by Mark Easton
When the legions departed, the neatly defined civitates quickly frayed as rivalries resurfaced. The arrival of Angles, Saxons and Jutes, formidable warriors from Germany, intensified the struggle and added to the general confusion. As the immigrants fought each other over territory, the older Celtic tribes were absorbed or restricted to the margins and classed as aliens in their own land. The Anglo-Saxon word for foreign was Waelisc and foreign territory was Wealas. Thus the Brythonic (British) Celts were Welsh and lived in Wales. Those who occupied the south-western peninsula (cern in Celtic or cornu in Latin) lived in Cornwall — the foreign land on England’s horn. The Pictish and Gaelic Celts of Scotland and Ireland — Tacitus described them with their ‘red hair and large limbs’ — were too belligerent for even the Romans to manage and so the extremities of the British Isles were excluded from the partitioning of England in the Dark Ages. Left to their own devices, they wrote their own story.
Public administration is a struggle between the tidiness of maps and the fuzziness of real life. History books often describe Anglo-Saxon England neatly divided into seven kingdoms: Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex and Wessex. But for centuries after the Romans left, the regions were disputed territories, their boundaries shifting and twisting as battles raged. In the end, bloody territorial skirmishing between the kingdoms proved an irrelevance in the face of a far greater external threat: the arrival of the Vikings.
It was 8 June AD 793 when Norsemen destroyed the abbey on the island of Lindisfarne, Northumbria’s Holy Island, an attack that shook Britain in much the same way as Pearl Harbour affected America more than a thousand years later. ‘Never before has such an atrocity been seen,’ a Northumbrian scholar observed. After seventy years and innumerable raids, the Danes mounted a full-scale invasion. Within a decade the heptarchy was no more: their royal families scattered or dead; their property destroyed. Only the kingdom of Wessex held firm, from where King Alfred began assembling an army of his own.
England’s destiny was decided in early May AD 878, upon blood-soaked turf close to a settlement called Ethandun. Alfred was victorious and upon that grim battlefield England was born. But where is Ethandun? It wouldn’t be England if there wasn’t a dispute as to which county has the honour. Ethandun, or Edington as it became, is the name of villages in both Wiltshire and Somerset. Of course, each has laid claim — and almost certainly blamed some faceless official for the confusion.
Alfred proclaimed himself King of the Anglo-Saxons and attempted to unite the people of the ancient kingdoms in a military network of forts and boroughs, roads and beacons designed to ensure that the Vikings could never again catch them by surprise. He was also responsible for spreading the West Saxon style of administration, dividing areas up into ‘shires’ or shares of land, each shire with a nominated ‘reeve’ responsible for keeping the peace — the title ‘shire-reeve’ becoming shortened over time to sheriff.
A shared terror of the Vikings just about held the nation together, but a far greater test of Englishness was imminent. Another army of heathen bureaucrats was on its way, an invasion of administrators, clerks, cartographers and planners with designs on the new kingdom. The Normans were coming.
If William the Conqueror had had access to clipboards and those pens you hang round your neck, he would have negotiated a bulk purchase. In 1085, hundreds of surveyors and auditors were recruited to get the lie of his new land, sent ‘all over England into every shire [to] find out how many hides there were in the shire, what land and cattle the king had himself in the shire, what dues he ought to have in twelve months from the shire’, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle put it. Having sized the place up, he then published the whole lot in the Domesday Book, introducing a bit of Norman styling to the process. The old shires were designated counties — the Saxon sheriff often replaced by a Norman count. Both names, however, survived — just one of a series of compromises that resulted in convoluted and often tautological names for large tracts of English countryside.
The County of Gloucestershire, for example, incorporates the Roman name for the main town (Glevum) attached to an ancient British fort (ceaster) then adding the Anglo-Saxon shire (scir) and capping the whole lot with a Norman count (comte). A thousand years of history is scrambled into names that often confound logic and sensible spelling, geographical relics that have come to be regarded as the essence of England. Devotion to such anachronism is soaked in nostalgia for a simpler, rural age; a time when people knew their place and lived their days on a scale where a close eye could be kept on strangers.
