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Tag: politics

  • When Plans for the North East Region were actually done well compared with the inane drivel we get today

    I am currently writing a chapter entitled: The North East of England – Post-industrial Carboniferous Capitalism in a Birthplace of the Capitalocene for a book dealing with Mediating Industrial Change: Construction and Perception of Discourses about (De-) Industrialisation. My abstract indicates what I propose to deal with:

    This chapter will examine the trajectory of the North East (NE) of England towards a postindustrial character in terms of all of economic base, employment structure, cultural character, and political systems. The NE was a birthplace of industrial capitalism globally. It was where railway systems were first developed and was a major producer of coal, ships, iron and steel, and chemicals over about 250 years. It was also the location of major technological innovation. From the 1930s there were introduced a range of department two industries including clothing, textiles, and light electrical engineering so the region for the first time had a large industrial female labour force. In the 1960s over half of all employed adults were employed in production industries. In the 19th and early 20th centuries the region was one of the great industrial zones of the world and seen as such with. After the first world war there was a massive slump in  consequence first of UK economic policies and then of the global depression. During this  period national government began to intervene to resolve unemployment by diversifying the industrial base. These policies continued until the election of the Neo-Liberal Thatcher government in 1979. Since then, the region has lost the great bulk of its mining and  manufacturing base with profound implications for culture and identity. An important aspect in how the region was seen in the UK beyond itself was the development of a regionally based popular culture, particularly in television series, which documented lived experience. Although these presented a realist but positive version of place, at the same time national political culture began to frame the future of the regthe ion in terms of managed decline.

    As part of the background research for this I have been reading a range of public body documents produced during the 20th Century. Of particular value have been the Barlow Report  of the Royal Commission on the Distribution of the Industrial Population with the work done before WWII but published in 1940, the Hailsham report of 1963 on The North East a Progamme for Regional Devlopment and Growth, and two indigenous documents.   These are the the Northern Economic Planning Council’s Challenge of the Changing North (1966) and the Northern Regional Strategy Team’s Strategic Plan for the Northern Region(1977).  Reading these well researched and written documents is a pleasure. I had criticisms of the latter in the 1970s but the plan was entirely accurate in its description of the origins of the issues it was confronting. This is in marked contrast to the inane boosterism of  The Interim North East Local Growth Plan of March 2025 produced by nitwit Kim and her team. The abolition of the Government Office for the North East in 2011, apparently at the behest of the idiot LibDems in the coalition in favour of localism, eliminated the expertise and professionalism necessary for getting even a proper timeline of the past together as a basis for planning the future. It is worth noting that the Barlow report proposed elected regional governments but we lost our chance at that in 2004 when a poorly run campaign in favour of a North East Assembly (for too reliant on nobs and not on civil society) was done in by Dominic Cummins with the support of the UK branch of the wretched US Heritage Foundation and the refusal of Labour MPs and councillors, scared of losing their own power to a regional level, to campaign at all in support of it. So we have an apolitical body  which has to accommodate the idiots who thinks Farage has the answer to our ills and the good Tory friend of his business associates on Teesside (for a good summary of  Private Eye’s excellent coverage of this see https://northeastbylines.co.uk/region/teesside/teesworks-scandal-a-dark-tale-of-public-wealth-lost-and-private-gain/ ).  Consensus means no politics. Any decent Labour politician should be calling these bums out, not giving the portfolio responsibilities, but the system does not work that way.

    To be fair to nitwit Kim there was no evidence in Driscoll’s period as Mayor of “North of the Tyne” of any coherent informed planning and no sense of any political direction. His application for a Tyneside Freeport which would have involved suspension of trade union rights and environmental regulation over a wide stretch of his area was particularly inane but there was no political machinery for holding him accountable for this action.

