Ever since the November 4 referendum decision against establishing an elected North-East Assembly, a big unanswered question about the future of the region has hung in the air. It concerns the fate of the regional institutions which an elected assembly was meant to democratize but which, in the wake of the No vote, now exist in an uneasy limbo. The question is a valid one, not least because some of the bodies in question were set up by Labour as precursors of the move towards regional government now stopped dead in its tracks. This week, the Tories confirmed that they would dismantle large parts of this regional apparatus as part of their drive to cut some £35bn of what they term "wasteful" public expenditure. Their plans would see unelected assemblies axed altogether, while development agencies like One NorthEast and the regional Government Offices would be radically slimmed down. In view of the referendum result, the Tories probably imagine this to be a vote-winner, although in truth it's not so very different from the policy on which they fought and lost the last election in 2001. Detailed policy proposals from the other two main parties are still anticipated, with Labour and the Liberal Democrats still seemingly unsure of how to respond to the referendum debacle. But whoever wins in May - when the next General Election is expected to take place - it is already clear that the self-styled, unelected "North-East Assembly" in particular faces a desperate fight for survival. So can there really be any valid argument for keeping an unelected assembly when the democratic version of it has already been rejected by the region's voters in such large numbers? Well, let me begin by saying that the NEA would probably not be in this position now if it had not made the daft decision to call itself an "assembly" in the first place. Initially set up by the Government as a regional "chamber," its subsequent re-branding exercise was not just a blatant piece of self-aggrandisement but also mightily confusing for the public. The campaign to establish a "North-East Assembly" cannot possibly have been helped by the fact that something calling itself by that name already existed. Secondly, it has to be said that the crossover between the NEA and the Association of North-East Councils, which is now to be severed, did not serve the wider interests of the region well. The dominance exerted by local government over the NEA has at times caused it to adopt a lowest-common-denominator approach to tackling the region's problems. Furthermore, in attempting to manage the political process leading up to the possible introduction of elected regional government, the NEA did further harm to the pro-assembly cause. The prominent role played in that process by local government figures such as Tony Flynn merely heightened the public's impression that home rule would mean the same tired old faces running things. Thirdly, the NEA's close links with the Labour Party political establishment in the region has seriously limited its effectiveness as a lobbying organization. A few years back, while preparing a report to take to the Government on regional funding, it was told by senior officials that any mention of the Barnett Formula would be "counter productive." Sure enough, when the document appeared in made no reference to the infamous Treasury formula which awards Scotland and Wales much higher spending-per-head than the English regions. But how anyone was supposed to make a coherent case for the North without mentioning the £300m funding disparity it generates was, and is, quite beyond me. That said, however, it is hard not to sympathise with the plight of the man at the centre of the current debate, NEA director Stephen Barber. As was first revealed in The Journal, ANEC has drawn up a secret blueprint to restructure the organization which involves making Mr Barber redundant. Mr Barber was party to some of the decisions I have referred to above and to that extent must bear some degree of responsibility for the failings of the NEA as an organization. But he is a good and decent man who has fought hard to bring a regional dimension to local and national policy debates and, as such, will be a loss to the region as a whole. And it is here - in the search for a regional dimension to policy-making - that the nub of the argument about the future of the unelected assembly really lies. On the basis of its overall track record, it scarcely deserves to survive - but as with the monarchy, the real question is what you would put in its place. The Tories talk of "returning" the assembly's functions to local government, but this is a dangerous, and arguably disingenuous fallacy. The kinds of governmental functions carried out at regional level - for example strategic planning, skills training and co-ordinating European funding - cannot realistically be exercised by town halls, and in truth, they never were. What we are left with, then, is either an unsatisfactory status quo, or the atomization of the North-East into a host of competing interests - urban against rural, Tyne against Wear against Tees. If the North-East is to be regarded as a region in any meaningful sense, it needs region-wide institutions like the assembly to bring a regional perspective to bear. The people of the North-East decided in November that they didn't want the irregional assembly to be elected, and those of us who argued for a different outcome have to respect that. Now, in deciding whether or not it should continue, the region has a much more fundamental question to answer - whether it wants to be a region at all. | 
