Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Tamas]

There was also the mysterious ship collision in the North Sea a few days ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_North_Sea_ship_collision ; "part of the US Government Tanker Security Program and was transporting 220,000 barrels (35,000,000 L; 9,200,000 US gal)[23] of Jet A-1 aviation fuel[12] "   

I remember when the news broke I thought the Russians did something then felt silly for being so paranoid, then it turned out the other ship's captain was a Russian who has been arrested...

[Sheilbh]

Yeah I'd assume Russia - just like the subsea cable sabotage, arson attacks in warehouses in the UK, Spain, Benelux etc and the explosives on that DHL flight.

Having said that I am baffled at how a substation fire in one of the busiest airports in the world can knock it out for 24 hours.

[mongers]

There was also the mysterious ship collision in the North Sea a few days ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_North_Sea_ship_collision ; "part of the US Government Tanker Security Program and was transporting 220,000 barrels (35,000,000 L; 9,200,000 US gal)[23] of Jet A-1 aviation fuel[12] "   

I remember when the news broke I thought the Russians did something then felt silly for being so paranoid, then it turned out the other ship's captain was a Russian who has been arrested...

Calling it a transformer fire doesn't do it justice, the thing contained 25 thousand litres of flamable coolant, local transformers you see in street locations have a few 10s of litres.
I wonder how long it'll take to repair, will likely cost millions.

[Sheilbh]

How much do the councils influence the local governance in Britain?

From experience, in Norway they have about 5-10 percent influence on how money is spent locally and almost zero on taxation except on property. I am paying a whopping 650 quid a year on a home, so let's say their mitts are ratter soft.

But the takeback of democracy starts with local democracy.

The zoning and planning is unfortunately one of the exciting issues I cover. This is where the councils actually can do some serious inroads into development, and also the absolute bitch to write about. Nobody reads. Even if it is actually influencing people's lives.

I see Sheilbh writing about how local councils don't need to run a net positive in spending in the UK. Welcome to shitshow of overspending that is Norway, I'd say!  Where budgets and goals rarely are aligned.

I think it's possibly similar - local government is really complicated here (and the government are currently reforming it to simplify which is a good idea). So the number of areas a local council is responsible for varies depending on the type of council it is. But at the most expansive it's broad - and basically most of the day-to-day interactions with the state will be with your local council. They're responsible for roads, planning, public transport, social care (for children and adults), housing, libraries, leisure, environmental health, waste etc. There's variations.

But the story of the post-war has been a huge diminution of their actual power - the "golden age" for local councils in Britain was the 1930s. You had really powerful local government providing lots of services and some providing really innovative models of public services.

After the war that breaks down and I think there's three big shifts. The Attlee government believes in nationalisation - so there's lots of local government social insurance schemes for healthcare and local hospitals, there's local government owned gasworks and energy networks. A lot of that is swept away and nationalised. We have a national health service, energy is nationalised, rail is nationalised etc. I also think some of it is a legacy of the war which was a "national" effort, I think creates Britain as a nation and nationalises whole swathes of policy by necessity (often under Labour ministers in the wartime Cabinet). That obviously also shifts revenue and responsibility for spending out of local government. I think it is also the source of a mindset in this country that if something isn't national it's not fair (and this comes from both sources) because there might be differences in services. But you still regularly get stories of "postcode lotteries" which in most other countries would just be understood as x council/state/province provides this service in that way, y doesn't. In the UK it's often seen as fundamentally unfair (and that was a driver for nationalisation). But this is why even in areas where councils are responsible for delivering a service, it's often to a standard and way designed by central government - right down to the ridiculous like the national Chewing Gum Task Force to deal with chewing gum on streets.

Thatcher then disempowers local government massively again. This is more because they are politically difficult for her and also she felt they were able to make spending decisions without collecting taxes/relying on central government grants. There is some justification in that complaint. I'm from Liverpool - at this point we had Trotskyist entryists running our council who were deliberately voting illegal budgets that had big deficits. They wanted to do that to either force the government to fold or to force a fight - the government didn't fold and the actual consequence, as Neil Kinnock put it, was the "grotesque chaos of a Labour council - a Labour council - hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers." There were other similarly left-wing and confrontational councils (Sheffield, Lambeth), but ultimately I think the rather Leninist Number 10 around Thatcher just wanted to smash councils as alternative, opposition centres of power. Thatcher massively constrained councils, destroyed effective local government in London for a generation and ultimately slightly destroyed herself on council finances with the poll tax.

I think this is also the point where "regeneration" starts to enter the conversation and the model at this point is I think basically relatively successful but it's central government in effect creating "zones" outside of local government accountable to "development corporations" to create enterprise zones. So it really succeeds in the Docklands in London which is an incredible transformation - I don't think it works anywhere outside of London to the extent it's even tried.

