The deep roots of English centralism ... and localism

One of the key challenges for localists is that England has been a unitary country for a very long time.   Accounts vary, but it is widely accepted that King Athelstan was the overlord who first achieved the unification of England at the beginning of the tenth century.   Bits of territory later drifted off and then drifted back again but by the beginning of the eleventh century there was a definitive English state; a unified territory for William of Normandy to conquer.  Subsequent civil wars have produced division on political rather than territorial grounds.

This is a challenge for localists because, while Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have some claim to differentiation within the UK, for a millennium England has been a single political unit where Cumbria  is notionally the same as  Cornwall  and Liverpudlians are theoretically indistinguishable from Londoners.    The foundation of England, having pre-dated the post-enlightenment penchent for written constitutions by several centuries, has left no legacy of local self government which does not emanate itself from the central power.   

But strong states need local government and the English version also had its origins in broadly the same Anglo-Saxon period that created England itself.   By the beginning of the tenth century, most of England was divided into shires, sometimes following ancient boundaries but in other cases, as with Mercia (centred on what is now called the West Midlands), apparently designed to break-up ancient loyalties.    The system of shires seems to have developed slowly, originating in Wessex where it must have been successful enough to be rolled out by other pre-unification kings and ultimately over the rest of the country.

Anglo-Saxon kings used local structures to exercise control and maintain the rule of law.  The shire had that role over a large territory and so did the next level  of local government, the ‘hundred’,  which also existed across much of the country and may have descended from the original local ‘folk moot’.  Hundreds provided a court for local administration of the king’s justice and also, as national systems of taxation developed, allowed people to challenge their tax bill with the reeve, the king’s representative.   As such it provided an important way of imposing a centralised system while allowing enough flexibility to manage little local difficulties. 

One of the key modern roles of local government, providing for the welfare of unfortunate individuals and families, was a function of two further units of local administration with overlapping roles, the manor and the parish, supplemented as time went by  the philanthropic activities of abbeys and monasteries.  The activities of these institutions were more private matters; for the formal elements of local government, the focus was the relationship between the people and the king.   Before local democracy both the shire and the hundred were overseen by a reeve.

So except at very local level, English local government has always been about the relationship between places and people and their central government.   Formal local government in England has its origins in the deep tap roots of central government control, from which springs the centralist English tradition.  This is problematic – as history shows, centralised systems have a tendency to over centralise - but it is not altogether without virtue, because it also reflects something fundamentally true about central/ local relations.   Local government provides a lubricant that, if it works properly, should provide enough flexibility in the system to acknowledge the differences between places;  Cornwall and Cumbria, Liverpool and London.   It does this by providing both a channel for discussion between localities and the centre and a means by which central diktat can be moderated to local circumstances and conditions.   In an undemocratic way, it did this in the Anglo-Saxon period  and unless centralism gets in the way, this remains a fundamental role for elected local bodies today. 

England remains a country with a strong shared culture and traditions (not least the welcoming way it normally treats outsiders) but recent ballots have re-emphasised, somewhat to the surprise of centralist politicians and media, it seems, just how much local difference there is across England.  If centralists continue to act as if the country is a single, amorphous place,  there is a risk that some people and some places may decide they no longer buy-in to the deal.   True localism – the capacity for places to decide for themselves  -must be a big part of the future.