6: Leaders, Regions and Places

By international standards, the United Kingdom is a highly centralised country. Within the UK, the governance of England is similarly centralised. In this chapter, we provide a brief guide to the inconsistent history of attempts to form a model of how the regions within England may be led. The rise and fall of efforts to form a coherent pattern of regional and sub-national governance will be explored, together with our conclusions about why the task has proven so difficult. This will include debates about devolution, decentralisation and local place.

The contrast between the UK as a whole (and England’s place within it) when compared with the rest of Europe is striking. Italy, for instance, became a unified country only in 1861. Historically, it had been a land of competing kingdoms and territories, and currently has 20 regions, 5 of which are deemed ‘autonomous’ in the Italian constitution. It is still a country of strong regional differences, particularly between North and South. This is manifested culturally and politically, for instance in the ascent to national political influence of the right-wing Northern League (dubbed simply as the ‘League’ since 2018) (The Local, 2018). It is essentially a country formed of regions – and indeed formed relatively recently – in stark contrast to the position in the UK. Similarly, Spain has a strong regional dimension in its culture and its governance. There are 17 autonomous Spanish regions (plus the 2 autonomous territories of Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa). There are also significant language differences. Under the dictatorship of Franco, there were moves towards greater centralisation of political power, but today each Spanish region has its own Parliament and President. The continuing issue of Catalan independence, and its culmination in controversial judicial decisions followed by widespread public disorder in 2019, demonstrates that powerful and conflicting regional identities may be manifested despite the preferences of central government. In comparison, France has a stronger centralising traditional, but even so it is much less centralised than the UK. Historically, 1066 can more accurately be said to represent a victory for the Normans rather than the ‘French’ as a whole. Today, there are 18 French administrative regions, 13 of which are metropolitan regions in Europe (the others are overseas territories). Each region is subdivided into departments. Again, there are regional language differences, especially Breton in northern France and to a lesser extent Occitan in southern France. According to Smith (2000, p. 5), the 1789 French Revolution ‘set the seal on an essentially centralised approach to government’ after centuries of rival kingdoms, but developments in the modern age have undermined this. Formal decentralisation in 1982 accentuated the move away from the centralist tradition.