  • Alex Niven: The North will rise Again. London: Bloomsbury £14 Hdbk 320 pages

    As I had a go at Niven in a recent post I thought I would post the review of his book which I wrote for North East Labour History Journal. This organization is now dominated by academics but for most of my long time in it, it had a large membership of people actually drawn from the industrial working class and who had worked in the world it addressed. The editorial board rejected this review on the grounds that it was “uncomradely”. I never knew that reviews were not allowed to criticize. Anyhow here it is and I stand by every word,

    Niven, a  ‘ leading voice on Northern identity and culture’ (Blurb for a Royal Society Event in York 2022), has a presence in the London Media. The book was extensively reviewed, not least in the Financial Times. It mixes personal memoir, literary criticism, weak history and a weaker account of Northern culture. He addresses the whole of the North but with a focus on the NE which I will follow in this review. The historical errors are trivial but if we don’t know our past we are damned to repeat it. For example, the Tyne Wear Metro was not the product of Dan Smith, far too much influenced by road engineers, but of Tyne and Wear County Council in the 1970s. Dan was an atypical product of machine Labour politics in the 60s. Far more representative was the vile crook, back-handy Andy Cunningham. That matters because the alliance of the local Labour machine with a right wing national party, now far to the right of Wilson et al., is back– witness the attempt to bar Driscoll from standing for NE Mayor. The 1970s Met Council was a progressive force but Blair (who to be fair Niven detests) did nothing to revive that level of governance.

    Niven focuses on high culture, especially on Bunting’s Briggflats. No mention of popular middle brow culture – When the Boat comes in, Whatever happened to the Likely Lads, plays from Live Theatre, especially Tom Hadaway – keep going –  so a literary critique rather than cultural study. If Niven had paid some attention to say the Likely Lads trajectory he would have engaged with lived experience, in the NE from the affluent 60s – see Pearson’s Sex, Brown Ale and Rhythm and Blues -towards the present. He might have understood the importance of the Elm Lodge housing estates. Niven has claimed to have returned to his native city on his appointment at Newcastle University. He didn’t. He grew up in the South Tyne Valley, the child of two blow-in educational professionals (both of working class origins and his London Irish mother could have put him right on the nature of the outer South East population which he gets badly wrong). He blew out to the music scene and to a higher education in London and Oxford before he blew back. He has no lived experience of North Eastern industrial working class life and no family background in it. That shows in what he writes.  Niven’s heart is in the right place but his head is away with the fairies and his representation of us to others is flat out wrong. 

    David Byrne

  • The Problem with politics in  the territory of the North East of England Combined Authority

    Let me begin with a historical set of memories. I have been actively involved in politics in the North East of England since I was a student at Newcastle University 60 years ago. I was very much engaged both with support for tenant and resident activists in the West End of Newcastle and with the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. In the latter capacity I organized buses to take people to the famous riot in March 1968 in Grosvenor Square (in which I participated enthusiastically). This meant I went around all the left groups on Tyneside ranging from the then International Socialists  and Communist Party across a range of Trotskyist sects – including the truly bizarre Posadists who believed socialism would be brought to Earth by aliens who being more advanced would inevitably be socialist and who published the only newspaper I have ever seen where the headline went onto the second page), Maoists – very odd group of very working class incomers living in Walker, and some others who combined an interest in  and practice of black magic with anarchism. There were lots of them including many trade unionists of a generally left tendency and they were spread across the whole conurbation including a strong group in my native South Shields.

    That was the character of the Left across the North East and one thing that was very evident was that whilst  there were people active who were blow ins (very useful Irish expression) the great majority of the politically active were from the north eastern working class and they were spread everywhere. Until the defeat of the miners in 1984 there was more focus of the Left as a whole on the trade union movement than on the Labour Party as such but that changed in a kind of quantity into quality fashion towards  the Blair years. Trade unions, even the wretched GMWU dominated by the Cunningham dynasty, were no longer the power players in selection of parliamentary candidates although they retained some influence and a mix of blow ins like Wood and home grown dross like Armstrong made sure that they were endorsed by unions representing sectors in which they had never worked.  In the Blair years opposition to policy focused on the Iraq war and there was much less sustained resistance to the continued privatization of public services, even when through the appalling PFI, or of the removal of powers over housing and education from local government by the creation of separate management bodies like Gentoo in Sunderland for housing and academy schools. There was opposition but it was almost invariably defeated. Real estate capital was given free reign in planning issues by Blair, Brown, Cameron and subsequent Tories. This has been continued by Starmer and Reeves. The Blair and Brown governments not only continued privatization but labour had no meaningful industrial policy whatsoever.