Industrialisation, when it came, was no respecter of ancient boundaries, disgorging giant smoking cities that squatted noisily across the countryside without a care for traditional county ways. In the century after 1750, Manchester was transformed from a market town of 18,000 inhabitants to a teeming metropolis of 300,000. It was a similar story in Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds and Newcastle: huge urban centres grew so rapidly that the mapmakers could barely keep up. By the beginning of the twentieth century some influential voices were asking whether the old counties, still obliged to nod their allegiance to the centralised powers in London, really made sense any more. With the Empire crumbling and the government considering Home Rule for Ireland, the question as to how the United Kingdom might best be administered was debated in Parliament.
In 1913 Winston Churchill wondered aloud about the idea of an American-style federal system in which Scotland, Ireland and Wales might each have separate legislative and parliamentary institutions, while England would be broken up into principalities or states. The great business and industrial centres of London, Lancashire, Yorkshire and the Midlands might ‘develop, in their own way, their own life according to their own ideas and needs’, he suggested. One of the great thinkers of the time, the Scottish evolutionist and sociologist Sir Patrick Geddes, was also an enthusiastic federalist, arguing that the new ‘conurbations’, as he coined them, should be allowed to break free from central control. He too envisaged a federal UK, with England divided into three regions: Industrial England in the Midlands and north; Metropolitan England incorporating London, the south and east; and south-west England including Wessex, Bristol, Cornwall and Devon.
But Parliament had other matters on its mind, not least the increasing Irish agitation for Home Rule, and the moment when English regionalism might have been seriously considered was lost. Unlike Scotland, Ireland and Wales, which revelled in their separateness, England’s cultural identity was based on the opposite — its importance within the wider United Kingdom and empire. While the Scots, Irish and Welsh tended to look within their borders to describe themselves, the English looked beyond, identifying themselves, as often as not, as ‘British’ and lamenting the devolution which diminished their sense of imperial centrality.
After the Second World War, however, the landscape looked very different: Britain’s global influence had declined and many of the industrial regions that had prospered in the nineteenth century were struggling in the twentieth. The sense of common purpose that had held England together since the Vikings was under pressure, with increasing resentment at the power and money residing in the capital. In the early 1960s, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan instructed the Conservative peer Viscount Hailsham to don a cloth cap and head for the North East with a promise of regional regeneration. But it was not enough to save the Conservatives.
Labour’s Harold Wilson crept over the political finishing line first in 1964 with a commitment to help the industrial regions, whose voters had handed him the key to Number Ten. Within a year he had created eight Regional Economic Planning Boards to administer the regeneration strategy, but Wilson was an unenthusiastic federalist and the new bodies spread a message of avuncular benevolence rather than devolving any real power. However, he was persuaded something needed to be done about England’s medieval local government structure, an historic system that appeared increasingly archaic in the technological age. Any answer was going to be controversi
al, so Wilson did what politicians in Britain traditionally do with a problem too toxic for elected Parliamentarians: he set up a Royal Commission, headed by a dependable member of the House of Lords.
Lord Redcliffe-Maud, a Whitehall mandarin known for his impressive intellect and safe hands, spent three years looking at England and its boundaries. But, despite such talents, his report could not help putting the reforming cat firmly among the old school pigeons. Instead of a system based on the ancient counties, he proposed new local councils based on major towns — so-called unitary authorities. It was a plan driven by urban realities rather than traditional loyalties and it was probably a century overdue.
The Rural District Councils Association (RCDA), however, was immediately opposed. Its members, the quintessence of grassroots Tories, were horrified at the idea that they would be subsumed into modern and soulless metropolitan inventions. The association’s president, the 5th Earl of Gainsborough, was the largest landowner in England’s smallest county, Rutland, and he was appalled at the prospect of being absorbed into neighbouring Leicestershire. ‘We are looked upon as a nuisance and irrelevant. We are not going to lie down under that,’ he proclaimed. ‘The fight is to save local government for people in rural areas who do not want decisions made by people forty or fifty miles away in large towns.’
