Ignore the Welsh chaos. Here’s how Starmer can make devolution work
Until the 1930s English cities had ambitious local governments that barely glanced at Westminster. That energy could return — if they don’t mimic Wales and Scotland
So much about the Welsh Senedd feels new, from the still-inspiring modern building in Cardiff Bay, with its slate, timber and natural light flooding through, to Vaughan Gething’s arrival in March as first minister, the first black head of a European country.
But the current mayhem in Wales is politics as old as the hills. It is the old politics of chaos and backstabbing as Gething angrily succumbed to a scandal about a campaign donation from a businessman whose firm had been convicted over illegal dumping, after sacking a colleague in a leaking row. He resigned on Tuesday, claiming he was never “accepted” as first minister.
Welsh Labour politics is not known for its warm fraternal atmosphere. This particular tale, mingling dubious donations, media leaks, touch-and-go confidence motions and personal feuding, would feel familiar not only at Westminster but in Edinburgh, where Humza Yousaf was forced out as first minister in May.
Yet another devolutionary failure then? Certainly both these men who were elevated to lead their devolved parliaments quickly proved unsuitable. Same old, same old. And it is certainly embarrassing for the newly elected Labour government. Everyone involved insists Sir Keir Starmer did not force Gething out; but after everything he had said during the election about probity, service and a new start, it was a party problem he simply could not allow to fester.
Apart from anything else, it has distracted from his own ambitious and energetic project to spread devolution across the UK. Devolving power is at the heart of the new politics Starmer hopes to deliver. Almost immediately after his election victory, he travelled to Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales to promise better relations with Westminster, and a Council of the Regions and Nations, to include himself, Angela Rayner, all the elected English mayors and all the first ministers.
On his first weekend in Downing Street, Starmer invited the English mayors in, saying that “regardless of the colour of their rosette, my door is open and my government will work with them”. Ben Houchen, of Tees Valley, the only Tory combined-authority mayor left standing, got a private meeting, and appeared delighted.
Then in the King’s Speech came the English Devolution Bill, described by the North East mayor Kim McGuinness as “the biggest change we have seen for generations”. Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, told me he thought it was the single most important thing in the new government’s programme “because it tilts the British state away from Westminster and Whitehall for the first time ever”.
And it is indeed hard to overstate the importance of devolution to the Starmer project. In the fight to get economic growth in time for voters to see a measurable change in their lives, energising the regions of England is absolutely central.
Yet it’s a subject Westminster journalism struggles to quite picture or enthuse about. By definition, it’s about towns and cities far away from parliamentary dramas; local leaders national journalists don’t drink with and sometimes barely recognise; and basic questions such as skills, bus networks and zoning that we have been taught to find boring.
But policy specialists, from the Institute for Government to the Starmerite Labour Together, agree that devolution — even the word causes some lobby hacks to find their shoulders involuntarily slump — will be pivotal to the success or failure of the government in the next few years.
“It’s about early messages. It’s about momentum,” one of those involved told me. “Starmer really believes in this stuff and really wants it. That, in itself, will have an impact.”
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Two things need to happen. First, the patchwork of different kinds of local government, with half of England not covered by an authority powerful enough to take over transport, planning and skills work, has to be regularised. The precise form of mayor, combined authority and geographical spread has to be agreed in places from Plymouth right up to Cumbria, including much of Lancashire and parts of east England. This will be ticklish and provoke obscure, complex local rivalries.
Second, the big city mayors may also need further powers to push through change.
But far away from Westminster, the sense of excitement is genuine and city mayors insist their form of devolution is very different from the politics of Wales or indeed Scotland.
The most important testbed will be Greater Manchester, where Burnham told me earlier this year that he thought 2024 would be a bigger turning point for progressive politics in Britain than 1997, despite the apparently much worse economic circumstances.
He thought this because when Tony Blair became prime minister, on a surge of optimism and ambition, he did not actually have the mechanisms, the political muscle, to drive change across the UK. Now they exist.
Take housing. In the early 2000s, Whitehall-driven “planning pathfinders” were designed to rebuild housing markets in the north and Midlands and ended up with the bulldozing of terraced housing in Lancashire and other parts of the most deprived communities in England. It was described to me by one local politician as a “total disaster”, but mayors believe the Starmer government’s ambition for 1.5 million new homes is something they can lead on.
In Manchester, Burnham has already made Starmer an offer to go beyond his region’s quota, or percentage, for new homes and to build 75,000, heavily tilted to new council and social housing. “We have done the site allocation already,” he says. “It was painful but we have done it. In nine out of the ten boroughs we’re ready to go.”
Another area where devolution could quickly make things feel dramatically different is education: Burnham has also overseen the Greater Manchester Baccalaureate which from September will offer local teenagers an alternative to university, focused entirely on local employers and what they most need.
At age 14, students will be offered seven gateways to local employment that — unlike the English baccalaureate from Michael Gove, which focuses on traditional subjects wanted by universities — will emphasise engineering GCSEs, art and design, music, drama, food technology, all skills urgently needed by Manchester employers. Everybody who got the requisite T-level or Btec qualifications would then, Burnham hopes, be offered a job placement with a Manchester company.
That is only one example. A combined authority in the east of England, for instance, might tilt its skills bias towards agriculture and wind technologies; in Liverpool or Birmingham, with the car industry, it would be engineering; elsewhere, marine and logistics technologies (and everywhere, computer science).
Will this succeed? In politics as in life, there are no panaceas. Devolution will not stop — although it may mitigate — ferocious local rows about the building of new housing, infrastructure or transport. Nobody, whether Andy Burnham or Ben Houchen or indeed Vaughan Gething, can authentically speak for everybody in an area; they can only make choices, from taking a bus system into local control to doing deals to allow technology hubs backed by universities, and hope they work and become popular.
But there is energy and optimism here, just as there was with the original Gove plan for levelling up before it degenerated into Whitehall flinging around little pots of money, which in some cases were literally used for hanging baskets to decorate the high streets of towns desperate for a bypass instead. We may, just, be at an important political inflection point.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, after all, England’s cities had pulsingly ambitious local governments which barely glanced at Westminster for permission before going ahead with transport schemes, energy and sanitation projects, specific local housing, colleges for local needs, baths, cut-price clothing and libraries.
“The gentleman in Whitehall knows best” is a relatively recent way of thinking; it originated in the Labour politician Douglas Jay’s 1937 book The Socialist Case and became associated with Clement Attlee’s 1945 government. What a happy irony it would be, if it was finally overturned by another Labour government facing different, but intense, economic challenges.
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