Empowering left-wing leaders is the price that one has to pay for the local experimentation that devolving power and funds entails.
Germany has come closer to managing it – but take a look at the bill: an average of £71 billion between 1990 and 2014. That’s a little more than the £2 billion Sunak was sharing out yesterday.
I favour a unitary system – combining a suitable number of current districts and boroughs, handing down county council powers, with a combined authority led by a directly elected Mayor.
They didn’t get a surge when the UK Internal Market Act passed and saw only a temporary one after their Supreme Court defeat. What about now?
In contrast with the Prime Minister, who made five specific commitments, the Labour leader told the nation that he will have objectives and will unveil them soon.
There is no point having Westminster build safeguards into devolution legislation if no government will actually use them.
Rather than a gimmicky new layer of Government it would have been better to adopt a more localist approach of handing powers to existing local authorities.
The claim that nothing has been achieved springs from the same lack of seriousness — and is simply untrue.
Labour cannot dismantle the British nation as a political community and expect it to long endure as a taxpaying one.
As we know, simply paying poorer parts of the country more will not abolish inequality – or the Barnett Formula would have gone years ago.
The real returns we are seeing on Birmingham 2022 show what can be achieved by devolved decision making and local leadership.
Salmond bowed out after taking his shot at separation in 2014; his successor may feel that she can’t step down without doing the same.
With a referendum taken decisively off the table, there is now space to really take the fight to the SNP on their domestic record.
Chris Heaton-Harris will probably call elections sooner rather than later, but another share of his department’s dwindling stock of credibility is lost.
Officials will argue it is a slippery slope. But unless we get a grip on how to push our long-term productivity rate up, the only way is down.