For all that one of Boris Johnson’s big selling points is his supposedly unique connection with the Red Wall, he has an unfortunate history with the Northern Research Group.
Last year, the embattled then-Prime Minister made all the wrong headlines when he stood up their inaugural conference in Doncaster in favour of another visit to Ukraine, a country with a plausible claim to being his real political heartland but which does not return MPs to Westminster.
This year there seemed to be no question of his attending. But by announcing his resignation on Friday evening, he all but completely eclipsed the weekend media cycle. To undermine one conference may be unfortunate; to undermine two looks very much like carelessness.
But your correspondent did not catch the 5.55 from King’s Cross for nothing. For all the Westminster drama, the NRG conference provided at least as much of an insight into the divisions wracking the Conservative Party.
George Osborne, for example, took a tacit swipe at Johnson’s Red Wall bona fides by contrasting the Northern Powerhouse, a geographically-specific idea with a clear underlying thesis, with ‘levelling up’, which could apply to anywhere and mean anything. Sir Jake Berry also took rather a jaundiced view of the Government’s headline pitch to the North, at one point asking a panel: “How can we deliver everything and nothing?”
Not that the two men were otherwise on the same page, of course. The Tories cannot “blame ‘the blob’ and the civil servants and the establishment” for their failures, said Osborne; “it’s time to blow up blobonomics“, thundered Sir Jake. The former chancellor was received with polite quiescence in the hall.
Rishi Sunak also put in an appearance, straight off the plane from Washington. The screen behind him bore the same five promises as usual during his speech, but he did claim to be a “prime minister for the north” – albeit in the context of gently rejecting calls for a Minister of the North, one of the many demands bubbling around the conference.
It was enough to get a standing ovation and a rather rapturous response from Sir Jake in his closing speech.
Elsewhere Dehenna Davison, the Levelling Up Minister, seemed to be testing the elasticity of collective responsibility when she told the hall (pictured) that she wanted the Party to be much, much bolder on housing.
Sure, there was a slightly stream-of-consciousness flavour to it (“digital commuter hubs”!). And yes, such courage on planning seems to correlate with MPs who have announced they are standing down at the next election.
But perhaps the most telling bit was her summary of her conception of the devolution and decentralisation agenda: “Give more cash and get out of the way.” This attitude was widespread throughout the conference, with endless calls for more powers and more mayoralties.
Much less often mentioned was the tension between those two propositions.
Fiscal devolution – the ability to set local tax rates and keep the receipts – has plenty of merit, in principle, from a Conservative perspective. Devolved bodies which do nothing but distribute central government money and endlessly demand more of it give voters no reason not to vote Labour, after all.
Yet all the regions represented by the Northern Research Group currently run substantial fiscal transfer deficits: lots of money levied from London, the South East, and the East of England is redistributed to the North via government spending.
Whilst there ought always to be a role for the British Government to make strategic investments in things like infrastructure, for day-to-day spending a more arms-length relationship with the Treasury would cut both ways.
After all, there is neither sense nor justice in supposedly allowing an area to stand on its own financial feet if it cannot fall, too. Are voters really prepared to accept that? Or to tolerate the emergence of postcode lotteries as management of taxation and public services diverged?
Labour, who have been playing this card a lot longer, are aware of the problem. As I noted in a recent column, Gordon Brown’s proposal is to take huge areas of redistributive spending out of day-to-day democratic control altogether, devolving sweeping new powers whilst having judges protect the flow of cash from the South to those bits of the country with “progressive values”.
Perhaps some alternative mechanism was floated at one of the break-out panels, and I missed it. But without one, the enthusiasm for fiscal powers and “devo max” on display in Doncaster could have been a put-up job by southern taxpayers.
(I submit that a good intellectual test of any devo-max or federalist proposal is the universality question, or “Would this work if we let the South do it?”.)
Outside the main hall, the most interesting debate was a frank panel discussion about the difficulty of designing devolution settlements that fit the economic, social, and political geography of the North.
Ben Houchen, who despite an appearance from Rishi Sunak was in substantive terms the conference’s star turn, stressed that such arrangements only worked when people felt an adequate sense of connection with the rest of a devolved area.
He could make major investments in a hub railway station, for example, because voters in the rest of Tees Valley felt the benefits. Where this wasn’t true – and he singled out the new North East mayoralty as an example – devolution risked devolving (no pun intended) into an exercise in tit-for-tat cheque-writing: they got £3m, so we should get £3m. Not a model conducive to strategic, growth-focused investment.
There were also thorny questions about whether there are sufficient people of good calibre in local government to make it effective, and how to structure a devolution deal to avoid a dominant party simply outvoting and ignoring other areas lumped in with their heartlands (especially when local authorities who think they’ll lose out can simply stonewall a deal).
To this might have been added another: if devolution proceeds in patchwork fashion, and the economically strongest areas and big cities start holding on to more of their own money, does this not risk leaving those areas left behind even more dependent on fiscal transfers than now?
Houchen was obviously not a devosceptic, by any means. But the difficult practical questions he posed contrasted somewhat with the unrelenting enthusiasm for moving further and faster on display elsewhere at the conference.
To some extent, it was all a little academic. The Government is unlikely to deliver much more by way of significant constitutional change before the next election, after which it is an open question how many of the NRG’s MPs will remain in Parliament.
Perhaps it is only after the 2019 tidal wave has retreated, revealing the shape and extent of any more enduring Tory breakthrough in the North, that a more clear-eyed debate about how to sustain it – distinct from the understandable reflex to just try and put some blue water between it and the Government – can really take place.