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fabian tract 484 
Against Metropolis: 
socialism and decentralisation 

Chapter 
1 Democracy, Socialism and Metropolis 
2 The Course of Centralisation 
3 Arguments for Decentralisation 

The Author 
Christopher Harvie served his political apprenticeship as a student canvasser for 
the Labour party during vacations from Edinburgh University, where he wa~ 
President of the Labour Club, 1964-65. From 1969 to 1980 he lectured in history at 
the Open University and is now Professor of British Studies at the University of 
Tubingen in West Germany. He is the author of The Lights of Liberalism (1976) a 
study of 19th century intellectuals and democracy, Scotland andNationalism (1977), 
and No Gods and Precious Few Heroes, Scotland 1914-1980 (1981). He has been an 
active Labour party member for 19 years and a Fabian for 10 years. 

This pamphlet, like all the publications of the Fabian Society, represents not the 
collective view ofthe Society but only the views of the individual who prepared it. The 
responsibility of the Society is limited to approving the publications it issues as 
worthy ofconsideration within the Labour movement. 
Fabian Society, 11 Dartmouth Street, London SW1H 9BN. 

October 1982 Cover design by Dick Leadbetter 
ISBN 7163 0484 8 Printed by Blackrose Press (TU) 
ISSN 0307 7535 Photoset by Range Left (TU) 
Fabian Society, 11 Dartmouth Street, London SW1H 9BN. 


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1. Democracy, Socialism and 
Metropolis 
Fashionable Decentralisation 

When the Whig Sir William Harcourt said in 1894, 'we are all socialists 
now', he seemed to endorse the Fabian ideal ofgradualist collectivism. In 
1982, who, outside the Labour party and points left, could say this? 
Gradualism seems no longer inevitable; a strong individualist counter-
current is making way. But we are all decentralists now. 

The Social Democratic Party (SDP) pays 
tribute to 'small is beautiful' and conjure 
up a regional second chamber; the left' 
recent Manifesto (Fontana, 1981) define 
its 'socialist society' as a 'powerful society 
with a minimal state'. The Liberals persevere 
with federalism ; Labour remains 
committed to Scottish devolution. Even 
the Tories have ju tified their market 
economics as 'restoring power to the 
people'. 

.We are, most of us, hypocrites as well. 
Mrs Thatcher's government has throttled 
industrial autonomy with high interest 
rates and local government with direct 
intervention. The Labour leadership has 
shown little enthusiasm for devolution and 
the left's true etatisme is never far from the 
surface in Manifesto: "Our immediate 
strategy is to use the centralised. power of a 
democratised state, in alliance with a majority 
of the population and the organised 
Labour movement, to create a fairer and 
more equal society. " 

How long the SDP's promises survive 
presumably depends on the support it 
gets. Its best chance of success is in southeast 
England, which cares but little for 
decentralisation, perhaps like the SDP as a 
whole? Its· recent economic policy doesn't 

eem to mention it, and its ideal of enduring 
coalitions achieved through proportional 
representation seems implicitly 
designed to strengthen the power of 
central government. 

A Political Awakening? 

And yet, the rejection of the traditional 
state, the declarations of belief in decentralisation, 
are part of a process which 
is rapidly dissolving the conventions of 
British politics. Parties assert themselves 
over their leaders; political meetings, dismissed 
as moribund, draw unprecedented 
eecrowds. Abstract ideas -definitions of 
democracy, arguments over representation 
or delegation -occupy activists, pushing 
aside discussions of 'positive' legislation. 
Political publications, from the journal 
Marxism Today to Politics is for People 
(Shirley Williams, 1982), sell on station 
bookstalls; local government leaders-Ken 
Livingstone, David Blunkett, Eric Milligan 
-and their policies move into the forefront 
of controversy. 

Much of this stems from economic crisis: 
fewer resources mean fundamental debates 


about their allocation. But it also means 
the end of elitist assumptions about the 
extent of 'political society', common to the 
main parties since 1945 -and still, ironically, 
preserved by the Oxbridge leadership 
of the SOP. 

So far, the rhetoric of 'mould-breaking' 
has counted far more than actuality: the 
SDP is a catalyst, not a vehicle for new 
political idea . If the Labour party eems, 
disastrously, to have lost direction, the SOP 
has simply demonstrated that the trouble 
i not due to a well-organised left but to 
the collap e of the broad church's foundations. 
Could anyone now write like 
Anthony Crosland in The Future ofSocialism 
(1956) 'of a peaceful revolution'? "one 
cannot imagine today a deliberate offensive 
alliance between Government and employers 
against the Unions on the 1921, 
/925-6 or 1927 models. . . Instead the 
atmosphere in Whitehall is almost deferential, 
the desire not to give offence positively 
ostentatious . .. although the ultimate power 
of course remains in the hands of top 'lay' 
management, more and more influence 
passes to the technical experts and 
specialists . .. This particular change in the 
character of the decision-making function 
naturally calls for men with a different outlook 
. . .from the traditional capitalist.'' 

