Michael Heseltine is unrepentant. 50 years ago, on April Fool’s Day 1974, his decision as local government minister to rip up England’s county map, redraw historic boundaries, and reduce the total number of English councils from 1,245 to 412 came into effect. At a stroke, county councils such as Westmorland and Cumberland and East Riding Yorkshire were replaced with new entities like Cumbria and Humberside. Lancashire was shrunk and chopped up, as Greater Manchester emerged from nowhere.
For the last half-century, campaigners have demanded the proper recognition of our 92 historic counties in the face of bureaucratic indifference. As Rupert Barnes argued on this site, the “counties of Britain have been the constant pattern of the land for centuries…deeply ingrained into our national culture and imagination”. Cornwall, Lancashire, Kent: these can conjure up feelings of history that no administrative unit cooked up in Whitehall can match. They are the fundamental matter of our national heritage.
But Heseltine wishes he had gone further. He has told the Telegraph that “by the 1960s we had telephones, cars, trains, and planes and a review under Labour came to the conclusion that what England needed was 60 unitary authorities, which was absolutely right”. Heseltine had wished to go the whole hog and scrap the two-tier system of country and district councils altogether, in favour of unitary authorities. But Tory councillors – who would have lost their seats – vetoed the idea in a self-interested pique.
Since 1974, our system of local administration has been tinkered with further. In 1986 Margaret Thatcher abolished the metropolitan country councils she considered a nuisance, Since the 1990s, some country and district councils have been replaced by unitary authorities since, and we have an ongoing proliferation of Metro Mayors towns, cities, and counties. But the 1972 Local Government Act still casts a long shadow. Campaigners want to end the confusing use of county names for administrative areas.
This debate goes to the heart of the two historic strands of British conservatism: the division between the Conservatives and the Tories. The former are the Heseltines, the Peelites, the modernisers. They are the sensible men who want the government to run as efficiently as possible. The latter, by contrast, are the romantic defenders of Church and King, ready to die in a ditch to defend fox-hunting, hereditary peers, and the old Prayer Book. They have yet to find a lost cause not worth fighting for.
Despite flare-ups over the Corn Laws, tariff reform, and Europe, the British centre-right (under various names) has been a coalition of these elements for nigh-on two hundred years. Both are essential. In Bruce Anderson’s phrasing, a “Conservatives should set out to hold the country together” whilst a “Tory had to ensure that it is worth holding together”. We need a Robert Peel and a Benjamin Disraeli, an Edward Heath and an Enoch Powell, a Michael Heseltine and a Margaret Thatcher, a Rishi Sunak and a Boris Johnson.
While the pair may often lapse into mutual incomprehension, a fair-sided observer can see both sides. Perhaps Tom McTague is right, and Britain needs a Napoleon to finally rationalise our system of local administration via Whitehall diktat. Or perhaps, considering our ongoing national nervous breakdown, any ‘reform’ which further usurps our historic sense of self in the interests of anemic administration should be vigorously fought against. In a sense, it all comes down to what one makes of Milton Keynes.
Whatever the philosophical resonance of the two sides, the reality is murkier. Lingering county identities tend to be stronger in those areas that still play first-class cricket, have more settled rural populations, or are sufficiently coastal to retain deep memories of Anglo-Saxon, Viking, and Norse invasions. Local governments themselves have been hobbled by Whitehall, with elections used as a referendum on Westminster whilst local services crumble and the social care dilemma goes unresolved.
If the original promise of the Heath government – that the administrative changes were purely technical and the traditional county map endured – was upheld, one suspects it would do little to salve our national neuroses or assist with making the governance of Britain any more coherent. But it might also do a damn sight more to convince disillusioned (and aging) supporters that this government was worth campaigning for than any unworkable smoking ban, tinkering with A-Levels, or fussing about with pedicabs.
After all, anything that might irritate Michael Heseltine can’t be a wholly bad idea.