    Blair and his allies not only systematically destroyed any semblance of internal democracy within the Labour party but through the Local Government Act 2000 replaced the committee system of management of departments and the overall authority (Policy and Resources Committee) with a Leader and cabinet system where the Leader appointed cabinet members to head functional departments. This was another major erosion of democratic process because in most authorities (not in Newcastle under the rule of the petit bourgeois “Labour” Beecham) committee chairs had been elected and committees were not whipped on party lines but actually discussed policy issues and changes.  The 2000 act also introduced the principle of elected Mayors as Executive rulers, originally of single local authorities but this has been extended now to cover major city regions. Alongside these changes in elected governance there was a continued growth of “the new Magistry” (Stewart 1996). The Urban Development Corporations established under Thatcher which de did so much damage to estuarine conurbations were an extreme example but the Local Enterprise partnerships established in 2011 were important bodies. These have now been subsumed into the Mayoral authorities as boards.  There is very little democratic element in the Mayoral authorities, only the Leaders of Local authorities who are not directly elected as such and as said before should be focusing on their own service providing authorities. Key city region decisions have no real democratic basis. The future of city regions should be a key focus of politics but is not. If we compare the Structure Plan developed by the elected Tyne and Wear County Council or even the North East Regional Strategy constructed on a corporatist basis with the kind of real estate dominated planning of Burnham in Greater Manchester (with the real decision making being done by Bernstein – the real estate very friendly former chief executive of Manchester City) we see a focus on the real needs of people and not of capitalist profiteers.  If we look at what Driscoll did during his time as elected Mayor of North of Tyne, he functioned in exactly the same way as Burnham not least in his support for a Free Port in which trade union and environmental protections would not apply.

    Driscoll’s selection as Labour candidate for his Mayoral role was a consequence of the desire of Labour Party members in Newcastle, North Tyneside and Northumberland to stick it to the wretched Blairite hack Nick Forbes. His failure to get selected by Labour as their candidate for the  North East Mayoral Authority was both revenge for this and a consequence of his association with Corbyn’s faction within Labour. In a real democratic selection for Labour  he would have had some competition from a socialist figure from the wider area, most of which was not within the North of Tyne area, and where he would have been challenged on his record in office and particularly on the Free Port issue.  He is now a key figure in the “Your Party” initiative.

    Driscoll is a resident of Gosforth, one of the most affluent areas in the North East, and well served by state schools but he sent his children to private schools before withdrawing them to home school to avoid embarrassment – probably not a good move since many teachers have deep suspicions of home schoolers.  He has a North Eastern working class background but retired after selling his business. In everything but his smoggie origins he is typical of a breed of middle class blow ins who have assumed considerable prominence in North East politics.

    Alongside this elite element there is also now an emphasis on identity politics. This has had a particularly malign effect on the Green Party where the rights of Trans men identifying as women now have absolute priority and a total lack of interest in the way politics at a city region level might be directed towards confronting the polycrisis. The Greens were always full of eco freak anti science elements, notably on nuclear power’s role in confronting climate crisis and a rejection of genetically modified crops, even CRISPR modifications which are based on the existing gene set rather than importation of genes from other species. This went way beyond any sensible precautionary principle. There are some good people in the NE Greens, notably Rachel Featherstone of Sunderland who is also a good union activist, but the party stood candidates in the 2019 election against left Labour MPs, notably Laura Pidcock in North Durham who lost when the Green Vote was greater than her losing margin. Labour have now imposed the Zionist agent Luke Akehurst in that seat so I hope the Greens are happy.