1956 was a very long time ago. Britain 
was still a major world industrial power; its 
industries dominated by the traditional 
'staples', its working class, socially, closer 
to 1920 than to 1980. Since then a lot has 
changed, and as significant as the decline 
of the authority of the state and Britain's 
industrial decay has been the renaissance 
of London as a financial metropolis. "The 
heart of the Eurodollar market", as C P 
Kindleberger reminded us in 1974, "beats 
in the American and British banks in 
London". (The Formation of Financial 
Centres, Princeton, 1974). Whatever the 
fortunes of UK industry, the City has 
prospered. £900m was invested abroad by 
it in 1979; after the abolition of exchange 

controls, this has risen to an average of 
£4,000m a year. 

' 

Servitor Capitalism . 

Crosland's New Fabian Essay "The transition 
to Socialism" (Dent, 1952) saw 
capitalism as doomed to be caught by the 
net of the state, and then tamed. How 
utopian this now seems! The net merely 
spanned the industrial sector (which had 
never anyway been a significant part of 
finance capital); the most significant institutions 
easily evaded it and regrouped. 
Their evolution has in fact been in the 
opposite direction from Crosland's 
'statism'. 

20 per cent of 'free world' production in 
the 1970s came from multinational companies 
(which Crosland completely neglected) 
and 'new' industries are increasingly 
based in NICs (Newly Industrialised 
Countries) in low-wage areas of the third 
world. The City of London has performed 
a valuable role in this, particularly after 
the crisis of 1973-74. By recycling the profits 
of oil it helps sustain such .'enterprise' and 
enables its owners and managers -corporate 
and individual -to purchase security, 
good taste and social prestige. 
London is the essential link: stable, 
accommodating, culturally well-endowed 
and close to a sympathetic government, as 
the Conservative party has shifted, since 
the early 1950s, from reflecting industry 
and agriculture to representing-especially 
in its upper echelons-finance. To enhance 
the wealth of its clients and relieve them of 
it, London provides everything from the 
elaborate mechanisms of City, law and the 
luxury trades to the undergrowth of gambling 
houses and clip-joints. Increasingly, 
this is reflected in its employment and 
social structure: a network of skilled 
manual trades, professionals and entrepreneurial 
groups service the City and th 



citizens from the affluence they had 
helped create. Provincial government 
might have coped with both these 
problems, but the bourgeoisie iself was 
changing; the elite was coopting its 
younger members through reformed 
Oxford and Cambridge; its image was disseminated 
through parliament, administration, 
schools and, above all, press and 
publicity. London may not quite have 
been a British metropolis, but was an 
imperial and English-language capital, 
which rapidly attracted the media to it. 
Nonconformists, coping with internal divisions 
and Anglican competition, moved 
their colleges and papers south. Middlebrow 
publishers, the mass-circulation 
press, the modern literary machine of 
agents and best-sellers soon followed. The 
means of discussion were skewed in favour 
of the capital. The first Fabians, 'young 
provincials, footloose in London', helped 
modernise its government and educational 
system, accelerating this process and 
benefitting from it. 

In 1886 the bourgeoisie was tested and 
knuckled under. Chamberlain shifted to 
the right, and the infant socialist movement 
inherited devolution. Fabian 
'permeation' put a progressive gloss on an 
expansion of the central state which was 
intended to check socialism rather than to 
further it. 
How much did the subsequent imperial 
decades enhance London's power? 
Despite the legendary wealth of Park 
Lane, probably relatively little. The 
Colonial and India ·offices needed only a 
small staff; the Dominions were now self-
governing. Imperial trade created informal 
bureaucracies in Manchester and 
Leeds for textiles, and Liverpool and 
Glasgow for shipping. Such places still had 
powerful elites, in education, the 
churches, newspapers, among MPs and on 
the town council. Manchester between 
1900 and 1914 had Ernest Rutherford and 
Chaim Weizmann at the University, L T 

Hobhouse, 1 L Hammond and 1 A Hobson 
writing for C P Scott's Manchester 
Guardian. It had the Halle Orchestra and 
Miss Horniman's Repertory Theatre ~ith 
its own school of realist playwrights. 
Winston Churchill and Arthur Balfour 
were local MPs, the radical Liberal Ernest 
Simon a leading figure on the town council. 
Mrs Pankhurst started the Women's Social 
and Political Union in Manchester, and R 
H Tawney conducted his pioneer Worker's 
Educational Association classes from there. 
The 'New Liberalism' of collectivism and 
social reform which might have brought, 
through 'home rule all round', a further 
opportunity for provincial government, was 
a Manchester product. And Manchester 
was not alone, before World War I. 

A Headlong Shuffle . 


