Interview with the Wessex Chronicle
April 2009
In early Spring Alan did a long sit-down interview with the Wessex Chronicle, who have kindly given permission for the interview to be reproduced on Alan's website. Here are their questions and Alan's answers.
- The recession in Southampton
- Regionalism
- Housing
- Immigration
- Europe
- What Alan would do as a dictator :)
- Culture
Q: To set the context, please tell us a little about your constituency and how things stand workwise in Southampton in this time of recession.
A: Southampton has always been relatively prosperous because of the presence of the port and a substantial industrial base in the city. It has suffered as a result of the changing nature of industry but has, as a city, in general, been able to replace the lost employment in those former heavy industries. It’s not that the port has disappeared – it’s actually handling more cargo than ever before – but the nature of the port is that it now employs far fewer people. The bulk of the traffic going through the port is container traffic, handled by machines. It’s a very different employment pattern in the city from, say, 30 years ago but the city generally has reinvented itself pretty well.
What is curious is that there are a number of towns and cities along the south coast, Southampton being no exception, that have very considerable areas of deprivation and pockets of unemployment surrounded by areas which are among the most prosperous in the country. So you don’t get European regional aid, for example, coming to the South East, but there are areas in the South East where really that should be considered appropriate. Because the region is the most prosperous in Great Britain and is regarded as the economic engine of the country, sometimes those issues get overlooked. In Southampton, unemployment is currently below the national average but climbing and there are certainly not enough vacancies available for all those seeking work. The present recession affects people across the board and will probably affect the country more evenly than has been the case previously.
Ford’s Transit plant has been cutting back. It looks like Ford will retain a manufacturing presence in the city in the long term – and that’s one of the things I’ve been working to try to ensure happens – but it will be of a different nature with a smaller workforce. The effects will not be limited to Ford’s factory itself. Somebody as big as Ford’s has a very substantial effect in terms of radiation out to suppliers of component parts. You shouldn’t just look at figures for direct employment. It used to be said that one person working in the docks supported ten jobs, so that’s the sort of effect one needs to look at.
Q: The name ‘Wessex’ has far more appeal in the heart than the geographical ‘South West’; this really is the language of the administrator. Why do governments go down the road of steamrollering over people’s history and feelings?
A: I was a member of an inquiry team headed-up by John Prescott in the early 90’s which produced the document from which the regional development agencies came to be. Those were seen originally as a part of a wider whole. I was particularly influenced by what regions would look like, how they would work and what their functions would be, and how politically you might bring that about. We found ourselves in a default circumstance where John Major had declared that there would be regions and that they would be based on the administrative regions the Government had previously had.
Then came the North East referendum result, which was disastrous, for various reasons. For example, it got all tied up with the question of local government boundaries. So today, representation of the nations and regions now comprises 2½ national assemblies – Northern Ireland is a bit different – and one regional assembly – for Greater London – and nothing elsewhere. What is running in parallel are the unelected assemblies and development agencies, along with many quangos (often based on boundaries that don’t match what others are using). The administrative boundaries that came about under the Major government have since become effectively what are ‘the regions of England’. But in reality, of course, they’re not the regions of England.
It’s interesting to compare what others have done. France decreed the boundaries, ignoring historical precedent [and is now redrawing them – Ed.]. In Spain the linguistic regions – Catalonia, Euzkadi and Galicia – went early, rather like Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – but the rest were set up on the basis of a considerable discussion about what the areas should look like. For example, one area, La Rioja, has a regional assembly for 300,000 people. It wasn’t done on the basis of a carving-up of numbers or areas. I think that’s quite a significant contrast.
In England, when you come to consider whether there should be regional assemblies, the view very much from Whitehall has been that you could use the existing administrative boundaries. Yes, the present regions cohere in some parts of the country, but in others – notably ours – they don’t appear to cohere at all. The idea that you were going to have a regional assembly for the South East stretching from Dover and the New Forest round to Milton Keynes really I think never would have flown. And the same with the South West, from Tewkesbury to Penzance.
