On The Map

If there is one group of people to be avoided at all costs, then it is the ones who, while nevertheless in favour of TTIP, go on about some EU map with England divided into regions (in fact invented quite independently by the last Conservative Government).

In no time at all, they will be threatening you with treason trials and hangings. If anyone had paid any attention to them, then the toothless and Tyneside-dominated regional assembly would have been set up in the North East, purely and understandably in order to spite them.

My bet is that it is because they supported the EU vigorously until Margaret Thatcher gave her career-negating "No! No! No!" performance, cheered on from the Opposition benches but greeted by groans and stony silence from her own.

In retrospect, she was already losing her mind by then. Very soon afterwards, she lost her job, courtesy of the only body ever to have removed her, the Conservative Party.

City regions are what used to be called metropolitan counties, which Thatcher abolished because she did not like Ken Livingstone. No, that never did make any sense. But that was what she did.

Similarly, many unitary authorities bear more than a  passing resemblance to county boroughs. These things have to keep going around and coming around, in order to justify the salaries of the people who write the research papers.

But since city regions are now to be revived under that name, whatever powers are proposed for them must also extend to a body covering each of those 40 English ceremonial counties which are neither Greater London, nor the City of London, nor any of the former metropolitan counties.

In many cases, the obvious body already exists. Where it no longer does, then that raises the question of why it no longer does.

And where, as here in County Durham, the legacy of the last Government is such as would leave that body unbalanced, with existing local government responsibilities for part but not quite all of its area, then that, too, would be called into question.

Leading to the restoration of the former district councils with municipal functions, as the county council took over those of an assembly.

This promise of significant devolution to rural communities might go some way to making up the support that Labour has been too lazy to build up during this Parliament by properly opposing cuts in those communities' services, and by selecting strong local campaigning candidates, with or without prior party allegiance, in order to contest hundreds of such seats for the first time in decades, if ever.

Whatever the conurbations are getting, as well they might, then so must the counties.

Not only is it false to assume, especially these days, that Labour would not in any case have benefited from that. But that pessimism would be rendered even more unrealistic by the strident opposition to the very creation of this settlement on the part of people who, in no time at all, would be threatening you with treason trials and hangings.