That war accelerates social change is a 
truism, but perhaps only a resounding 
defeat can provoke reflection on whether 
this change is beneficial, and what it implies 
for the constitution. In Britain, in the 
absence of defeat and constitutional debate, 
the one unchecked trend was towards 
centralisation. In World War I government 
intervened more, and coopted provincial 
elites to replace an inadequate establishment. 
This centripetal tendency was reinforced 
by changes in industry and technology. 
After 1923 four London-centred 
railway monopolies replaced 120-odd 
companies, only ten of them London-
based; the same trend happened in banks 
and shipping. Further, the provincial staple 
industries, already over-expanded to meet 
wartime demands, were menaced by 
worsening trade (aggravated by the City's 
insistence on a dear money policy) and 
mounting foreign competition. The industries 
which expanded -cars, chemicals, 
electrics and services -were mainly organised 
as large public, multinational or 


semi-monopoly companies. They wanted 
an expanding market, and sited their works 
near it in the south-east. 

Labour and the Conservatives did little 
to intervene, nor did local government. 
Socialism, depression, and Liberal collapse 
panicked the old provincial elites into rate-
reducing 'moderate' alliances, until in 1929 
the Conservatives aided them by derating 
industry and substantially replacing rates 
by grants. Labour seldom gained majorities 
in local councils until the 1930s, and had to 
learn the business from scratch. 

The slump's economic consequences 
proved temporary-the 'staples' picked up 
rapidly during and after World War II. Its 
cultural, and by implication political, 
effects were far more serious. 

In Arnold Bennett's novel Lord Raingo 
(1926) the hero-a northern industrialist 
drafted into war government -is gripped 
by pneumonia. His heart, labouring to 
pump out the blood from his lungs, over-
strains itself and he dies. This intelligent, 
terrifying metaphor could stand for the 
impact of World War I on the provinces, 
and possibly also for a realisation on 
Bennett's part that the tradition of provincial 
intellectual life -energetic, cosmopolitan 
and didactic -which he represented 
was being overwhelmed. 

The slump coincided with the onset of 
new communications technology and ensured 
that the provinces would only participate 
in it at second hand. By itself, the 
slump was bad enough. J B Priestley's 
English Journey (Heinemann, 1935) caught 
the provinces on the slide. His description 
of Birmingham was almost emblematic: 

"In two minutes its civic dignity, its 
metropolitan airs hud vanished, and all it 
offered me, mile after mile, was a parade of 
mean dinginess . . . ". 

Priestley not only noted the impact of 
economic collapse -most dramatic in a 
Lancashire stricken by Far Eastern competition 
-but the changes which new 
industries brought: fewer skilled work


men, and instead a relatively small group 
of 'planners' and a large unskilled workforce 
, often female. The provincial middle 
class, now beginning to commute by car 
from the countryside, was less cosmopolitan 
(the German-Jewish community 
had been expelled from Manchester and 
Bradford after 1914) and more London-
oriented. The vacuum was filled by a 
narrow-minded, reactionary puritanism. 
Priestley's heart was in the right place. 
Norwich, one of the few places he enthused 
over, got him arguing in favour of decentralisation: 
((A democratic system 
assumes that nearly everybody is taking an 
interest in government. The more difficult it 
is for anybody to concern himself in political 
matters, the worse it is for democracy. 
Centralisation is one ofthe deadliest enemies 
ofthe system. For this reason alone there is 
much to be said in favour of regional 
government in England. . . such government 
would bring a new dignity to provincial 
life, just as it would increase the importance 
ofthe various new provincial capital cities, 
where the deputies or senators meet. " 

But the litany of "drabness, seediness, 
hopelessness" remained, amplified by 
Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier 
(Gollancz, 1936) and the photojournalists 
of Picture Post. Like Priestley, they came, 
sympathised, spoke up for planning, but 
they saw the provinces as patients, not 
agents. The image -though not the engagement 
or the hope -has hung on, in 
Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Malcolm 
Bradbury. 

After 1934 the National Government 
spent some money on 'Special Areas' in 
Scotland, Wales and the North (although 
it also subsidised the transfer south of some 
250,000 people, 1928-38). But the housing 
and consumer goods boom which 'protection' 
and 'cheap money' brought about 
helped reduce unemployment in London 
to 6.3 per cent in 1936, compared with 21.3 
per cent in Scotland. Pressure on infrastructure 
was met by the nationalisation of 


London's transport (1932) and low-interest 
loans for railway electrification, while 
Labour's capture of London in 1934 enabled 
a growing rates income to finance 
welfare and housing improvement. This in 
turn boosted new consumer goods and 
service industries, from building societies 
and hire-purchase companies to chain 
stores like Marks and Spencer and Tesco. 

