A Desk Is Not Power

He is right about the problem

Start by giving him this, because it is worth more than the criticism that follows.

Britain is the most centralised large country in the developed world. Almost every decision that shapes a town — what gets built, what gets funded, what gets closed — is taken by people who do not live there and will never have to explain themselves to anyone who does. This is not a grievance invented by the north. It is the settled view of nearly everyone who studies how this country is run, and it has been true for fifty years while government after government promised to fix it and didn't.

Andy Burnham has said so more plainly than any Prime Minister in living memory. Whatever else follows, he has named the disease correctly and he deserves credit for it.

The trouble is the prescription.

What he actually announced

Last month the Prime Minister began working from a new office at Heron House in central Manchester, nicknamed No10 North. He described it as the nerve centre of a rewired Britain, and said he would end the era in which power and resources had been sucked into the centre.

His stated aim was to take power out of the centre and put it into the hands of the people and places who can use it best.

Hold on to that phrase. We are going to come back to it, because three days after the office opened, a place tried to use exactly that power, and we all watched what happened.

Follow the money

There is one number that tells you almost everything about whether power has actually moved.

Local government in this country collects about five per cent of all tax revenue. In France it is fourteen. In the United States it is fifteen.

That is the whole argument in three figures. A council that raises almost nothing decides almost nothing. It applies. It bids. It submits proposals to a department in London and waits to hear whether it has been successful, like a charity writing to a foundation. Whatever is written on the door of the building, an organisation that cannot fund its own decisions is not governing — it is administering somebody else's.

And the Treasury did not move to Manchester. Nobody has seriously suggested it should. The department that decides what everything costs and who gets it stayed exactly where it was, which means the answer to almost every question a northern city might ask is still given in London.

Even his friends can see it

This is not just our view, and it is not coming only from his opponents.

Academics at his own city's university have described the new office as largely symbolic. The Financial Times warned before it opened that the whole devolution drive risked disappointing unless it came with a decisive transfer of power rather than a change of address. Other cities have quietly noted that moving influence from London to Manchester is not the same thing as spreading it around the country.

Westminster, which is cruel but rarely wrong about these things, has taken to calling it Manc-A-Lago.

Epping

Now go back to that phrase — power in the hands of the people and places who can use it best.

In the same fortnight, a place used it.

Epping Forest District Council went to the High Court on behalf of residents who objected to a hotel in their town being used to house asylum seekers. That is a place using power. It is precisely, exactly, what devolution is supposed to look like: local people, local representatives, a local decision, pursued through the proper legal channels rather than on the street.

They won an injunction. It was overturned. They tried again and lost again. And then they were ordered to pay the Home Secretary's legal costs, on top of the half a million pounds of public money they had already spent.

So we have two events, in one fortnight, from one government. In the first, the Prime Minister promises to hand power to places. In the second, a place picks that power up, and the government spends public money beating it back down and then bills the town for the privilege.

Only one of those events was a speech.

Lent, not given

Here is the part that is not really Burnham's fault, and matters more than anything he said in Manchester.

Under our constitution, devolved power is a loan.

Parliament is sovereign. Everything it gives away, it can take back, and no Parliament can bind the next one. Scotland and Wales have had their own parliaments for a quarter of a century and Westminster can still legislate over their heads, because the power they hold was granted rather than owned. Every mayor, every council, every combined authority in England sits on exactly the same footing. They exercise powers on loan, revocable by a future government that finds them inconvenient, in an afternoon, without asking anyone.

So when a Prime Minister says he is putting power in the hands of places, he is not lying, but he is not describing what he thinks he is describing either. He is lending it. And a loan can be called in — usually at the exact moment a place tries to use it for something the lender dislikes, which is the only moment it ever really matters.

That is not an argument against Burnham's sincerity. It is an argument about the machine he is operating. Even if he means every word, he cannot give away what our constitution says he must keep. No Prime Minister can. That is the flaw, and it is why this problem cannot be solved by moving offices around. It is constitutional, and it will keep coming back until somebody addresses it as such.

Devolving to whom, exactly?

There is one more question worth asking, politely.

The powers being offered go to mayors and councils — the same tier of government that Epping just demonstrated can be overruled and then invoiced. The open letter welcoming the plan came from mayors and civic leaders. The consultation, such as it is, has been between one layer of politicians and another.

Nobody has asked the public which powers they want held where.

And the new centre of the rewired Britain is, as it happens, the city its author ran for eight years. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were mentioned in the speech and given no detail. There is a version of this that is genuine decentralisation, and there is a version that is simply a second capital with a familiar face in it. So far we have been shown a building, not a plan, and the difference between those two things is measured in money and law, neither of which has gone anywhere.

He has not moved power to Manchester. He has moved himself to Manchester, and power stayed where it was.