After Thatcher there's two other trends which basically carry on those. New Labour does not trust councils/local democracy. They use them in effect to identify the most "need" for the central system which then allocates funding to local government and gives them very detailed mandates on how it is need to be spent. They're not seen really as democratic government but as being about helping support delivery of the centre's priorities. That's continued in the last 15 years - but again this trend goes back to 1945, but I don't think they ever expected us to be having national bin mandates on local councils Regeneration also shifts here and is more successful to an extent - however, in retrospect, I'm not sure the New Labour regeneration model of build an arts centre of some sort and make the area around it a little nicer has actually resulted in sustained growth. I think the key successes in regeneration have actually been locally led (Manchester) and/or centred around universities.

In the last 15 years all of those trends continued. The mandates from central government increased, the disempowerment of local councils continued. The new addition was that spending was slashed - real terms per capita spending fell by about 30% by the time covid hit. Despite obligations from the centre to provide many services most local councils ultimately ended focusing on the core: social care (which now takes up, on average, two thirds of council budgets), waste collection and roads. Obviously the first to go was spending on the arts and culture (like those shiny regenerative projects built by New Labour). I think it was mainly political - cutting central government funding for council was a way of doing austerity but relatively stealthily. So the coalition and Tories protected health spending (and I think education spending) but they could just cut the funding for local government and make the councils responsible for making the cuts to services. It has bounced back a little under covid but there's a lot to spend on after a decade plus of cuts, a lot of responsibility for delivery of covid-related policies and a population that is getting older and sicker. Many if not most councils are now in financial crisis of one sort or another (some just as a result of the cuts, others in part because of their own fuckups too).

The only slight point in the other direction is the emergence of mayors - first in London under New Labour and then George Osborne's metro-mayors which I think have been a faily big, positive change in local government. And we saw this really vividly in covid when Andy Burnham standing on the steps of Manchester council was able to challenge government decisions on covid - I think that was something a council leader would not have been able to do as effectively. The Mayor of London has fewer powers than most other mayors but I think has been a transformative role in many ways.

But also no-one cares. Me and Jos and the posters on this forum I think are more engaged on local government than most One of my most crotchety old man/wildly reactionary opinions, is that it's because we've re-organised local government a lot including the boundaries. I think it'd be wild in the US or Canada or Germany for the borders of states or provinces to change - but county and borough and council boundaries in the UK have been changed every few decades. So I think in part there's not an identification of your area with your local government (there are some places where there is an identification but it's not for the local government area you're actually in).

And the effect of all of the reforms over the last 80 years has just been that it's really complicated and most people don't really know what their councils do. This in turn drives people to complain to their MP about things that are really the responsibility of councils, lots of MPs want to be "good constituency MPs" so take up cases on housing etc almost as social workers of last resort - that, in turn, drives further nationalisation of policy.

I feel like a period of fairly clear, relatively stable boundaries, organisation and responsibility would be a good start for local government. But we're about to go through another round of big reforms and reorganisations (which I broadly back) and, no doubt, in 10-20 years there'll be another go and in the meantime no doubt large chunks of the PM and parliament's time will be spent litigating planning decisions in Spelthorne and local council housing in Bury

[mongers]

..snip...

But also no-one cares. Me and Jos and the posters on this forum I think are more engaged on local government than most One of my most crotchety old man/wildly reactionary opinions, is that it's because we've re-organised local government a lot including the boundaries. I think it'd be wild in the US or Canada or Germany for the borders of states or provinces to change - but county and borough and council boundaries in the UK have been changed every few decades. So I think in part there's not an identification of your area with your local government (there are some places where there is an identification but it's not for the local government area you're actually in).

..snip...

[Hampshire hog]

Yes, bring back Bournemouth* into Hampshire where it belongs, missing now for 52 years. 

[/Hampshire hog]


* why on earth would we want this very odd conurbation back into a soon to be largely rural county.

Incidentally my own local district council, New Forest is about to be abolished and folded into the Hampshire CC, odd given we tucked away in the farthest corner of the county and be a lot of mile away from the centre of power (Basingstoke??)

Plus being largely a national park, have quite a different character in terms of transport and planning etc.

[Norgy]

Devolved local government seems like a great principle and idea right until you get involved with it.

[Josquius]

The 1974 reform was right. The demolition of metropolitan counties is a sadly forgotten crime of Thatcher.
It is nice to see city regions slowly moving back to this but they're still pretty powerless.

Of course I've seen how things go in countries with more local power and there's a lot that can go wrong- battling each other for taxes, sabotaging regional planning by killing off the regional city centre with malls, etc...

[Sheilbh]

[Hampshire hog]

Yes, bring back Bournemouth* into Hampshire where it belongs, missing now for 52 years. 

[/Hampshire hog]


* why on earth would we want this very odd conurbation back into a soon to be largely rural county.

So I think this sort of gets a bit to the point. Bournemouth is an odd conurbation, it's also rapidly growing with a university that's particularly popular with international students and one of the only two local authority areas in the country where the population is getting younger.

