There is a long and disastrous history of entitled Englishmen redrawing border lines. In an interview published last week, Michael Heseltine revealed that in his political youth he, characteristically, had created the new English county boundaries of the 1972 Local Government Act simply by hiring a light aircraft and flying over the green and pleasant land.
Ancient territories were erased or reshaped from 2,000ft in the creation of five extensive new urban authorities. “You could see where [conurbations] began and ended,” Hezza recalled, “and I would just tick local authorities in, out, in, out whatever it may be.” I remember one minor effect of that shift from ground level; overnight, my school exercise books lost their distinctive Warwickshire bear-and-ragged-staff coat of arms, as the town in which I lived was subsumed into the ahistorical sprawl of the West Midlands – part of a new Britain bluntly demarcated into urban and beyond. Heseltine’s comment came as part of a comprehensive Harvard University study into the reasons why the country’s regional inequalities have in the years since, only grown. As instructive as his airy reorganisation strategy were his comments on the ways that efforts at “levelling up” have always been undone by ministers abandoning the better plans of predecessors for grand schemes of their own. As our history proves, the easy bit is redrawing the map; what follows, less so.