Even Conservatives worried about this 
imbalance. Baldwin.'s appointment of the 
Barlow Commission (1937-40) into 'the 
distribution of the industrial population' 
stemmed both from the threat of bombing, 
and the 'over-heating' of-the south-east. 
Government-sponsored bodies such as the 
Scottish Economic Committee. told Barlow 
that a Scottish planning authority with 
spending power (like the Scottish Development 
Agency of 1975) should be set up. 
Labour was divided. The Fabian local 
government expert W A Robson urged 
larger regional authorities which could 
encourage economic growth, but Hugh 
Dalton, in Labour Party enquiries of 1937, 
emphasised central planning. Both 
Barlow's 1940 report, and the later 
'Keynesian' stress on regulatory fiscal 
policy, echoed this, and it was given reality 
in the Distribution of Industry Act (1945). 
Local authorities were restricted to physical 
planning, and further inhibited by the New 
Towns policy. By the 1970s most of these 
had been built to take London overspill, 
and lay securely in the shadow of the 
capital. 

Meanwhile new technology was used to 
impose a single cultural pattern. Reith's 
BBC certainly promoted material of high 
quality, but stifled promising local initiatives. 
The rich markets of the South 
naturally attracted films and advertising, 
which in turn lubricated the migration of 
press and publishers. After the Guardian 
moved south in 1957, the only quality 
dailies left outside London were Scots or 
Irish, along with a handful of weeklies and 
about 10 per cent of major publishers. The 

contrast with press and publishing in 
Europe is dramatic. A glance at The 
Bookseller will show the extent to which 
books have become products rather than 
means of information and any copy of the 
London New Standard demonstrates that 
centralisation no longer guarantees choice, 
fairness or quality. (Autonomy does at least 
give the left a hearing. In 1945 every 
Scottish daily supported the Conservatives; 
in 1979, unlike in England, the Tories were 
left with the Manchester-printed Scottish 
Daily Express.) 

State aid after 1945 further strengthened 
London; today, 25 per cent of the Arts 
Council's budget goes on four large London 
companies. Jenny Lee certainly got the 
provinces a better deal, but since 1970 the 
South Bank and Barbican complexes have 
swung matters in favour of the capital. 
Whether or not such 'centres of excellence' 
benefit the rest of Britain, they certainly 
benefit London's international role. Did 
anyone think it unusual when Nicholas 
Nickleby transferred from London to 
Broadway at $100 a ticket? It would have 
seemed odd had it opened in Leeds. 

We are dealing here with a mentalite, 
something which dominates-unquestioned 
-action, habit and language. We defend 
the Nickleby business with a world like 
'excellence' but how do we define it? As 
expertise which we trade in the international, 
English-speakmg market, or a 
means of enriching the lives of our citizens? 
If, as socialists, we accept the second 
definition, can we justify the inequalities 
which result from the concentration in 
London of so many of our cultural 
resources? 

Our intellectual 'authorities' tell us that 
their idea of metropolitan life is stimulating, 
liberating, and inevitable. But how 
does it compare internationally? Is it not 
still rather like Scrutiny's indictment of 
Bloomsbury: "a little world in which social 
life made the exercise of critical judgement 
bad taste; every member accruing to the 


group became entitled to eminence ... ·' 

The ble sing of not being uprooted by 
fa ci m and war eems to have produced 
complacency, parochiali m and nepoti m, 
not rigour and originality. Still, the elite 
coin our vocabulary and it basic values, 
and exclude alternatives, howevercogent. 

The ambitiou maintain that London is 
the centre of action and information (look 
at the career of virtually any Labour cabinet 
minister). They continue to maintain thi 
when driven by expen e and stre to the 
Dordogne or Su ex where they are more 
i olated than in any provincial town. 
Politician -above all Michael Foot celebrate 
the drama of parliamentary 
combat. Yet it ha been poor compensation 
to Labour, out of office, for the i olation 
of it leader from executive experience. 
Party hi tory between 1951 and 1964 
generated Cro man' Backbench Diaries, 
Philip William ' Hugh Gaitskell, and Foot' 
Aneurin Bevan, 3000-odd pages which 
~how talented men, who in a federal tate 
could have been furthering ociali t legislation 
in the region , and mastering the 
civil . ervice. rotting on the oppo ition 
benche . The re ult was a cabinet (196470) 
rich in academic talent and pitifully 
de titute of re ult or re pect. 

Mentalites feed back into ociety. Our 
' elf-governing' bodie , finding their 
autonomy dimini hing, became pressure-
group . In Europe, regional bodie act to 
amplify local intere t , or act a arbiter 
between them. Briti h pre ure group aim 
at We tmini ter, and adopt man of it 
eliti t approache . London attract pre ~ 
ure group -over two-third of them -but 
it high co t expel them to remote uburb 
and new town . Are the wa te of Milton 
Keyne nearer to power than Bri tol or 
Li erpool? 

The Misfortunes of'Pianning 

'Planning' a word that Labour make 

meaningle s through over-u e. But it i not 
a ociali t concept: it originated in centre 
and centre-right groups in the 1930 . And, 
anyway, the Briti h have never been much 
good at it. In the word of a French commentator, 
Jacque Leruez: "It has never 
been more than a succession of isolated 
efforts which have led to nothing, and which 
have been temporary expedients rather than 
thorough-going reforms. " (Economic Planning 
and Politics in Britain, Martin 
Robert on, 1975). After World War II, it 
was mainly concerned with the nationali ed 
indu trie , them elve almost wholly in the 

ervice sector, while Labour' regional 
strategy wa a relative failure. 

