Every time Westminster gets cold, mayors and first ministers reach for the oldest security blanket in British politics. They call a summit. Andy Burnham has decided to drag the leaders of Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland into a room to talk about constitutional reform, funding formulas, and regional muscle. The media treats it like a major power play against Whitehall.
It is nothing of the sort. It is political theater for people terrified of actual accountability.
I have spent years watching regional leaders posture about local autonomy while begging the Treasury for their lunch money. Summits do not redistribute power. They give politicians with declining domestic approval ratings a backdrop to look statesmanlike while avoiding the hard work of building actual economic self-sufficiency.
Let us dismantle the lazy consensus that bringing the devolved nations and northern mayors together creates a meaningful counterweight to central government.
The Myth of Regional Solidarity
The core fallacy of the Burnham-led coalition is the belief that Edinburgh, Cardiff, Belfast, and Greater Manchester share a coherent economic interest. They do not. Their economic profiles are fundamentally contradictory.
Scotland operates under a block grant funded by the Barnett formula, which historically skews higher per capita spending than large parts of Northern England. Wales has structural challenges around post-industrial transition that bear zero resemblance to the financial services-heavy economy of Edinburgh or the tech-and-logistics matrix of the Northwest of England. Northern Ireland is tethered to a unique dual-market trade status that nobody in Manchester or Cardiff has to navigate.
When you put these leaders in a room together, what do you get? A vague communique about fairness, localized investment, and cooperation. It is a Wishlist written in crayon. Whitehall reads these communiques, smiles politely, and continues writing policies based on GDP density and electoral math.
Centralization in the United Kingdom is not a design flaw. It is the engine. The British state was built on fiscal centralization. Expecting the Treasury to willingly hand over revenue-raising powers to a loose collection of regional chieftains who hate each other's tax policies just as much as they hate London's is pure delusion.
The Accountability Trap
Here is what nobody wants to admit about devolution in its current form: it is an excuse machine.
When public transport fails in the North, the default reflex is to blame Westminster funding. When health outcomes stagnate in Wales, the blame goes right back to the block grant. Devolution without profound fiscal federalism—meaning the power to raise and lower your own taxes to compete—turns regional leaders into middle managers of decline. They take the credit when a new tram line opens and point the finger upward when the hospitals run out of cash.
Burnham wants to style himself as the prime minister of the North. But a mayoralty dependent on central government grants is not a government; it is an extended lobbying firm with better stationery.
Imagine a scenario where the Treasury actually calls their bluff. Imagine London says: Fine, you want total control over your regional economy? Here is your autonomy. But zero bailout funds, zero Barnett adjustments, and complete fiscal self-reliance starting next Tuesday.
The summit would break up in ten minutes. Because the dirty secret of regionalism is that nobody actually wants the responsibility of failure. They want the optics of resistance without the existential dread of insolvency.
What Real Power Looks Like
If these leaders were serious about breaking the London stranglehold, they would stop holding talking shops and start doing the boring, unsexy work of structural market creation.
Real autonomy is built on balance sheets, not press conferences. It means aggressively courting private capital, rewriting archaic zoning laws to build housing at scale, and cutting regional red tape to make Manchester or Cardiff more attractive to international investors than the Square Mile.
Singapore did not achieve economic sovereignty by holding summits with the regional governors of Malaysia. They built a tax regime, a port, and a legal system that forced the world to deal with them on their own terms.
Our devolved leaders are doing the exact opposite. They are spending their political capital trying to lobby a central state that views them as an administrative nuisance.
Stop calling summits. Stop drafting communiques that end up shredded in Whitehall recycling bins. Fix your local productivity crisis, collect your own taxes, and stop pretending that a group photo on the steps of a municipal building constitutes a revolution.
The revolution will not be televised from a holding room in Salford. And it certainly will not be led by politicians who measure their authority by how many letters they can write to the Prime Minister.
