Making a success of the Regions

Written by Andrew Duff MEP and published in Liberal Democrat News on Thu 26th Aug 1999

We reel under regional strategy documents. The East of England Development Agency has published its proposals for economic development only a fortnight after the men from the ministry released their own observations on regional planning guidance. Of course, neither addresses itself seriously to the other. I fear we are condemned to months more of squabbling between what's good for jobs versus what's good for the environment - and years of unfulfilled potential.

What might make Eastern England one of the top regions of Europe is to integrate planning and economic policy within one autonomous, well-resourced regional government with the status and credibility to attract investment from Europe's flush capital markets. What will cause despondency and cynicism about the regionalisation of English politics is a lack of decisive action. Better to be bold and experimental than to be querulous and quibbling.

We Lib Dem Euro MPs have a big vested interest in making a success of the new regional dimension, and our vantage point in Brussels helps to sharpen the regional perspective. The clustering of hi-tech industry, for example, cannot be left to local planning authorities, however well-meaning, unless they are working within a regional, national and European framework that they both understand and part-own. At the moment we have nothing like the coherence we need. At the local level there is confusion between different tiers of local government and precious little coordination across county boundaries. The regional tier is a mess. In Whitehall there is self-evident tension between the DTI, DETR, DfEE and MAFF. No wonder the European Commission sometimes gets it wrong!

Constituency engagements in Bedfordshire meant I missed the chance to boo President Jiang Zemin outside Cambridge University Library last Friday. By all accounts it was a good demo as demos go nowadays, despite the formidable presence of various gentlemen from the Met rented by the hour to help out our home-grown Cambs police. The students (or clerics?) who hoisted the Tibetan flag on the flagpole of Great St Mary's deserve a free shiatzu session each.

I remember a vast silent throng protesting on Midsummer Common after Tiananmen Square ten years ago, and it's good that Cambridge has kept the memory alive.

Going broody in the autumnal mists, I realise that one of my first political forays on coming up to Cambridge as a very young student exactly 30 years ago, was the march on the Garden House Hotel in protest against the Greek junta. One of the leaders of the riot was one S. Hughes of Selwyn Coll., now our spokesman on law and order. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.