This had two aspect . Under the 1945 
Act the Board of Trade allocated indu trial 
development certificate and con tructed 
advance factorie while local authoritie 
zoned land for indu trial u e. A variety of 
new indu trie flowed into the 'development 
area ' until 1947, when the financial 
cri is forced its curtailment. Given the 

carcity of factorie and hou ing in the 
blitzed outh thi would, however, have 
happened anyway. The policy wa no more 
than marginally useful. 

The Con ervative neglected regional 
policy in the 1950s, pending le on it, in 
real term , than in the 1930 . The de truction 
of their rival gave hipbuilding and 
engineering an Indian ummer of pro perity, 
until, after 1957, they had to compete 
with up-to-date German and Japane e 
work ; by 1961 whole indu trie were falling 
apart, even where-unlike in the 1930 
-the global demand for their product wa 

oanng. 

Labour' enthu ia m for regionali m 
before 1964 accompanied it promi e of 
' cientific revolution', and wa rather low-
key, a the idea had alread been preempted 
by Harold Macmillan. A important 
a alleged French precedent wa 
the lobbying of road and con tructi n intere 
t which had propo ed, in the 
Buchanan Report of No ember 1963, a 


new tructure of regional government. 
Under the National Plan of 1965 regional 
regeneration was seen a a means to faster 
economic growth, drawing labour surpluses 
into play to increase GNP by the 
magic 3.8 per cent per annum. But the 
qualitative schemes of the new Regional 
Economic Planning Councils were mainly 
ignored; by the time they were adequately 
serviced by civil servants the Department 
of Economic Affairs had been conquered 
by the Treasury, and the whole growth 
strategy was in ruins. 

The decade 1964-1973 saw regional 
economic assistance increase in real terms 
by over 750 per cent on the preceding 
decade. Yet there was only slight change 
in the unemployment picture, which overall 
had worsened. And unemployment was 
only one indicator of economic decline. 
Scotland lost 94 per cent of its natural 
population increase by emigration, 196171; 
between 1966 and 1971 government 
investment valued at £641m added 105,000 
jobs in Scotland, but at the same time 
156,000 jobs were lost, and the new jobs, 
mainly in 'branch factories' of multinationals, 
depended on decisions taken and 
research carried out elsewhere. Government 
research expenditure in Scotland 
during the 1970s was only half the country's 
entitlement by population. In northern 
England it was even less, and two-thirds of 
that went to nuclear research. Growing 
amalgamations and specialisation have 
aided the south-east and made provincial 
economies less resilient and adaptive; the 
Scottish unemployment rate in October 

19.81 was 14.4 per cent, compared with a 
8.9 per cent rate in south-east England. 
Without the employment provided by the 
oil industry it might easily have reached 18 
per.cent. 
In the era of property speculation, investment 
trusts and asset-strippers, a more 
politicised City has intervened more-and 
with destructive effect-in British industry. 
The Monopolies Commission's Report on 

the proposed takeover of the Royal Bank 
of Scotland, of January 15, 1982, made the 
re ults of the 'greater efficiency' of London 
control bluntly clear: " In certain cases the 
comparative economic difficulties ofregions 
such as Scotland have been accentuated by 
the acquisition of locally managed and 
controlled business by companies from 
outside . .. an important factor in Scotland's 
economic difficulties has been the progressive 
loss of the morale (this) has 
caused . .. Entrepreneurial spirit and· business 
leadership depend critically on self-
confidence, and on balance we·believe that 
such self-confidence has been weakened''. 

It is the same with the state corporations. 
remote from their workers and consumers. 
and often defended by regional 'advi ory' 
group , picked from the politically 'sound' 
rather than the imaginative, which innoculate 
them again t reform. They present all 
the arrogance of corporatism (second-rate 
Labour politicians abu ing consumer 
before graduating to city boardrooms and 
abusing socialism) with none of its stability 
of policy. In important areas state corporations 
have wilfully destroyed regional 
initiatives. International qirports, for 
instance, could have been made the focu 
of regional growth. At the moment 
Prestwick Airport is being allowed to 
decay, while plans are advanced for a third 
London airport. 

The coordination of regional policy with 
local government and educational reform 
could have helped revitalise provincial life. 
By setting up Royal Commissions on local 
government Labour made legislation impossible 
before 1970, by which time 
'obsolete' city councils had torn apart their 
centres with motorways and stacked their 
citizens in tower blocks, while education 
policy-produced needless competition in 
high education. Richard Crossman's 
Coventry exemplified the result: a sterile 
city centre and a campus university remote 
from and irrelevant to local people. Yet 
Crossman, surveying the student revolt in 


1968, had the nerve to reject his earlier 
faith in democracy, and claim that the 
'enlightened oligarchy' which gave us this 
was the only possible way of governing 
Britain! 