    So a  political scene which was dominated by working class people and working class interests and in which women played an important part, alongside people of colour in the seafaring and dock unions in the two Shields, has been replaced by one in which safe labour wards fell to Reform, I well remember when the Felling, having got rid of the vile crook Cunningham, was won back for Labour by young working class people who were part of the Militant. That area is now represented by a Labour MP who is a complete supporter of the rights of trans women identifying men against biological women. The Felling deserves better and even the Morlocks of Jarrow (living proof of the epigenetic effects of red lead) do not deserve her (I am from South Shields). Identity politics is a disaster. I write as someone whose family were among those who in the early 20th century brought the Irish working class on Tyneside into the Labour party and who has seen how identity politics work out in Belfast. The arrogant and contempt of these people for working class and indeed people in new middle income groups who do not endorse what are described as ‘woke’ ideas is extreme. In Tribune edited by Alex Niven from the Tyne Valley although describing Newcastle as his home city we find articles asserting that the Trans women identifying men are a key group of persecuted people. Niven’s book The North will rise again  is not only marked by trivial but annoying historical errors – Dan Smith had nothing to  do with the development of the Tyne Wear Metro – that was the TW County Council – but really does not grasp the essentials of North Eastern culture. He has neither lived experience or technical expertise.  

    I almost could give up when I look at the character of this absolute shower but I guess I won’t.

  • Kim’s New Cabinet – should be some interesting discussions.

    Following the recent local elections Mayor McGuiness has had to change her Cabinet, given the election of Andrew Husband of Reform as Leader of Durham County Council and Karen Clark of Labour (only just beat Reform) as Mayor (in effect Leader) of North Tyneside Council. The Cabinet is made up of the leaders of all the constituent local authorities within the Combined Authority Area. I will repeat that this is daft. Council Leaders have enough to do running their own authorities and cannot and should not be devoting time and energy to Combined Authority functions. Better to nominate a Councillor from each authority who makes it their main job and far better if we actually had elected regional councillors but the rejection of Prescott’s devolution deal in the 90s with a campaign run by the delightful Dominic Cummings and supported by a UK offshoot of the vile US Heritage Foundation scuppered that prospect. Existing council leaders did not like the idea and Labour did not really campaign for elected regional government. So here we are and this is the shower we have.

    Here is what McGuiness has done:

    New leader of Durham County Council Cllr Andrew Husband was appointed cabinet member for A North East We Are Proud To Call Home, overseeing Housing Policy and Delivery, Social Housing and the North East CA Rural Growth Fund.

    New Mayor of North Tyneside Mayor Karen Clark was appointed cabinet member for Home to the Green Energy Revolution, overseeing Energy, Net Zero, and Environment and Coast.

    Leader of Sunderland City Council Michael Mordey was appointed cabinet member for Finance and Investment, Gateshead Council leader Martin Gannon was appointed cabinet member for Transport, South Tyneside Council Leader Tracey Dixon was appointed cabinet member for Home of Real Opportunity, Newcastle City Council Leader Karen Kilgour was appointed cabinet member for Home to A Growing And Vibrant Economy, and Leader of Northumberland County Council Glen Sanderson was appointed cabinet member for A Welcoming Home To Global Trade.

    Chief Executive of the North East Chamber of Commerce and Chair of the North East Business and Economy Board John McCabe will continue as a non-voting cabinet member representing the business community, and Chief Executive of Voluntary Organisations Network North East (VONNE) Martin Brookes will continue as a non-voting cabinet member representing the CVS (Community and Voluntary Sector). (From the Combined Authority Website News.)

    Martin Brookes is a Banker who formerly worked for Goldmann Sachs – truly a representative of the people of the North East – and yet again no sign of the Trade Unions to represent organized labour despite some of them lending political support to get nitwit Kim elected but with nothing that looks like a real democratic mandate.

    Well Reform are in the door with a seat at the decision making table. Husband, a Plawsworth Publican, (could be worse – running a pub is an honest trade –  could be a city speculator like the Lizard who leads his party nationally) has responsibility for Housing Policy. Lloyd George described the post First World War allocation of industrial Silesia to Poland as like giving a clock to a monkey (he was wrong) but I think that describes my view on giving Husband  direction of North East housing policy to a T.  Housing intersects with planning and given that the Cabinet still has a commitment to net zero given the role of Karen Clark in that portfolio it should be a major commitment.

    Clark looks like a grown up with children and grandchildren, long experience in voluntary work, youth work and teaching, and I hope she is able to see off  Husband who will want no Net Zero interference with housebuilding or planning in general.

