(this is drawn largely from the fascinating work of James Bulpitt. I cut it because it didn't add much to Bulpitt's original publications - which explain a great deal about centre/periphery relations in British politics and, indirectly, culture.)
Central and local government
'Apart from its passive and increasingly weak collaborative peripheral elites the centre, or court, possessed no effective territorial political base. The regime survived because of the weakness of its enemies rather than the strength of its supporters. Thus, despite its appearance of solidity, in reality little stood in the way of determined and intelligent territorial dissidents if and when they emerged in one or more parts of the periphery. Nevertheless, the Dual Polity possessed a certain negative strength. Throughout the United Kingdom the general public appeared not to want a more dynamic system of territorial politics. They disliked positive and politicised local government as much as an active interfering Centre. To this extent peripheral dissidents would both gain and lose from any successful attempt to politicise peripheral affairs.' -Jim Bulpitt, from Territory and Power in the United Kingdom, describing the system in 1961, before its bases began to be questioned.
Bulpitt describes a political system for ruling Britain, which he calls the Ancien regime in order to point out the possibility of it ending, in particular in crises which it underwent in about 1870-1926 (problems in Ireland) and 1960-80 (problems with Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland). It was a Dual Polity: divided between High politics (the domain of central government) and Low politics (the domain of local government) with minimal contact between the two. The centre was particularly concerned with its "external support system", which in the nineteenth century might mean European powers as allies, and in the mid-twentieth might mean the IMF and the EEC. Central government kept its intervention in the regions to a minimum, as it had finite resources which could easily be stretched too thinly, and these resources were guaranteed by the collaboration of local elites, whose fiefs could not therefore be trampled on: 'the Union was a ramshackle affair in which a weak Centre managed its estate via local elite collaborators in times of normalcy and what amounted to a gunboat diplomacy in time of emergency.' The local elites, in the form of political associations and politicians elected to local office, did not originate bold policies because (a) the degree of local mobilisation was weak (b) local associations were not strongly motivated by party politics (c) up till the 1960s, there was a strong prejudice to respect the wishes of the ratepayers, so that local government expenditure and activity were minimized. This precept was cast aside, locally, in the 1960s, by active Labour councils setting high rates to pay for reform programmes. Members of Parliament did not become important figures in regional politics, and identified strongly and consensually with national politics: this critical weakness was not a 'rule' of the system, but if anyone mediated local opinion to central government, or won over local opinion to new central policies, it was not Members of Parliament
The jargon of decentralisation which we hear increasingly from the 1960s evolves from the arguments for self-government advanced by Australia, Canada, and South Africa from the 1830s on (and, in the 1770s, by the Americans); it was picked up, reasonably, by the non-White territories to whom Dominion status was by no means being offered; the growth of peripheral nationalism and regionalism within the British Isles in the 1960s is synchronised with decolonisation outside the isles, and is largely a by-product of it. However, the anti-central ideology of the Concord Declaration, and of Australian claims for self-government (rapidly granted), remembered its arguments and turns of phrase from the parliamentary attacks on centralised overriding of local interests, which were the expression of the opinion of local landowners in the oligarchic-county political system which dates, as we have seen, from Henry II. If central power leaves the stage, the question is who holds the power in the towns and counties.
So far Bulpitt. The limitation of this politological analysis is its exclusion of business from the picture. This is unsatisfactory, because it may very well be centralisation of private ownership which the citizen is complaining about, and anyway the division of social power between business and government is a shifting border, the two obviously form a single system and it is together that they would have to be reformed. De facto power, which was left intact by a minimalist policy in local government, was invested in the ownership of property: analysis has to move away from elected bodies and towards the owners of wealth. Indeed, the weakness (or 'discipline') of local government can be seen as obedience to the first claim of the persons of influence, that rates should be kept to the minimum. The state of the country today, and of the parts of the country, is not primarily the result of government action or failure, but of the action of the owners of wealth.
