The Northern Powerhouse is a smoke-and-mirrors sales pitch to sell the North and it's assets. The North needs something real.

Photograph: Northern Rail train at Manchester Oxford Road by Mikey. (License) (Cropped)

The chaos caused by the mess Northern Rail has made of it's timetables, has led to commentators calling into question how committed the government really is to the vaunted Northern Powerhouse - it's plan to rejuvenate the North.

Perhaps this mess would have been containable for the government, if it wasn't for the fact that the collapse of the rail network in the North comes not in isolation, but on the back of big promises that been ever further downgraded until they have been all but scrapped.

Tory ministers had pledged major upgrades and major new links. But the big pledges were watered down. Last summer, the transport minister announced that Electrification for the North were cancelled, even as he confirmed more investment in London.

And the ambitions of the TransPennine railway upgrades have been severely contracted - originally pitched as work from Liverpool to Newcastle, the latest focus is just on speeding up links between Bradford, Leeds and Manchester.

Even in the face of the current crisis, the Transport Secretary has been reluctant to talk punitively of how the rail services are being run - even as they are effectively curtailed, cut down to something approximate to an emergency schedule.

It isn't hard to see why the Northern Powerhouse now looks to have been all smoke and mirrors.

Part of the problem is that it was. In essence, the government plan for devolution was constructed around a branding exercise - the "Northern Powerhouse", the "Midland's Engine" - the semantics of which give away the broader aim of gearing the regions towards serving the corporate interests of UK PLC.

In practice, devolution reflected Conservative interests. It cut money from local services, only to return it, in part, through the Metro Mayors - executive figures, alienated from local government and accountability - whose role seems mostly intended to spend the funds on easing the way for business.

The focus was on building a framework, an infrastructure, that will encourage inward investment into a transport hub that would have most Northerners at most an hour away from most major Northern cities and their employment opportunities.

But the plan has also effectively cut local people out of the loop - developing plans for them, to impose on them. And the focus is still on the cities, and not post-industrial towns, where people have been left feeling abandoned.

Recently speaking at a Manchester Business School event on the Northern Powerhouse, Vince Cable delved into how the Powerhouse plans that he and George Osborne developed unfolded.

Cable said that the Northern Powerhouse was supposed to achieve two things: balance out the lure of London and address previous failures to get people and jobs in the same place - which he referred to as the "work to the workers, or workers to the work" dilemma. Transport would be key to Powerhouse's "workers to the work" approach.

Cable argued that efforts were however undermined by budget cuts - the Liberal Democrat said that he protested cuts to capital spending, and that the local government minister failed to protect local government budgets.

The result was a collection of cities, still poorly connected, that have become more vibrant and dynamic, but are still surrounded by impoverished suburbs - already stripped of opportunities, now cut off and drowning amid cuts.

In these conditions, of course, any investment for the North is welcome. And needed. But is tailoring the whole region purely for business the right way to go about it?

The Conservatives have sought to rebrand the North and prepare it's assets - including Northerners themselves, presented as a pool of workers and customers within easy reach and ready to scramble - for sale. Regional devolution becomes a sales pitch, all show and no substance.

But where are Northerners themselves fitting into this? People in the North are struggling to make ordinary journey's to work, that they really can't afford to lose. With competition for jobs so overwhelming, expensive journeys and cancellations are a direct threat to the ability of the lowest earners to get by.

There's only so much that an influx of business investors and new jobs could fix - even job security would unlikely be improved if the amount of work available better matched the demand for employment, such is the direction working conditions are headed in.

The North need more that is rooted there. Affordable housing. Affordable and reliable public transport. Career opportunities for the least well off, and least skilled, with the longevity and security around which to build a life.

Was any of this ever on the cards with the Northern Powerhouse?

The North needs public investment in public infrastructure and work deeply rooted in it's own communities - the means to make use of it's own resources. Achieving that from the outside, from distant Westminster, would be hard.

But from well organised and funded local government, taking seriously civic engagement, giving people a real voice and involvement? In that there is hope.

Transport Funding: The government created it's own problems and now they're getting in the way of the real debate

Photograph: 43207 Departs Leeds by Joshua Brown (License)

The government's homemade problems on transport rumbled on this weekend, with blowback from their cancellation of funding for infrastructure in the North. This can at best be described as falling at first hurdle.

Having a debate about funding at all ignores the guarantee of huge benefits that any investment produces and obscures the real, and much deeper, debate that comes after: how that funding is structured to best serve communities.