This is also a question of what things a region might deal with and how, for example, it would relate to local government structures. There are things that can properly be done at regional level, such as planning, housing, transport and economic development. How do you pull things together? The question of what is ‘the land’ that people think they are being governed on behalf of is very important. Do you have someone in Whitehall draw up boundaries, looking only at the national interest, and fail to satisfy anyone on the ground? Is it better to accept that there will be areas that are not ‘tucked in’, as it were? More than arguably, Cornwall can stake its claim to a regional assembly, for historical reasons. What then happens to the remainder of the South West? The Bournemouth area has a lot in common with areas to the east, so the issue is not just about breaking up the existing regions but also about moving areas between regions.
Q: The latest draft Regional Spatial Strategy for the South West incorporates over half a million new homes. The exodus of eastern European workers who no longer need the extra housing and the stagnant housing market generally could mean these new homes remain empty for years. What will be the effect on the financing of this plan of the Government’s unprecedented spending on bailing out bad debts?
A: Some of the current initiatives will go on isolating toxic debt from non-toxic debt and so free up money for lending again. A much wider part of the process is getting resources into the economy, probably publicly-led, to stimulate activity that then radiates out into a refloated, refunctioning economy. Housing has to be part of that. There has already been funding advanced for local authorities to purchase non-selling private developments and some restructuring of mortgage debt. In the medium to long term we do need homes. The demand for housing continues to grow, as more people are living alone. There is no sign that that change is going to slow down or stop, so if there are unsold houses around that is because of the economy and not because of real need. If we don’t have a supply of houses that matches the way lifestyles now work, then that will be bad news for the future of the economy.
So it’s probably right that we continue to invest in new housing, even though in the immediate future there are going to be difficulties with it. The interesting question then is, where does it go? If every community thinks it should go somewhere else, the region is absolutely the right level of decision-making to bring people together to work out a solution. This is preferable to deciding things nationally, or giving every local area a veto. Doing things on a regional or sub-regional basis makes a lot of sense.
Q: What doesn’t make sense is that we don’t have a population policy to work to. Because of illegal immigration, we don’t even know how many people there are at the moment. Can you comment?
A: There are always difficulties in working to projections because we don’t know how reliable they will turn out to be. We used to be told that cities would empty of their population and that the life of a city was going to be one of continuous decline. That hasn’t happened and city living has seen a renaissance, partly through positive planning policy and partly through lifestyle changes. I agree that estimates of illegal immigration are one of the ‘known unknowns’. But those who are here legally, from other EU countries, are another element for which we can’t really plan. On the other hand there are 400,000 UK citizens living in Spain, and parts of Spain so dominated by ex-pats from this and other EU countries that you hardly hear any Spanish voices. In London, hundreds of thousands of people are coming and going as part of global businesses and have no relation to the rest of the national economy. Unless you have a sealed borders policy, you have to come to terms with an increasingly mobile population, within the UK and within Europe. Those eastern Europeans who came to the UK largely did so to find work, and found work, without taking anyone else’s jobs. The economy grew, to some extent with the assistance of those people. In Warsaw recently there was a real shortage of construction workers, and those jobs have been taken by Ukrainians, Romanians and Moldovans. When the economy contracts, there is a float-back of people across the board, but some will remain and settle. Overall, the population projections for the country have not been badly out, but underneath they conceal a huge churn of different things happening.
Q: As part of the European Union, we are subject to its laws. The English have a tradition of obeying the laws; others have different traditions. How can the Anglo-Saxon common law be accommodated within a Europe that largely operates under Roman law?
A: I’d put it slightly differently. The European Union is a unique institution. A number of countries, which are and will continue to be very pronounced nation-states, have come together for particular purposes. The discussion generally is not whether that is a good or bad thing but about how far it goes beyond pooled sovereignty or about democratic accountability in those areas. However, you’ve then got a number of languages, a number of different systems of law and then different cultural expectations and understandings that have evolved, over a long period of time, about what all that means. The fact that it works as well as it does is perhaps the real surprise. Yes, it’s true that there are different views on, for example, the extent to which you obey planning laws, or even have planning laws. In Holland everybody, by cultural custom, sweeps the street in front of their house. There is no law requiring this; they just do it. So there are different sorts of approach. One approach is to express the ambitions of a policy in very general terms, which tends to be how southern European laws have developed, whereas the northern Europeans like to see the detail. There does tend to be a bit of national stereotyping. We think that the French don’t take laws seriously but they do, but sometimes in a slightly different way to the northern European countries. The critical thing is to agree a common framework that enables those different aspirations to be accommodated.