1960-70: Decentralisation as modernisation in the 1960s
This cultural system has been in much more rapid flux for the past 35 years. Bulpitt argues that the concepts of modernisation taken up by the end of the MacMillan government, and then by the Wilson government, undermined the Dual Polity: the Centre treacherously negated the achievements and competence of their local partners, aroused new and higher expectations, and in return was threatened by new and turbulent groups at the periphery, holding power or competing for it. Bulpitt remarks that modernisation created a new implicit contract between Centre and Periphery; the failure to deliver on this was causing profound problems for both Labour and Conservatives by the late 1960s. The Conservative, Quintin Hogg, was appointed as a regional co-ordinator for the North-East (of England) in 1963, a precursor of Labour initiatives in regional planning. All this might be an admission of past failure by the Centre, but more clearly it assumed the incompetence of the local government authorities of the North-East to fix the problems of their region. The extension of the commitments of central government to make detailed interventions in business and regional economies reduced the prestige of central government; but it tended to push regional elites right out of the picture. It put their incompetence beyond question. How could everyone agree about the inefficiency of business in the regions, without defining regional businessmen as inefficient? New regional poets in 1961 attacked institutions in London, Oxford, and Cambridge, the central cultural triangle, because they regarded local cultural figures as completely without influence on the situation: cutouts, too unimportant to be blamed. This attack continues in the 1990s because local cultural leaders are still without prestige or influence; something is critically wrong with regional culture. This state of self-contempt is different in Scotland and Wales.
As a result, "By 1968 the Dual Polity had declined throughout the United Kingdom. It is possible to argue that between 1968 and 1977 it collapsed. Indeed, for some commentators at this time the whole system was on the verge of breaking up into its constituent territorial parts." During the crisis of the 1970s, "The Centre became 'overloaded' with problems of all kinds resulting in a degree of 'ungovernability' in the system not experienced since the period prior to the First World War." 1973-7 was the low point: the excitement must have stimulated radical poets to expect the imminent collapse of the power order. This tension is presumably the source of the regional conflicts we now have in British poetry, and of the ferocious attacks on anything that might appear to be a Centre or to be a source of legitimacy. The critique of representations is not merely a sophisticated one carried out in university seminars, but a populist one, flowing from a hatred of authority and of the south-east.
So we descend, from Bulpitt, to the level of individuals' beliefs about what is not happening. In order to imagine social problems solved we would have to imagine a White Knight who would come along and solve them. This takes for granted the weakness of the social agencies who left affairs stuck as unsolved problems. In the Depression of the 1930s, the failure of capitalism to supply full employment was the most obvious fact: that is, business, most of which was highly local, and local government, were quite unable to provide a solution. It's legitimate, in view of post-war experience, to suppose that intervention by central government would have had a beneficial effect. But to ask for central government to bow out is to hand all power back to business, and to the elected local government, most of whom came from the business milieu anyway: no solution could be expected from this direction. The doctrine that "power should be decentralised" should be translated as "all power to the local ruling class": but no-one believes this, so the translation should be "all power to a new local ruling class which doesn't exist, but which we have invented for the sake of a thought experiment". Even the transfer of ownership away from magnates resident in Lancashire (let's say) to corporations whose head offices are in Tokyo or New York, was a symptom of the failure of local business: they failed in competition, and given the chance they would fail again. Much of the optimism about decentralisation stems from ignorance about the record of local government in Britain, which is so uninteresting to most of the populace that debate can ignore it: idealists can pretend it never happened, so that devolution is not seen as "local government with a larger budget", but as a new start whose course will have nothing to do with the timidity and meanness and connivance of local government as we know it.
The central tenet of the Conservative Party has been to reduce taxation and decrease State intervention: the central tenet of the classic Liberal Party was to reduce State intervention and decrease taxation. This leaves the Labour Party, which has only held power for 20 years (25 if we include five years as junior partner in the wartime Coalition). All this makes me incredulous of any thesis about excessive centralisation in British life: Bulpitt's account is convincing because it does not conflict with these facts, but proposes that the Centre has always been reluctant to extend its responsibilities.
It is not rational to ascribe all the bad results of modern government to centralisation. However, to identify what its real defects are, one would have to penetrate deeply into the details of administration; something no poet is willing to do. It would be necessary, for example, to prove that a majority of local electors would be in favour of the reform proposed. Poetry is only able to express views in semi-articulate form, or to unfold a mythology sustaining political philosophies which have been argued out elsewhere, and which are presumably familiar to the reader at the outset of the poem.