    She claims to have been brought up in poverty but I wonder. Bridget Philipson says she was in poverty until her mother was able to go back to full time work – hard up OK but real poverty? Starmer whose father was a toolmaker – every engineering worker in the UK took the Coventry toolroom rate as the standard to aim for – makes similar claims. I am older but until the age of seven I lived in a downstairs Tyneside flat with no inside loo, bathroom or heating other than coal fires – a council house with merely no upstairs heating is not poverty Bridget – with my mother supporting me, her sister and her mother on a primary teacher’s salary and we were not poor. Ordinary working class living standards in the post war era were not poverty.

    Net Zero should be a crucial point of difference in the Combined Authority but if the loony Greens – no nuclear, no genetically modified crops (even by CRISPR) and biological males being able to play women’s sports – are the only ones arguing for it from outside then we are indeed in a mess.

  • Mayor Kim McGuinness brought together Northern Mayors to set out a vision for a united ‘Great North’

    The image says it all. A picture is worth a thousand words. It shows seven of the North of England’s combined authority mayors, including Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen who frankly no respectable politician should touch with a bargepole (see Private Eye numerous editions on Mayor Ben). But now we are in a post political era when all can unite around a Great North and with Sir Brendan Foster, the creator of the Great North Run during his time at Nike (not a North Eastern industrial giant). Kim is front right but prominent. Her message includes something I agree with:

    “We cannot afford to slow down the pace of devolution, a Great North deserves a greater say over its own future. That means handing mayors single settlements and an end to the days of bidding into Whitehall for permissions to spend, and changes to legislation to free up the north to contribute more to the Government’s missions.”

     Except of course for the part about contributing to the government’s missions.  No notion of any autonomy to confront a government which in effect, despite recent moves by Reeves to permit borrowing to invest, of a coherent industrial policy but we have not had one of those since Tony Benn was at the Dept of Industry and doing what Eric Heffer and Jack Jones told him to. Benn’s only real virtue was that he was biddable when telt by people who knew what they were doing.

    Otherwise as with the combined authority interim plan what we have is a lot of blather. To quote:

    Kim said: “The Great North Run has for decades shown what’s great about our North, and now it’s time we spread that message. We’re doing our bit to build on our Great North identity and uniting under that northern pride that defines us. We’re delighted to be working with Sir Brendan on a new era of northern collaboration, with a brand recognisable across the world.

    I was never a runner – long distance walker and a swimmer with a couple of 5,000 metre swims back in the long ago day. Nothing wrong with a half marathon although those of us who avoided pounding the pavements probably have less need of new knees in our old age.

    However, yet again we have PR twaddle instead of an honest confrontation with the reality of the post-industrial North and especially the North East. It is this lack of engagement with reality which explains why Reform now controls Durham County Council because of course the main political choice of voters in local elections, including the one which gifted us Kim, is NONE OF THE ABOVE and no MP was elected  in this region with more votes than the non voters in their constituency. (Tynemouth with 50% of a 66% turnout might have just squeaked it on a check but otherwise no)

    I will continue to keep an eye on the Combined Authority but it continues to be NOT A PRETTY SIGHT.

  • Why I am keeping an eye on the North East (of England) Combined Authority

    The North East of England Combined Authority has been in existence for just under a year since Kim McGuiness was elected Mayor beating Jamie Driscoll and gaining 42% of the voted on a 31% turnout. I voted for Driscoll despite having a lot of reservations about him and the nature of his campaign. He was barred from standing for the Labour nomination by the zionist clique on the National Executive which was a point in his favour but he had supported a Free Port for Tyneside in which trade union rights and environmental protections can be suspended / ignored which was very much not. He is a businessman with very limited political experience before being elected as Mayor of the absurdly named North of Tyne combined authority (much of which was south of the Tyne) and had no real record of trade union activism. He ran the campaign to appeal to everybody on a kind of anti political basis. This might have worked in a transferable note election but this was first past the post. It was certainly not a socialist campaign which would have required attacking Labour for it neo-Blairite and zionist turn and attacking McGuiness for her manifest inexperience and status as a political hack for Labour and being a sort of revenge proxy for Driscoll having defeated Nick Forbes in the North of Tyne Labour selection process. Driscoll has now established his own political party – majority – but it seems to be pretty much a one man band so far.