Avoiding Devolution 

The Scots and Welsh, with their own 
administrations and cultural traditions, 
expected more of the government, and 
were the first to rebel. Prematurely, alas. 
Wilson buried this discontent beneath the 
Crowther/Kilbrandon Commission, which 
he then forgot about. The Conservatives, 
never tortured by scruples, forgot their 
devolution pledges and completed local 
government 'reform' in 1973, before Kilbrandon 
had reported. 

Labour's 'regionalism' actually implied 
further centralisation. Regions had to 
lobby in London to attract employers, who 
in turn wanted takeovers and amalgamations 
as a quid pro quo. Would a strategy 
of local public investment not have been 
better? This worked well for Norway in 
the oil boom of the 1970s, while Scotland 
and the north east failed dismally to benefit 
from it. The Scottish and Welsh Development 
Agencies (1975) were a backhanded 
recognition of the failure of central 
control, but they had scarcely been set up 
when the recession arrived. Before then, 
there had been no detailed analysis of how 
the regional economies actually worked. 

Since then, with Thatcher's scrapping of 
the English Regional Economic Development 
Councils and Industrial Development 
Certificates, the position has worsened. 

The Kilbrandon Report would have died 
but for the revival of the Scottish National 
Party (SNP) in 1973; when the Scots 
accepted Labour's devolution compromise 
at by-elections in 1978, Labour MPs felt 
free to wreck it. Westminster's attitude to 
regional government . had been compounded 
of such panic concessions and 
opportunist betrayals. Most English 
Labour MPs have preferred stasis to 
action; they would rather destroy devolution 
than try to extend it to their own region. 

Clement Attlee argued in 1946 that ((it 
was in economic matters that there was the 
strongest pressure against separate administration 
for different parts of Great 
Britain." The experience of 1945-51 
scarcely endorsed the view and since then, 
within the mixed economy, centralisation 
has extended the values of the City into the 
administrative structure, rather than enhancing 
public participation and social 
responsiveness. The mixed economy, with 
the market as servant not as master, is still 
a workable compromise, but its decisions 
must be made at a level where the interests 
of business-state, private or multinational 
-are governed by the needs of the community 
as a whole. This can no longer be 
done in London, but the bodies responsible 
must be accessible and recognised and 
their representatives powerful and well-
informed. We need to create a new socialist 
basis in provincial government. 


economic principles more strongly than 
their belief in democracy -and are skilful 
and ruthless when it comes to preserving 
them . But it is unlikely to come to that. In 
the face of Labour's confusion, the 
'metropolitan' option can be marketed 
successfully, promising general stability, 
satisfying certain groups on the left, and 
providing at least enough prosperity to 
keep vital groups of electors loyal. 

The evolution of servitor capitalism has, 
however, something of the symmetry of 
Marx's dialectic: it creates its own opposition. 
Where multinationals have eroded 
autonomous capitalism most deeply above 
all in the British provinces -a new 
political generation is discerning the links 
between third world exploitation and 
British economic centralisation. In contrast 
to the simplicities of Manifesto, a 
recent study of Scotland, Multinationals 
and the Third World (Mainstream, 1982) 
shows the extent to which provincial 
Britain's eccnomic and social future 
depends on finding a new relationship with 
the developing world. If we can get this 
relationship straight, we can export 
products and expertise which enhance the 
ideals as well as the techniques of our welfare 
state, and transmit our painfully-
acquired experience of multinational capitalism. 


Ifthe world changes in the way that we, 
as socialists, want it to, Britain must change 
as well. The more rapid the changes in 
Britain, the more hopeful the pibspects 
for a new world economic ordef. Otherwise, 
Orwell's accusation stili stands: "All 
left-wing parties in the highly industrialised 
countries are at bottom a sham, because 
they make it their bUsiness to fight against 
something which they do ttot really wish to 
destroy. They have internationalist aims, 
and at the seme time they struggle to keepup a standard of life with which those aims 
are incompatible . . . " (Rudyard Kipling, 
1942). 

The Socialist Commonwealth 

Decentralisation seems remote from the 

trend of administration -save in Scotland 

and Wales -because it echoes the view, 

hitherto possibly more articulated by the 

right than by the left, that self-government 

has sufficient intrinsic merits to outweigh 

the dislocations and inequities that in


evitably accompany it. 

But it also has forces making for it. 
Firstly, confidence in the coercive apparatus 
of the nation-state may have decreased, 
but the impulse towards collective 
action at a local level has grown. John 
Ardagh, in his study of provincial Europe, 
A Tale ofFive Cities (Seeker and Warburg, 
1979) noted that 'social action' was most 
marked in his British city, Newcastle: "On 
Tyneside, all is participation and involvement. 
In fact the more voluntary the service, 
the better it works, very often" . 

This amounts to a political economy of 
cooperation, and its momentum can be 
awesome, in movements to help the handicapped 
or elderly or to preserve the 
environment. Our task can be exemplified 
by the need to win over the hundreds of 
thousands devoted to preserving our industrial 
past, and turn some of their 
energies to ensuring our industrial future. 