It seems that the rise of Scottish and Welsh nationalism in the Sixties, after 40 years of dawdling, was due to the example of decolonisation on the world stage. This was poured through the news media on a daily basis for a number of years. Nationalists of both countries would be highly indignant if you denied that there was a colonial relationship between England and themselves. More technically, Bulpitt suggests that the modernisation theme of politicians in the 1960s was an implicit attack on the local governing groups: by destroying their prestige, it created a vacuum which new potential ‚lites could compete for, by means of boosting talk, and also weakened the Centre, the agency which had launched modernisation in the first place. The Sixties saw a collective stereotype of guilty and obsolete politicians: these included the old-style Conservative Party in Parliament, of course, but perhaps more clinchingly it included local politicians of all three national parties, who didn't even have the trappings of power and media attention. This tarnishing made people more inclined to vote for the nationalist candidates. In our perspective, of course, it smears all over the prestige of the cultural elite as it existed in 1960, and explains the melody of resentment and protest which prevailed in the poetry of the Sixties.
Before the twentieth century, regions may have been aware of their distinctiveness from London and the South, but it would be an exaggeration to say that this awareness had been reflected on, or nourished by, literature. At the point of maximum distinctiveness, linguistic and social, provincial awareness was voiceless. But further, the people who got access to print were the least distinctive and regional, and social groups became less distinctive almost exactly as they acquired literacy and the possibility of literary productivity. This circumstance changed dramatically as a result of the 1944 Education Act, more decisively after the expansion of higher education in the early sixties, using the products of that Act. The plethora of small magazines, most of them outside London, produced an outlet for poets of all sorts, and with it a structural demand for regional identities. The vague mistrust of "the corruption of the Metropolitan cliques" underwrote a set of theses about the distinctiveness and importance of writers who lived outside the charmed circle. The regionalization was at the level of self-awareness, not poetic form or phonetics. The sixties saw little dialect writing: very many people from the lower classes got access to higher education, and then to poetry publication, in little magazines, but they didn't use dialect.
A theme of the later decades of Imperial government had been the nativisation of administrative cadres. The loss of confidence in the public-school trained District Officer is closely connected to the loss of faith in the "cultured" poet. An ethnic qualification for a writer is only one criterion among many, and I very frequently encounter prose arguing that X is commendable because of his or her regional roots, while ignoring the other question, Can X write poetry at all?
Arts Council policy since 1968 has been to hand over control of funds and policies to boards of local notables, as a way (cynically) of limiting possible criticisms or revolts or (nobly) of encouraging maximum diversity and local appropriateness. If these boards have not been much interested in contemporary poetry, that argues the lack of an informed reading public for such poetry in the regions in question, which is a weak basis for any kind of subsidy to poetry. The system was designed to give power away; its most noticeable effect is to persuade publishers and magazines to claim a self-righteously Regional Identity, so as to make a continuation of their Regional Arts Board grant more likely. There is institutional pressure to be linked to some "tribal" market base as well. Poets have been so terrorized by the accusation of not being "native" enough that they are afraid of autonomy: frantic to acquire authenticity, they go native: we can interpret the wave of shamanistic poems in this way, as a demonstrative jettison of Western civilization, tearing off the European clothes, painting your body, and going bush.
In the melee of tastes, the preference for negative criteria can be seen as an example of indirect rule: the approach of Practical Criticism is genuinely objective, allows all kinds of local deviations, but does try to raise the standard of debate and to encourage analysis of why a poem is effective. This resembles the system whereby central government lets local government do as it wishes, within certain guidelines which include not rigging elections and not accepting bribes as vital arguments in placing municipal contracts. Poets who acquire a kind of faithful passivity and lack of commitment produce a new kind of vacuous poetry, while those who exhibit attachments, identifications, longings, and loyalties forfeit serious attention because they don't belong to the new middle class.
"In Britain, modernisation was born in 1961." Bulpitt states that it was defined in terms of "planning, efficiency and participation". "First, the programme [of modernisation] was associated with a sustained attack on the existing institutions, procedures and personnel of territorial politics, on the grounds that they were administratively inefficient, insufficiently democratic and over-centralised." (p.173). These political events coincide with the decentralisation of poetry from around 1959, brought about by cheap reprographic methods, which gave rise to 2000 little magazines during the sixties; written and read by a whole new stratum of people concerned with poetry and sceptical of prestigious, or visible literary magazines. No-one has ever even listed all those enthusiastic and self-willed threads of taste- and poetry-making. This explosion was in large part a rebellion of the provinces.