Pooled sovereignty on some of the big issues – borders, drugs, a lot of environment policy, trade – may create a much bigger space for those different national and regional identities to operate under that framework. National governments will not be dealing with the same sort of requirements that applied in the 19th century. Belgium is an interesting case – effectively three regions with a pretend government at the top of it all. So things change. There is interesting potential for change in how cultural and regional identities work with the national identity and then with the functional pooling of sovereignty in certain areas, changes concerning who does what, where, when and at what level. It’s not so much an accommodation of Anglo-Saxon law with Roman law as a coming together of many different ways of looking at things.
Q: The ancient Greeks, when things got really bad, would hand over their city-state to a tyrant for a set period, in order for him to get the chariots to run on time, so to speak. Gloriously free of the electorate, what would you do as tyrant of Wessex for a year?
A: Part of the problem with Greek tyrants was that they tended to be put into place and then wouldn’t go away again! But also, if you do things that way, the results only survive if the people think they are good things. Take the poll tax. Drawing it out on paper after an agreeable lunch, it might look quite good but in practice it was a complete disaster because people said no, it wasn’t something they could identify with. How you apportion responsibility for taxes so that local government is financed is a fair question but the answer given was detested.
There is a real issue about how we as a country, and internationally, decide what we are going to do about climate change and what we need to do to move to a lower carbon economy within 40 to 50 years. That does mean homes that are much better insulated and more energy-efficient, modes of transport that are much more frugal, and perhaps there will be more people growing their own food. A few years ago there were reports saying that the world of allotments was coming to an end, with huge numbers of vacant plots, and that this was land to build houses on. Now there are queues for allotments and new land coming into use, a trend which is probably going to have to increase. So what I would probably do as a tyrant is help this along. The insulation is going into your house, because it’s good for the country. But it’s good for you too, because your energy bills will be a lot lower. Of course, it would be better if you turn the central heating down by 3˚ and wear a jumper, but that illustrates how lifestyle changes have raised our aspirations.
Another example would be how we deal with waste. If we want to move away from landfill we need a network of facilities to deal with the recycling and all the rest of it. People support the recycling but no-one wants the waste treatment facility down at the end of their road. Yet within the next 15 years we are probably going to have build something like one waste facility a fortnight across the South East of England. As a tyrant, I could direct where they go. Once built, by and large, people come to accept them. In reality, there has to be wider recognition of what needs to be done and wider buy-in to the decisions, if they’re to last.
Q: Many young people today lack anything to inspire them. To me, they’ve been betrayed. Humiliated. They just don’t know who they are any more. Part of the role of Wessex Society is to say to them, this is your history, this is your culture, it’s really worth knowing about. What do you think needs to be done?
A: There are certain things that radiate out if you have shared values and shared community experience, shared public experience. It’s not just about youth – that’s the problem! Our society as a whole has, over a period of time, fractured, in terms of a ‘retreat from the public sphere’ as far as people’s everyday experience is concerned. The Internet and other communications technology creates a fictional sense of intimacy and immediacy that risks distorting how reality is perceived. People are becoming detached observers, fracturing into tribal identities, which are wanted identities that provide a sense of safety but which are ever more narrow.
We won’t ever be able to go back to the 1950’s, to a world where everybody looked like their parents and did National Service, but a much wider degree of shared experience is very important, I believe. We’ve gone through an individualist, ‘greed is good’ generation and are now surprised that we have a society without a centre. In fact, however, a lot of young people are value-driven and idealistic but they tend to feel strongly about particular things and the things are not joined up as they used to be, in terms of a wider view. So, while getting communities working better together may sound like a fairly feeble response, it’s potentially quite important to the long-term healthy functioning of our society.©
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