Secondly, there is the impulse of altruism, 
not quite as peremptory as Beatrice 
Webb's 'sense of guilt', more like the 
'herbivores' who Michael Frayn described 
in a famous essay " . . .gentle ruminants 
who look out from the luslt pastures which 
are their natural station in life with their 
eyes full of sortow for less forti,;nate 
creatures, guiltily conscious of their advantages 
through not usually ceasing to eat 
the grass" (The Age of Austerity, Hodder 
and Stoughton 1963). 
Herbivores are important. They are not, 
as our outside left (really a sub-species) 
would claim, natural members of the SDP. 


Governments and Cabinets 

If we divide the major subject-groupings 
of government into ten main areas, 
responsibilities would besplit roughly thus: 

RESPONSIBILITY 

Agriculture 
research 
Education 

Energy 
Environment 

Financial 

Foreign, Commonwealth 
Defence 

Health and Social Services 

Justice 

Trade and Industry 

Transport and 
Communications 

PROVINCE 

land, training, planning, 
co-operatives 

all levels, inspection, 
libraries, museums 

generation and supply 

WESTMINSTER 
> relations with EEC, 

> some research and general 
planning; examination 
co-ordination 

> grid supervision 

urban and public land, local > environmental standards 


government, housing, 
waterways 

provincial state banks, some 
revenue ra~smg, savmgs 
schemes, provincial pension 
funds 

aid programmes, consular 
and EEC representation 

NHS, supplementary 
benefit, individual social 
services 

prisons, most crimes, police, 
employment, some financial 
aid 

regional development, 
employment, some financial 
aid 

provincial transport, 
airports, tourism 

and research 

= 
revenue raising and 
allocation, central banking, 
audit, currency 

< foreign and commonwealth 
relations, defence 

> national insurance, 'historic 
entitlements' appeals, 
inspectorate, research 

= 
overseas trade, national 
planning, monopolies 

= 
overseas trade, national 
planning, monopolies 

> national networks, overseas 
links 

> 
Indicates that provincial 
responsibility is greater than 
Westminster's. 

< 
indicates the reverse. 
indicates the division of powers is 
roughly equal. 


The provincial government would be 
organised on 'cabinet' rather than 'committee' 
line , as the 1979 Scotland Act en-
vi aged, and the peciali t committee of 
the provincial a emblie would bear the 
brunt of detailed legi lation and upervi 
ion. The witch of large area of re pon


ibility to the province hould allow the 
reform of the policy-making level of the 
civil er ice (federal and provincial) to 
integrate mini terial staff recruited for the 
duration of the go ernment. Re triction 
of official information hould be reduced 
to the minimum compatible with the 

ecurity of the tate. 

The role of the federal government 
would be re tricted to coordination , long-
range planning, re earch and external 
relation . Certain mini trie (Environment, 
Energy, Education) would either 
cea e to exi tor be reca tin a coordinating 
role. The Hou e of ommon would be 
commen urately reduced -to half it 
pre ent ize. 

The ri k of cour e i that the central 
mini ter either become impotent referee 
in an anarchic inter-provincial game, or 
that, by dividing and ruling, they win back 
even more central authority. The answer 
to this lie in creating a mediating structure 
of inter-provincial bodie (organi ed under 
the umbrella of the Federal Council but 
probably each ba edina provincial seat of 
government) to promote policy coordination 
in energy, transport and so on function 
in which the 'communication 
revolution', through video-links and computerised 
data, can reduce co ts and increase 
efficiency. 

Thoughts on the Constitution 

There is no hope of introducing federalism 
without a written constitution and, 
to interpret it, aSupreme Court. The left 
has always regarded both with hostility, 

eeing them a a con ervative check on the 
power of a sociali t government. But can 
'parliamentary overeignty' be a radical 
force when the executive ha taken over o 
much of parliament' authority? At 
pre ent, it eem a licence to the government, 
the bureaucracy and their corporate 
allie to do a they plea e -a greater threat 
to the left than to the right. Various 'right ' 
that eemed to be afely embedded in our 
political convention have simply di appeared: 
the ecurity of the hou ehold 
from arbitrary police action, the right to 
employment, the right to adequate education, 
or the right of local communities to 
determine their expenditure programmes. 
The ' overeign parliament' two hundred 
year ago gave little aid to those worker 
who e welfare wa overturned by indu triali 
ation ; an equally determined group 
of economic zealot i behaving imilarly 
today. The implication of joining the EEC 
have hown the limitation of sovereignty, 
while Labour' ill-conceived experimentation 
with referenda ha opened the door 
to the ort of 'plebiscitary democracy' 
beloved of right-wing regime . 