    So what about McGuiness and the Comined authority. First it has a cabinet consisting of Council Leaders alongside a business representative (but no trade union representative) and a community / voluntary sector representative. As usual that person is a charity background individual with no discernible community status. There are substitute members from the councils, business and the community / voluntary sector but the leaders (and Redfern as elected mayor for North Tyneside) have executive functions. This of course is absurd. Council Leaders and Redfern should be devoting their time to their own authorities and not playing at doing something (or more likely very little to nothing) at a regional level. There is no mechanism for political accountability at the regional level unlike the days when Labour was more or less democratic and there were district and county parties. None of these characters other than McGuiness has been directly elected and the non-political character of the cabinet means that the Tory leader of Northumberland has responsibility for the environment – much like giving a clock to a malign monkey.

    I am old enough to remember Metropolitan Counties and their structure plans – democratic bodies with a serious focus on confronting issues and creating change.

    And what about McGuiness herself – well she lives in Northumberland with her RAF officer husband and posts pictures of her dogs on facebook. She was elected asserting that her priority was getting rid of child poverty – kind of hard that when a major factor in child poverty is the two child benefit cap which has been kept in being by austerity not so light New New Labour and Reeves. There was a big event about this with the usual suspects in attendance but the outcome was just the usual inane drivel about expanding opportunity in an era when educational attainment is no guarantee of a secure life. I promised to do as the Skibbereen Eagle of County Cork did in in the 19th century in relation to the Czar of Russia and keep my eye on them. Not a pretty sight so far.

  • What Durham Going “Reform” means for the NE Combined Authority

    The sweeping gains in Durham by Reform have given that party control of the county council. Reform are now the second largest party in Northumberland with the distinct possibility of a Conservative / Reform partnership in control there. The response of our nitwit Mayor Kim McGuiness was to say that whilst disappointed in relation to massive Labour losses she is: ’as determined as ever to continue to work cross-party to keep delivering for our amazing region and creating real opportunity in the North East.’ Fat chance of that in relation to at least one crucial issue – confronting impending climate catastrophe by working towards net zero. There is an good publication by that excellent institution – the House of Commons Library – on the role of local authorities in achieving net zero: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CDP-2023-0122/CDP-2023-0122.pdf Lots of good stuff in this but one crucial point. There is no statutory obligation on local authorities to work towards net zero. Central governments since the establishment of net zero and the introduction of legislation in the Amended Climate Change Act (2019) took it for granted that local authorities would go along with the general programme. Reform’s County Durham Manifesto endorsed Reform National’s Contract with the people of the UK. Here are some relevant quotations from that document:

    We will unlock Britain’s vast energy treasure of oil and gas to slash energy bills, beat the cost-of-living crisis and unleash real economic growth.

    Net Zero is pushing up bills, damaging British industries likesteel, and making us less secure. We can protect our environment with more tree planting, more recycling and less single use plastics. New technology will help, but we must not  impoverish ourselves in pursuit of unaffordable, unachievable global CO2 targets.

    They go on to propose a role for small modular nuclear power. Even loons are right sometimes.

    “Nigel Farage has warned council staff to look for other jobs after Reform took control of Durham. The Reform leader had a message for anyone working in a host of roles for Durham council, which his party is now in control of. Speaking at a victory rally in Durham on Friday (2 May), Mr Farage said: “These include those with working on climate change, diversity initiatives or even just from home. “You all better be seeking alternative careers very, very quickly.” (Source Independent)

    Given that there is no statutory obligation on local authorities to pursue net zero this may well happen.

    McGuiness kept the Tories happy by handing over control over environmental issues to them and their country landowner and farmer allies – see previous post on composition of the boards of the authority.  Reform will be ranting and raving to support the national NO NET ZERO position of their reptilian leader. David Icke claimed that we were controlled by alien lizards walking amongst us in human form. I don’t think Farage has made much of an effort on the human form.

