When asked before the 1997 general election what his priorities would be in Government if elected, Tony Blair famously replied: "Education, education, and education." By the same token, if the Prime Minister was asked to sum up the Government's regional policies in three words, he might respond: "Relocation, relocation, and relocation" In the weeks since the crushing "no" vote on elected regional assemblies, much ink has been spilled on the question of where - if anywhere - the regional policy agenda goes next. While it is too much to expect this Government to start relocating public spending to the regions that need it most, it is at least doing what many see as the next best thing - relocating public servants. In his pre-Budget report, Gordon Brown announced the latest wave of civil service jobs moving out of London in the wake of Sir Michael Lyons' report published earlier this year. Okay, so it later emerged that the jobs had in fact already been relocated, but that does not invalidate the general thrust of the Chancellor's policy. Now the BBC is following suit, declaring its intention to move 5 Live, CBeebies, BBC Online and BBC Sport to Manchester en bloc as part of its £960m cost-cutting programme. But will it make the British state and more importantly its economy less London-centric? Or is it just a doomed attempt to swim against an irreversible tide? Tim Luckhurst, a former Scottish newspaper editor who also served as a political adviser to Donald Dewar, expressed what for a devolutionist was a surprisingly blunt view this week. "There's a reason why capital cities exist. It's because they contain a critical mass of talent, and when you're trying to run a great broadcasting organization you need to do more than recruit talented staff," he said. "You need fantastic guests, the best restaurants, the best universities, and in every country in the world those things gravitate around capitals." He added: "The notion that we can somehow reverse the trend is silly." As it happens, Luckhurst is based in Glasgow, but as an example of the kind of smug thinking that permeates the London-based intelligentsia, his comments can scarcely be bettered. The clear implication was that no Northern city, nor even the North as a region, contains sufficient well-qualified people to run a major national organization. This is a not dissimilar argument from the onethat surfaced in the devolution referendum campaign that the North-East did not have the "gene pool" of political talent to govern itself. The fact that the people who expressed such views ended up on the winning side does not make their opinions any the less unpalatable. In any case, a cursory knowledge of European geography shows that Luckhurst is wrongto assume that capital cities always exercise the kind of centrifugal force that London exerts. In Germany and Italy, for instance, Berlin and Rome are respectively the political centres while Frankfurt and Milan are the financial centres. An even bigger diversification of influence is to be found in the United States, the country New Labour would apparently most like us to emulate. The capital Washington is indisputably the political centre, but by no stretch of the imagination is it an important a city economically as New York or Chicago, or culturally as Los Angeles. So if these examples are anything to go by, the idea of different political, economic and cultural centres co-existing in one country is, in theory, a perfectly plausible one. And there seems little doubt that the relocation of Government offices away from capital cities can, at least, play some part in dispersing influence more widely. As well as prestige, it brings to a region the additional spending power of the relocated civil servants which in turn has a beneficial knock-on effect on the wider economy of the area. It can also significantly widen the local skills base, although as North-East business leaders have pointed out, this rather crucially depends on the sort of jobs that are relocated. But the specific problem of Britain's "London-centricity" derives not just from the capital's importance as a financial centre but as an "economic driver" for the rest of the country. Tony Blair's Government has made clear it will do nothing to put at risk this economic pre-eminence - and frustrating though this is for the other regions, it is not hard to see why. Attempting to turn Manchester or Newcastle into the nation's financial centre is, in any case, impossible if not actually undesirable. What would make much greater sense in the longer-term would be a concerted drive to disperse some of the over-concentration of political power that currently resides in the capital. As I wrote in the aftermath of the "no" vote, the idea of an English Parliament ought now to be given serious consideration as a means of addressing the imbalances in the constitution. London would remain the centre of UK Government, in control of foreign policy, defence, homeland security, and overall taxation andspending - with a new centre of English governance in control of everything else. The exact location - Manchester, York, Birmingham, even Derby - would not matter, so long as it was anywhere north of Watford Gap. It would not merely help to re-balance the constitution - but more importantly in the longer-term, to rebalance the economy too. | 