The Social Democrat appear to believe 
that we can have devolution, stopping 

hort of federali m, but their 'checks' convention 
plu a regional econd chamber 
-till leave enormous latent power with 
the centre, and of cour e with a judicial 
e tablishment which ha long ince incurred 
the ho tility of the left. Faced, for example, 
with a Scottish government which wished 
to levy taxes on oil, a determined central 
government could retaliate by imposing 
financial antions, which it would be 
beyond the power of the Second Chamber 
to reject, and could follow this up with a 
threat to dismantle devolution and have 
that decision endor ed by a referendum. 
Nothing in the career of the present 
government suggest that it would feel this 
ort of action beyond it. A written constitution 
plus a charter of rights does, 
therefore seem more of a radical than a 


conservative measure, a means of preventing 
extreme action by provinces (restoring 
the dealth penalty, for instance), and of 
guaranteeing basic social entitlements. The 
Federal Council would, moreover, be 
more imaginative in its nominations to the 
Supreme Court, and would probably feel 
that academic constitutional lawyers and 
political scientists are more acceptable 
members than the present judicial 
establishment. 

Debatable Lands 

Relationships get more complicated, and 
the attraction of the status quo seemingly 
increases, when we probe the economic 
infrastructure. But in three crucial areas-
finance, economics and local government 
-drastic reform can yield gains to a socialism 
which is under mounting threat from 
conventional political institutions. 

Finance The financial changes required 
for effective decentralisation run into 
another swamp of administrative inertia-
the persistent failure to evolve any alternative 
to our taxation and rating systems. 
Imposing new taxation of the existing 
pattern creates horrific complexity or (in 
the case of block grants) actually 
strengthens the positions of the bureaucrats. 
The best solution seems to be to 
have a formula by which a Federal Finance 
Council (nominated by the Federal 
Council) divides the yields of various taxes 
between central, provincial and local 
government. In West Germany, for 
example, Bund and Lander each receive 

42.5 per cent of West German income tax, 
the remaining 15 per cent going to local 
government, while 70 per cent of the 
taxation on business profits (or sometimes, 
payroll or capital taxes) goes to local 
government. 
The Financial Council would also 

operate a compensating fund, as a means 
of direct transfers between high and low-
income provinces. Besides this, the 
provinces would also have the power to 
raise taxation on, for instance, motor 
vehicles, pets, gambling and drink. 

The Bank of England would be restructured 
as a central bank with a supervisory 
board composed of representatives 
of publicly-owned provincial banks, and 
an executive head appointed by the 
federal finance minister. This structure 
would greatly increase public control over 
the financial system, with the provincial 
banks taking over many of the functions of 
the 'high street' banks. The recent Royal 
Bank of Scotland case showed that, 
despite the general unpopularity of bank 
nationalisation, many Scots were prepared 
to sanction public ownership as an 
alternative to southern takeover; a line of 
strategy which Labour ought to encourage. 


Economic planning Decentralisation 
clashes with the left's traditional ideal of 
the central integration of economic and 
industrial planning -an ideal which, of 
course, has never in practice been 
realised. Provincial economics ministries 
and executives on the lines of the Scottish 
or Welsh Development Agencies can 
probably integrate better with a more 
pragmatic type of corporate planning by 
state and private industry. Such institut-
IOns can: 

* Marry infrastructural provisiOn to industrial 
development by coordinating the 
programmes of local government, education, 
nationalised industries, etc. As 
federal government agents, they would 
also supervise national and international 
labour and environmental legislation. 
* Research and present industrial 
development and export options. This 
implies a sophisticated provincial operat

ing reforming economic and social initiative 
, and assembling behind them a 
wide range of public suport. 

Neither is this a pamphlet about 
Britain's economic future, but decentralisation 
po its an economic order different 
from the one we have been evolving towards 
-and a shift from international 
financial ervice to the upply of equipment 
and techniques which aid world 
development. Thi i not the place to 
dogmatise about what we hould produce: 
the ability of provincial agencie to et 
resource against need will, in time, 
produce its own pattern. But certain 
options are obviou -equipment developed 
around our natural resources and 
our social service , areas of ocial technology 
such a public transport or water 

upply in which the u e of new technology 
is qualified by experience and experimentation. 


Such options recognise that although 
the world's basic technology-up to and 
including the microproce or -has been 

preempted by the international industrial 
order, its adaptation and constructive 
application are quite different matters. 
New technology ha already put conventional 
busines tructures into question, 
and enhanced the competitiveness ofsmall 
and flexible unit . Decentralisation thus 
doe n't imply a retreat from reality, but a 
Briti h economy which in world terms will 
be more competitive and more u eful. 

But will it bring more prosperity than 
metropolis? Frankly, thi is doubtful. The 
wealthy pay better, and if we want to be a 
nation of well-tipped waiters, then we 

hould continue to erve -and arm -them. 
The Argentinian have, as I write, just 

igned the cheque for two warships 
which, a couple of months ago, could have 
been . .. We are back to morality and the 
'good society', and the value we are prepared 
to put on that. 'If you will tell me 
what you ultimately intend Bradford to 
be, perhaps I can tell you what Bradford 
can ultimately produce.' We still have 
Ruskin to answer. 


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