The British government has decided in its wisdom that England is to be divided into various regions for planning purposes, which may, if the inhabitants vote the right way, be graciously permitted to have elected regional assemblies. If they don't they will get appointed ones anyway, made up of timeserving councillors their party bosses want to kick upstairs, and local businessmen on the make. Now this is all fine. There is nothing wrong with regional government - when the regions are real, when they are the places people actually think they live in. But nobody asks people where they want the regions to be. They draw administratively convenient boundaries, and plonk different towns and counties in a region that the people don't identify with.
The real question for the large chunk of England within 100 miles of London is not the West Lothian Question but the Banana Doughnut Question.
The government used to have a huge south-eastern planning region, including London and everything else south-east of a line from Oxford to the Wash. This artificial "region" contained nearly half the population of Britain. And when London is removed from it, as it has been, it becomes a dough-nut with a hole in the middle. A pointless, useless area. Communications in the area tend to be radial - people go in and out of London, but not round it. Almost everyone in Guildford or Hastings or Stowmarket or Olney or Woodstock or Andover occasionally visits London. Very few of them ever visit each other. Almost everyone in it, if they were forced to move in with some other part of the country for regional government purposes, would probably feel more at home being in the same region as London.
So, to avoid the dough-nut, the government has gone for a large Eastern Region - including Bedfordshire, Essex & Hertfordshire - and put the south into a banana-shaped region bending round London from Milton Keynes via Southampton all the way to Dover.
Among other things this puts Bedford and Milton Keynes, in two different regions (East and South East) and has the boundary of another one (East Midlands) only a decent afternoon's stroll north of them. As these regions are mainly meant for planning purposes, and as this area is the fastest growing in Britain outside London, with MK & Bedford promising (or threatening) to merge into one large city, this is just plain silly.
No-one really identifies themselves with these made-up regions at all.
In the government's new South Eastern Region, the Big Banana containing Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hampshire, Surrey, Sussex & Kent, a 2002 survey asking people what region they thought they lived in, found that unprompted only 54% answered the South East. Of course 80% of those asked in East Sussex did - but only 41% of Hampshire and 26% of Buckinghamshire. Which is perfectly sensible because half of Buckinghamshire isn't in the south-east, it is really in the south Midlands, along with places like Bedford and Northhampton. Even when prompted, 18% thought they lived in the South West (presumably the inhabitants of Hampshire - you only have to listen to the accent of a native of Southampton to realise that there is more than a hint of oooh and arrr in there)
When you ask people in the government's so-called South-East "which county areas do you think are included in the South-East Region?", over 70% mention Kent, Surrey and Sussex (which implies that the other nearly 30% have the geographical awareness of a blind lemming on heat) but only 23% Buckinghamshire and 19% Oxfordshire.
Things are as bad in the new Eastern Region. Nearly everyone in traditional East Anglia (Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, and we can argue about Essex) thinks they live in the Eastern Region. But 37% of the inhabitants of the government's Eastern Region said they lived in the South-East when asked. Which is also rather sensible, because urban Essex and almost all of Hertfordshire are suburbs of London. As is the southern half of Buckinghamshire, which is no doubt why, for planning purposes it is to be included with Wivelsfield, Winchester, and the Isle of Wight.
Frankly, its all a scam. Central government in Britain - whether Labour or Tory - doesn't think of local government as "government" at all. It doesn't think of local government as any place for a democratic expression of popular will. It thinks of it mainly as an agency of central government, a way to get policy implemented. The only place for democracy in local government is as a sort of glorified schoolboard, amateur auditors, part-time watch-dogs for the ratepayers, the local Great and Good keeping an eye on all those suspicious characters in the Town Hall to make sure they don't run off with the money or - even worse - try to do anything radical.