    What happens in relation to the combined authority’s programme on net zero will be crucial. The Greens with their quasi religious opposition to nuclear and genetically modified crops ( I am with James Lovelock on these issues), not to mention their support for aggressive extreme trans policies – men should be able to play women’s rugby – will not provide any sort of realistic opposition to failure to deal with this existential (when did that become the word for this but it has?) issue.  Take to the streets on this – talking to the school kids who did that before.

    I am looking to see what I can find out about the Reform Councillors in Durham. They look like (in photos) a mixture of renegade Tories, golf club bores, and young nutters. However, there are local elections coming in Tyne and Wear in 2026. Labour is useless at addressing real discontents. If there is no development of a force which can do that before then, Reform may well sweep the board there as well – they very nearly won the North Tyneside mayoral election (why a North Tyneside mayor?).  Bad times coming.

  • Membership of the Business and Economy Board of the NE Combined Authority

    Now we have details of the full membership of the Business and Economy Board of the NE Combined Authority – see here: https://www.northeast-ca.gov.uk/business-and-economy-board

    It has a Chair from the NE Chamber of Commerce and a Vice Chair from Lloyds Bank, although  mostly it seems now engaged as Chair of Gentoo – Sunderland’s operator of what was Council Housing and, although before her time, with a controversial history. There is a NE based banker and venture capitalist, two lawyers, reps from Northumbria Water (not good for our rivers), the Port of Tyne (one that should be there), three business consultants, three lawyers, one rep from a company specializing in  private provision of public services, and two from manufacturing – one is Nissan, the other seems to make cheese -, one rep running a storage facility, three reps from education although two seem to be consultants / private providers, and a rep from the Federation of Small Businesses.

    Compared with the North East Local Enterprise Partnership, which was folded into the Mayoral Authority, this board is light on reps from manufacturing and heavy on lawyers and consultants. What is missing? There is no elected representative, even from local councillors elected on derisory turnouts and votes like the Mayor herself. AND THERE li IS NO TRADE UNIONIST. Some trade unions leant their support to McGuiness during the Mayoral election and as usual with New New Labour have got nothing for it. In the corporatist era of regional governance in the 60 and 70s it would have been unthinkable for organized labour not to be represented on a body with economic functions.

    In the past we had figures in Labour local government who were intelligent, competent and knew what they were doing about our declining economy. The late Pat(ricia) Murray, Chair of Gateshead’s Economic Development of Committee, was an outstanding example. Another was Charlie Slater, Leader of Sunderland Council although he was an arrogant little (insert word of your own choice and it took some restraint on my part not to pick him up and shake him). There were people on Tyne and Wear County Council – both Jim and Anne Cousins for example. Teesside had Maureen Taylor, another clever and able working class woman. Now we have McGuiness.

    I had some respect for the Local Enterprise Partnership because it had a significant representation from production industries.  This board is a lot worse than that one.

  • Now we have a plan from the Mayoral authority

    Interim North East Local Growth Plan

    ‘https://www.northeast-ca.gov.uk/local-growth-plan

    The North East Combined Authority under the “leadership” of Kim McGuiness (whose face now adorns what seems to be a sort of logo for the authority – see above) – has published its Interim North East Local Growth Plan – Interim because a final version will be published after the Labour government’s spending review. Well, we now know what that has done. McGuiness is big on opposing child poverty, a domain of policy over which she has no powers whatsoever. The spending review has just added another quarter of a million children to relative poverty to join the nearly 2.5 million already there.  Reeves’ economic policies will have Keynes spinning in his grave. Cutting benefits and public sector employment will reduce aggregate demand in a recession! All this by a government of “Labour”, a party to which McGuiness owes her position by an unblemished record of servile adherence. It is interesting to note who were the “partners” involved in the preparation of the plan – business (OK), education (if VCs and College Principals pretty useless), the Voluntary Sector (largely dependent on grant income and guaranteed not to rock the boat), and the Community Sector – what is this and who selected its representatives? The very notable absence is Trade Unions – not even the regional TUC. What do they donate to the Labour Party for – to be treated with contempt by a nitwit like McGuiness and her allies?  The Voluntary and Community Sectors do not speak for Civil Society but who does?

