The Tory party’s favourite thinktank fell dramatically out of favour with its Cameronite friends over the summer after releasing a controversial report arguing that regeneration of northern cities had reached its limit and people would be better off moving to the south-east (to paraphrase).
David Cameron described Policy Exchange’s report, Cities Unlimited, as ‘rubbish from start to finish’ and ‘barmy’, a marked change in tone from when he gave a speech at the thinktank’s HQ in 2005, reminding his audience that ‘Policy exchange was set up to ask some pretty fundamental questions about politics’.
The party’s shadow work and pensions secretary also waded into the dispute, venting his anger on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site where he branded the report ‘misplaced’ and ‘nonsensical’. The MP for Epsom and Ewell, hardly an area in need of regeneration, then added menacingly: ‘In fact it was worse than that – but I’m not allowed to say what I really think of it on a family website.’
Some have speculated that this apparent rift between Policy Exchange and the Tory high command could pave the way for other centre-right thinktanks – such as Reform, Centre for Policy Studies and the Taxpayers’ Alliance – to make their mark on Tory policy. But with a raft of Policy Exchange advisors going on to work at Tory HQ, the damage to relations is probably not permanent.
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If those in the north felt demoralised after reading the Policy Exchange report (which no doubt scores of them did), the New Local Government Network sprang to its defence, issuing a report calling for more peers hailing from north of the Watford Gap. The report, Lords of our Manor?, revealed that over 40 per cent of peers live in either London or the south-east and that large swathes of the country – especially the North, the Midlands and Wales – are underrepresented.
According to the report’s co-authors, Nick Hope and James Hulme, cities such as Birmingham, Liverpool and Bristol have little or no voice within the second chamber. ‘A significant north/south divide is apparent, with areas in the South enjoying far greater representation than those in the North. London has more Peers than the East Midlands, West Midlands, Wales, Northern Ireland, North East England and Yorkshire and the Humber put together.’
And despite living closer to the chamber, the report also found that peers from the south-east were the laziest, being less likely to attend the Lords than their colleagues living in the West Midlands, Wales and the north-west ‘despite the considerable distances they have to travel to get to London’. Even peers registered as living overseas put in more appearances on average than those living in the south-east.
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Have-a-go heroes – from both the north and the south – will have been heartened by a recent report from Reform berating the growing number of Britons who have become ‘“passive bystanders”, uninformed about crime and punishment and less likely to participate in maintaining justice than people in other countries’.
The result is ‘Robocop justice’ – an increasingly centralised and technocratic system of justice that has ‘made Britain the most expensive country to police in the world and has rendered citizens incapable’.
The report goes on: ‘The failings of Robocop have been recognised by the political parties who have all attempted to spell out a localist agenda. In practice though this approach is one of the “colouring book”, with national politicians dictating parameters and targets for local action with only a small amount of autonomy allowed. Radical decentralisation has been consistently blocked by politicians and police keen to maintain their national power base.’
Thankfully, the report spells out a course of action to remedy this unsatisfactory situation – transform Britons from passive bystanders to active citizens. One active citizen who no one would dare accuse of being a ‘passive bystander’ is, of course, justice secretary Jack Straw who last year told how he had intervened four times to stop criminals, three times managing to detain the offender until police arrived.