria', it would be enormously popular. We have a government to which such an idea might not, for all sorts of reasons, seem unsympathetic. We have at least one senior member of the cabinet, William Whitelaw of Cumberland, who was, and I suspect remains, implacably hostile to the whole absurd scheme, What I am therefore suggesting, is firstly, that the idea of reviving the old counties should at least be discussed, so that any practical problems which might arise can be assessed. Then, secondly, that a public campaign should be launched to ensure that our ancient counties are restored. On each of these points, both I and the Spectator would be interested to have readers' reactions. We may not be able to go back on decimalisation. We may not be able to pull down all the tower blocks (yet — eventually we may have to). But here at least is one symbolic measure which, in I suspect an entirely practical and welcome fashion, might serve as a gesture to mark our final rejection of that superficial and fantastic age of the Sixties and early Seventies, which has left such a hideous legacy in our national life and brought so little of lasting benefit.
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