The Tories deliberately gerrymandered an unpopular Greater London Council that was meant to destroy the inbuilt Labour majority in the old London County Council. People in London tend to identify with their own neighbourhood - their post-code, their parish, their suburb, their local railway station, the old small boroughs - and then with London as a whole. The GLC London boroughs were, quite intentionally, exactly the wrong size to get voters interested. Large enough to feel remote and distant and bureaucratic, but too small to exert any kind of power on a national or even London-wide scale. They also set the outer boundary of Greater London in exactly the wrong place - far out enough to include many disgruntled (& mostly Tory-voting) suburbs which didn't want to be part of London in the first place, but not far enough out to give the GLC any real regional influence - and certainly not far enough out to include transport infrastructure like the M25 or the international airports.
The Tories also forcibly integrated the various boroughs and cities of England outside London into the counties surrounding them, who were presided over by county councils that represented constituencies that had very different interests from those towns. They merged local services such as the police, and they forced councils to sell off amenities like water and transport. So in Brighton we lost our (not very good) schools, our unchlorinated water, and our police with white helmets, and were dumped into East Sussex with all those retired colonels and stockbrokers who thought that anyone over the age of 30 who still travelled by bus was too much of a loser to be allowed out on their own.
As if this was not bad enough in the name of efficiency they also remapped many of the traditional counties into new counties that no-one knew or cared about.
In London this policy failed and the GLC first became Labour, then became popular - though more for putting on good parties than anything much it did to improve life in London - except of course for public transport. Thatcher hated fun (for others) and local democracy almost as much as she feared cities and public transport - so she abolished the GLC and gave all the duties of local authorities to those dozens of London boroughs, all that remained of London local democracy after Thatcher, that almost no-one gave a damn for, and which in two or three cases were completely incapable of doing the job.
So we ended up - quite deliberately - with the local affairs of London, where people identify with the whole city, being managed by meaningless boroughs. But outside London where people often do identify with their town, local government was mostly in the hands of distant county councils - often representing entirely invented new counties, whose boundaries were fixed by MPs and judges against the wishes of the people who actually lived there.What it was all really about was deliberately inventing local government districts that people did not care about, did not identify with, and would not use to assert their power over government. Central government does not want informed, activist, popular, local government. It wants local government that meekly does what it is told. And the best way to assure that is to make sure that no-one gives a damn. So they set the estate agents and the road planners to work and came up with such meaningless districts as Cleveland, Thameside, and the London Borough of Redbridge. Some of them seem to have been invented by the people who think up names for semi-detached housing estates. Forest Heath? Waverley? Caradon? Vale Royal? Eden? Nice names, but WTF are they?
On the whole, the Labour government, perhaps because of its populist instincts (we could hardly call them socialist any more) has done much better. They have restored a certain amount of local self-government to the towns and cities that were forced under the county councils, releasing places like Plymouth and Brighton and Derby and Milton Keynes from the stockbrokers and the retired colonels (though not, unfortunately, from the estate agents and the property developers). They have allowed various towns to re-brand themselves as cities - harmless fun, but something the Tories never understood, as they hate and fear cities. Spectacularly so these days when Tory shadow cabinet members can go on the BBC and wave away their failures in elections in places like Brent or Birmingham because they aren't natural Tory constituencies - they have officially given up on the half of Britain that lives in cities - which is fine by me, a party that promises to scrap the congestion charge and bus lanes is never going to run London again. They have even re-invented Rutland - a populist move if ever there was one.
But then Noo Layburr started getting too used to government, and they started listening to the remnants of the planning mafia, and they started listening to the big property developers, and most of all they became convinced that they knew best. And they came out with this crappy regional government plan. It's not crappy because it is a regional government plan - nothing wrong in that. If people want a regional assembly they should have one. It looks like a fine idea for the North East of England. But it is crappy because people aren't to be permitted to decide which region they live in - and they are to be forced into these deliberately uninteresting and boring regions, so as not to arouse them to vote.
And Prescott still hasn't given planning permission for the new Brighton football stadium. When half the population of a city sign a petition saying that they want it, when the local council wants it, when the local MPs want it (or if they didn't wouldn't dare say, for fear of the election) what moral right has central government to step in and ban it? And now they want to hand over the decision (or rather the implementation of their decisions) to some estate agents in Guildford or wherever the regional assembly is based, so that they can pretend it isn't them. Bollocks to that.