Rutland exemplified the political dilemma: an historical anachronism famous for the World Nurdling Championships (don’t ask), its collection of horseshoes (many presented by royalty) and its splendid Ruddles bitter (now brewed in Suffolk), it made no sense to the prosaic minds of public administrators, but its very eccentricity played directly to rural England’s sense of itself.
When the Tories came to power in 1970, they found themselves in something of a bind: they knew they needed to modernise local government in England but, politically, they could not afford to upset traditional Conservative voters. Their attempts to find a compromise proved tortuous, and ultimately it was a doomed process. The Local Government Bill was debated fifty-one times in four agonising months between November 1971 and March 1972, as MPs argued over boundaries, place names, geography and history. The result was an Act of Parliament that, in attempting to satisfy everyone, infuriated millions.
As the law was passed, a bonfire was lit at the site of the Uffington White Horse, a prehistoric carving on the Berkshire downs. Protestors claimed to have a petition of 10,000 demanding the new county boundary be amended to prevent the figure residing in Oxfordshire. The fact that the horse pre-dated England’s historic counties by some two thousand years was not the point: the bureaucrats were fiddling with heritage.
The Local Government Act created metropolitan counties that trampled all over ancient allegiances. So it was that Greater Manchester included both parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, while South Yorkshire included parts of Nottinghamshire. It also formed new non-metropolitan counties that twisted traditional county boundaries or, in some cases, abolished the original shire completely. Somerset and Gloucestershire became Avon, parts of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire were designated as Humberside, while bits of Cumberland, Westmorland, Lancashire and Yorkshire were cobbled into Cumbria. Bournemouth went to bed in Hampshire and woke up in Dorset. Rutland ceased to exist.
It had been such an exhausting experience for all concerned that there was little appetite for further review. As a trainee reporter, I attended classes on local government administration in the late 1970s, a topic so complex and confused that I sensed every twinge of political pain in the reforms. I swatted over single-tier and two-tier authorities, boroughs and districts, mets and non-mets, trying to fix in my mind the varied responsibilities and powers of each. Throughout my time in local newspapers and radio, I kept a dogeared copy of my public administration textbook by my desk in case of emergency.
The social and political turmoil of the 1980s saw the invention of a new and unofficial English boundary — the North-South divide. The Yorkshire Evening Post newspaper is thought to have coined the phrase in an article in 1984 that contrasted the affluent south with the job-starved north, a line being drawn from the Severn to the Wash, separating the ‘haves’ from the ‘have-nots’. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher dismissed the divide as a myth, insisting there were ‘simply areas of difficulty in all parts of the country’. She criticised the ‘moaning minnies’ of the struggling industrial regions as she killed off virtually all of the bodies offering regional assistance in a quango cull. Before she came to power, 47 per cent of the working population received some kind of regionally administered subsidy. Within five years the figure had fallen to 15 per cent.
There were two important political consequences: northern England became increasingly resentful at the London-based government, while the Labour opposition became more interested in regional devolution. The party’s bookish leader Michael Foot asked an MP with impeccable northern working-class credentials, John Prescott, to produce an Alternative Regional Strategy, a task he undertook with enthusiasm.
Labour’s interest in regional policy also coincided with important changes on the international stage: the European Community had told member states that huge sums in development aid, so-called Structural Funds, would be channelled directly to regional bodies. To many UK Tories, this looked like the slippery slope to Euro-federalism and a threat to British sovereignty. So the politics of English administration became sharply polarised between the traditionalist instincts of the Conservative Party and the devolutionary demands of the Labour heartlands.
