Britain will have to recapture its decentralising spirit to secure a post-Brexit settlement that works for everyone, argues Alan Lockey 

Early in his political career, Nye Bevan had a stump speech about power in Britain. ‘When I get older’, the young Bevan would say, ‘the place to get to is the council. That’s where power is. So, I worked hard and, in association with my fellows, when I was about 20 years of age, I got on the council. Then I discovered when I got there that power had been there, but it had just gone’.

Where is had gone was Westminster. And what Bevan was describing was the slow yet unmistakable emasculation of local government in mid-20^th century Britain. Of course, Conservative governments also played a full role in this process. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher, despite being the daughter of an alderman, waged something akin to an all-out war on council autonomy, moving innumerable fiscal levers from local to national control. Yet it is still hard not to see the 1945 Labour government as representing the decisive turning point against Britain’s municipal tradition. Before the war whole spheres of public life now seen as the province of national government or the private sector were owned and managed locally – not least 80 per cent of the country’s utilities. Beatrice Webb, the arch-Fabian centraliser, regularly complained about ‘the characteristic English preference for local over central administration’.

But Webb soon got her way. With the growing dominance of central economic planning, Labour sidelined ‘municipal socialism’ in favour of the central Fabian state. And in creating a centralised institution that so perfectly captured a sense of the national common good, arguably it was Bevan and his National Health Service that effectively finished the job.

Fast forward to 2017 and Britain now stands as the most centralised country in the world. Even France, the home of dirigisme, turned its back on centralism in the early 1980s. But uniquely in Britain you can find political, financial, economic, media and cultural power all concentrated in one city.

It is difficult to measure the impact this unevenness has upon our political culture. But it is difficult to argue against the idea that resentment towards regional economic inequality and London dominance may have stoked recent populist anger. Easier to quantify is the important social benefits a more decentralised approach to power in Britain could create. According to the Organisation for Economic Development and Co-operation, decentralisation correlates favourably across the world with stronger growth, more social investment, better educational outcomes, higher wellbeing and less regional inequality.

Moreover, evidence suggests civic politicians are both more trusted and seen as more innovative than those at the national level. Therefore, they surely stand a better chance at negotiating the new social compact we need between prosperity and pride; between the economic imperatives of the modern digital economy on one hand, and peoples’ need for a sense of place and community on the other.

Either way, there is no doubt centralised authority, right across the globe, is in crisis. So, if Britain is serious about tackling its citizens deep sense of powerlessness, then devolution would seem as good as bet as any other.

For these reasons 2015 saw an imperfect, cross-party movement emerge around devolving economic and political power away from Westminster. Yes, alongside the new powers cuts were very clearly being devolved too. Nevertheless, in challenging the decades-long consensus for ‘the man in Whitehall knows best’, the deals that Labour councils struck with the then-coalition government were both important and right.

This logic still holds. And, in fairness, it would be wrong to suggest the two main party’s manifestos attempt to unpick it. Both contain respectful nods towards more economic devolution, with Labour’s connection of this process to Brexit and its opportunities particularly welcome. Nevertheless, there is no avoiding the fact that the core message of each document is optimism – cautious for the Tories, unflinching for Labour – about the power of the central state to deliver social justice outcomes. The local state is there, but it is no longer the main story.

This is a mistake on its own terms. But there is another crucial reason why devolution is particularly important in the next parliament: Brexit. At face value, both parties want to build an economy that works for the majority of working people. Yet in an economically diverse country what works for the majority will vary massively depending on where precisely in the country you stand. What works for the majority in the north-east, will vary enormously with what works for the majority in London, Wales or the south-west. And this is the rub: there is no single, top-down approach to Brexit or industrial policy which can cope with Britain’s economic diversity. Devolution is the only road down which an equitable deal for the whole country can travel.

For a successful Brexit – and so much more – we need to reverse young Bevan’s story.

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Alan Lockey is head of the modern economy programme at Demos. He tweets at @Modern_Lockey

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