    There are elements of good sense in parts of this Plan in relation to the support and development of industrial sectors in green energy, biosciences and pharmaceuticals, general advanced manufacturing, defence and space (although there has been an imperialist seizure of RAF Spadeadam – the UK’s Electronic Warfare Centre – it is in Cumbria, not the North East), and creative industries (although we no longer have a regional TV programme producing company now Tyne Tees does not do that). There is the usual guff about digital industries – games yes and Teesside University – not in the NE Mayoral area – is one of the best places to learn that kind of programming, but AI ???? What we seem to be promised is a massive energy-hungry data-processing centre which is ecologically disastrous. The more you know about so called “artificial intelligence” (I have been engaged with thinking about neural nets for a long time), the less you expect of them and the more questions they raise. The new Chinese AI agents have already changed the game. Of course, Starmer and Reeves have been seduced by the Tech Bros into thinking that AI is the solution to the delivery of public services. The record of government procurement of even basic digital services is dire and AI will be worse.

    One sector I am deeply suspicious of is “Knowledge Intensive Professional Services”. Marine engineering and ship management services – very good indeed. Legal and Financial Services – the tax dodgers’ pals, not good for much of what they do. Real Estate – bad – dominates urban systems and planning to the detriment of most people and the whole of the environment. Good to see the Leamside line in the plan as a metro extension and bringing back redundancy to the East Coast line but that plan way proceeds the establishment of the Mayoral authority.

    There are occasional signs of intelligence and forward thinking – although perhaps only one. Somebody seems to have realized that with the UK out of the EU and protectionism being the new game in world trade there will be a necessary shortening of supply lines. Given that the NE has retained more of an industrial base than the UK in general, (although much of it is on Teesside outwith the NE Combined authority area), this point is well made and there could be benefits for manufacturing in general in the UK and across the whole NE region.

    Of course there is no real democratic basis or real public engagement for any of this. Compare this really rather trivial exercise with the Structure Plans and North East Regional Strategy of the 1970s – they were much better informed and well constructed.

    The BIG FAULT – the NE region as a whole includes some of the poorest areas not just in the UK but in the whole of Western Europe. One is shared with Teesside but even Northumberland and Tyneside are way below the UK and Western Europe EU levels for Gross Value Added (GVA) although since a lot of GVE includes the imputed net rents of owner occupiers (10% for the UK as a whole) GVA is not the best measure for poverty. There is some passing mention of this in the report but the whole tone is relentlessly upbeat – all will be well, and all manner of things will be well, and all things will be well. Fat chance.

  • Composition of NE Combined Authority Boards

    One way of getting to grips with the nature of the North East Combined Authority is to look at the membership of its Boards. There are three of these:

    Business and Economy Board

    Culture, Creative, Tourism and Sport Advisory Board

    Environment, Coast and Rural Advisory Board

    For the Culture etc. Board the membership seems reasonable and representative of those sectors, although there is no representative from a community background.

    For the Environment etc. Board from a membership of 28 we have two from the National Farmers Union, two from the Country Land and Business Association (former name Country Landowners’ which indicates what this represents) and Lord Curry of Kirkharle, a British farmer and businessman who is the former chair of NFU Mutual. The urban North East seems not to have an environment given the presence of deep rural reps on this board and Tyne and Wear having only one Councillor rep with Durham having none. There is no rep from users of the rural environment – where is the Ramblers’ Association?  In Scotland there is a right of responsible access to all rural land. Now that is way out of Mayoral powers, although it should be devolved, but fat chance of pressing for that with this bunch in control and fat chance of serious attention to river pollution from agricultural runoff.

    We only have information on two members of the Business and Economy Board and that from a tweet from McManus informing us as to her such a busy week. These are the Chair, John McCabe, Chief executive at North East Chamber of Commerce and Vice Chair, Emily Cox Group Ambassador for the North and Director of Colleague Relations at Lloyds Banking Group, previously the Director of Public Affairs at Virgin Money with a law degree from Cambridge and who splits her time between (!) (does she know between is for two cases – should be among) Edinburgh, London and Newcastle.  Will there be a trade unionist – even just one? The North East LEP has now been merged into the Combined Authority. At least it had some members from productive industrial capital as opposed to finance and real estate. I will report on the full composition of this crucial board in due course.