When John Major arrived at Number Ten, struggling with trunk-loads of anti-European baggage, he sought to emphasise his love for Olde England, ‘the country of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers’, as he later described it. It was vital he stressed his patriotic credentials as he negotiated Britain’s place in Europe. So, just as he was signing the Maastricht Treaty, which gave English regions a voice within the new European Union, Major also set up a commission to review the controversial changes to county boundaries that had so angered his party’s rural power base.
The chair of the commission, the business leader Sir John Banham, had been handed a poisoned chalice, of course. He said he hoped for some ‘early wins’ by abolishing the unloved new areas of Avon, Cleveland and Humberside, but he was quickly ensnared by the deep passions and ancient prejudices of local governance in England, as well as the complexities of Westminster politics.
The commission was unable to recruit enough willing staff, saw its funding squeezed, its terms of reference changed and its deadline brought forward. There was intense lobbying from MPs of all shades, trying to influence the new power structures within their constituencies, particularly the creation of authorities based around towns or smaller counties. Tempers became frayed and when Sir John Banham presented his plan in 1995, the government refused to accept all his recommendations. ‘I well recognise that the commission has not done the bidding either of the government or of the parliamentary Labour Party,’ Sir John wrote bitterly, as he cleared his desk.
From the tangled mess, the counties of Herefordshire and, yes, Rutland were awoken from their slumbers, restored as local government bodies. But Huntingdonshire was denied authority status because ‘there was no exceptional county allegiance’, Cumberland and Westmorland likewise. Lancashire and Derbyshire, fearing their abolition, went to the High Court and won a reprieve from total bureaucratic execution, but Somerset lost its case. Most of the historic counties saw chunks of their territory carved off or administered from town or city centres, a technocratic exercise based primarily on urban geography rather than English history.
The Conservatives attempted to defuse some of the simmering resentment in the Tory shires by quietly drawing up the Lieutenancies Act, legislation nodded through the House of Lords that consolidated the role of a county’s Lord Lieutenant — an office dating back to Tudor times. In an appendix, the Act defined English counties by their historic boundaries, thus ensuring that the exi
stence of the ancient shires was retained within the legislative structure. The presence of a uniformed Lord Lieutenant with his (or her) responsibilities for arranging visits of the Royal Family, presenting medals, advising on honours and liaising with the local military, played elegantly to the traditionalist cause. But it also added to the general confusion.
When New Labour bounded to power in 1997, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott was rewarded with his own sprawling Whitehall empire, the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions. The letter ‘R’ in DETR gave him licence to dust off his Alternative Regional Strategy, creating nine agencies dotted around England to take control of billions in development funds.
By its second term, Tony Blair’s government was suggesting it might go much further: there was talk of a ‘regional renaissance’, with proposals for English regions to be put at the heart of ‘a modern and more prosperous society’. Prescott was the flag bearer of the plans for elected regional assemblies, but he faced some formidable obstacles. Not only did he have to convince the sceptical Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to relinquish some of their centrally based powers and resources; as he tried to draw the new regions, he re-awakened the traditionalists in the historic counties. ‘Is it not the case that whenever a boundary is drawn around anything, people on the edge of it believe that they should be on the other side?’ asked one MP. ‘In the end, no one is ever happy,’ advised another. ‘The solution is not simply for a minister or a civil servant to sit in an office in Whitehall with a map of England and a blue pen.’
The Deputy Prime Minister pressed ahead but, without enthusiastic backing from Brown and Blair, he was obliged to reign in his ambition for a speedy devolution of power to the English regions. He agreed to test his plans on the area of England he thought would be most receptive to the idea of regional government, the north-east. On 4 November 2004, the Great North Vote was held. The referendum had seen two distinct strategies: the ‘yes’ campaign (Be Proud, Be Positive, Vote Yes) was filled with uplifting anthems, balloons and local celebrities; the ‘no’ campaign (Vote No to More Politicians, More Bureaucracy, Extra Taxes) consisted largely of an inflatable white elephant plonked unceremoniously in shopping centres. When the votes were counted, the result was decisive: overwhelming rejection by a ratio of almost four to one.