I think there's maybe an argument for allowing areas that are different to co-exist in the same local government (which is not to say you don't have strong city or town government below that) - there may be competition. But what does New York City have to do with upstate New York or Frankfurt with rural Hesse. It allows each other to share and allocate costs. So maybe a county spending almost 85% of their budget on social care would benefit from also including a rapidly growing metro area with an average age of 33.

I think it's a very English perception that local government boundaries should be based on similarity not solidarity.

[mongers]

I only found out this morning, whilst reading wiki, that Rachel Reeves did PPE at Oxford.

Later listening to a recording of a PMQ discussion on the 'World At One', heard the labour pension minister, a certain Torsten Bell talking around the subject of PIP cuts and deliberately avoiding answering a simple straight forward question about eligability.

Though to myself, I wonder if he did PPE ..........

edit:
His conservative 'opposite number' in the debate, Helen Whately was fist asked hwo would she go further on this welfare change, her immediate reply 'I'll answer that shortly, but first. etc'.
Guess what?

[Josquius]

Seems he did 
Can we set a quota on these people in parliament please

Quite sad to see him doing the rounds for these cuts. What I've seen of him previously he really seemed to be someone who actually spoke a lot of sense.

On metropolitan counties and the south coast et al.... Something that came to me a week or two ago and I just remembered. It's weird southampton - Portsmouth was never made a met county.

[Sheilbh]

Obvs

Although I rate Torsten Bell. He ran the Resolution Foundation which has done some really interesting work and from years of following him on social media I think he's got good interesting ideas - and I'm glad he's gone into politics.

Of course the cost of going into politics and especially being a junior minister is you need to back the government line - I think he's auditioning for a promotion by doing a lot of media on a tough issue for the government.

[mongers]

Seems he did 
Can we set a quota on these people in parliament please

Quite sad to see him doing the rounds for these cuts. What I've seen of him previously he really seemed to be someone who actually spoke a lot of sense.

On metropolitan counties and the south coast et al.... Something that came to me a week or two ago and I just remembered. It's weird southampton - Portsmouth was never made a met county.

Oh there was a quite interesting radio programme about 1960s plans to do just that, create a huge urban complex, to be called 'Solent City' , here's the podcast:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00291pq

Shelf might like it, as it involved innovative urban planning on a big scale.

[Sheilbh]

[Massively crotchety conservative rant income ]

Interview with Stephen Sackur as the BBC shuts down Hard Talk - which is excellent:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/mar/24/i-feel-really-really-cross-at-incredibly-dumb-decisions-stephen-sackur-on-the-end-of-hardtalk-and-leaving-the-bbc

This sort of thing really annoys me - like the slashing of the World Service budget, shutting down World Service in Central and Eastern European languages a decade ago, the changes to Newsnight and Panorama, or the general shift of BBC politics coverage to a "talking heads argue" format. Not to mention things like basically wiping out arts and culture broadcasting.

I'm very strongly supportive of the BBC as a public service broadcaster - I just with the BBC's management had any interest in doing that rather than a big tie up with Disney for a multi-million re-launch of Dr Who or podcasts like Uncanny (even if I might enjoy that stuff it is all things other media organisation could and should do - the public service stuff isn't)

I'm a bit reminded of Channel 4 where I was emotionally opposed to privatisation. But I couldn't help but notice that all of the "groundbreaking" "radical" stuff supporters of Channel 4 were citing were made decades ago and it's now basically just Channel 5.

[Richard Hakluyt]

I am in complete agreement; apparently Hardtalk only cost £1.2m a year to make 

The axing of the Persian language service over at the world service particularly infuriated me. it saved sixpence apparently 

[Sheilbh]

£1.2 million - 70 million viewers globally through World Service and BBC News 24.

One for the government's newly established "Soft Power Council" to discuss no doubt

The "soft power" stuff particularly annoys me given the wildly insane/improbably/irresponsible ideas from the former head of the FCDO Lord MacDonald. And also I think a general perception that it's basically real power but cheap and primarily involves royal visit - as opposed to a reflection of hard and sometimes expensive factors like defence, economic strength (reflected in cultural output and universities etc) and, say, well-funded public service broadcaster transmitting internationally in multiple languages.

And on crotchetty old man stuff from the FCDO that saves a tuppence - I'm also not thrilled that they've scrapped the language school and downgraded the importance of language skills. And reduced the number of specialists. I think I read somewhere that the FCDO now has about 50 fluent Mandarin speaking China experts which seems sub-optimal whatever your view on what policy should be towards China.

It just feels - very much not the only bit of the state - like it's all running on fumes at this point.

Edit: And on Hard Talk specifically it's a show I've heard people in other countries talk about (admittedly in NGO-ish circles so engaged people). I think it had a vastly bigger reputation globally than it did in the UK.