The current distraction began when the government cancelled the full electrification of the Manchester to Leeds rail links, which had been at the heart of plans for George Osborne's so-called 'Northern Powerhouse'.

In response Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester, gathered the political and business leaders of the North to a summit. It's purpose was to call for long overdue investment in the transport infrastructure of the North.

Only together, argued Burnham, could Northern leaders achieve greater parity of funding and overturn a situation that has London receiving eight times more in investment than the North - recently expressed in the cancellation of Northern electrification plans prior to the approval of further investment in London.

Chris Grayling, the government transport secretary, responded to the anger at the government by following the Tories' longstanding approach: shifting responsibility. Grayling and transport ministers announced that it is on the North to develop plans for the government to fund - as if Burnham's summit was what it wanted all along.

The government also took time out to complain that it wasn't invited to the Northern summit. But the summit was clearly the first step in building the solidarity necessary to construct a collective negotiating platform. Burnham himself adopted a stern stance, saying patience has run out, that London cannot continue to be developed at the expense of the North.

George Osborne, the former Chancellor and now Evening Standard editor,  couldn't help but wade in. In what was seen as an attack on his successors for not following through on his own policies, Osborne called for Theresa May to relaunch her premiership on investment in the Northern railways that could help geographically rebalance the national economy.

There are plenty of reasons for the North to be disgruntled at the government for it's failure to deliver and not least is that infrastructure spending alone is a boost to a local economy.

In the long term it is an unflinching in it's positive affect on economic growth. But in the shorter term it also creates a lot of jobs and a lot of contracts from which local businesses can benefit.

The rail links themselves reduce the time and distance between key locations. That is a boost for business, widening their customer base and giving them access to the benefits of operating at scale. It's also a boost for workers, widening opportunities while reducing the time spent on a commute.

But there is a downside - and it is this that the questions, of whether to provide funds at all, delays and distracts from. The better connections, the widening of opportunity can also encourage centralisation.

As a business pursues cheaper ways to work and greater efficiency, they have a tendency to gather in key locations, close to important suppliers, partners and customers. That raises big questions about how this will all impact the local business environment.

It cannot be taken for granted that plans for transport links will be a good in themselves. We must ask how they will serve each area. The answers we come up with must empower people, and empower them where they are.

Getting to the roots of that is tackling a microcosm of the bigger problem with globalisation, which has left behind entire communities, concentrated growing wealth and opportunity, and excluded the welfare of ordinary people from it's expansion.

Averting those outcomes means services must be tied to and benefit local people. Whether that means local cooperative or municipal rail companies, or some sort of statutory reinvestment, or some other solution, communities must profit from their local services, not be drained by them.

It is in many ways the same as for the energy sector, where action is needed to counter the impact of operating at scale and centralisation that leaves communities disinherited from the product of their own regional resources - exploited instead for private gain.

But first, we must start that debate. That means first getting passed the Conservative austere reluctance to invest in the future. Public investment is beneficial. So let's get beyond that point, and get down to how to get services working for communities, not rendering them little more than glorified or abandoned suburbs.

Rail chaos opens discussion of alternatives: Mutuals and co-ops offer community a stake, instead of rentiers who extract local wealth and without Whitehall centralisation

Photograph: Brighton Station from Pixabay (License) (Cropped)

One of the big issues in the past few weeks has been the Southern Railways shambles, that has again exposed deep problems with the British system of rail franchises - at least three rail franchises face major strike action in the coming weeks (Topham, 2016; Topham, 2016{2}).

The franchise system has faced plenty of criticism. At the core is that a rail franchise is little more than permission to set up a toll booth and start extracting rent, squeezed out with higher prices, cuts to staff and services, and limiting expensive maintenance (Chakraborrty, 2016; Woodman, 2012; Milne, 2012).

Solutions to what are natural monopolies is not a simple matter. As a result much was made of Jeremy Corbyn's 2015 leadership election promise to renationalise the railways (Mason, 2016) - a brave decision for a party all too easily beaten over the head as centralising, bureaucratic, exorbitant spenders with a disdain for free enterprise (Kellner, 2014).

The latest round of railway chaos put Corbyn's policy of renationalisation on the table for a Readers' debate in The Guardian yesterday (Marsh & Walsh, 2016). The nature of the discussion was interesting to watch.

There was positivity towards renationalisation to be found, with some pointing to the more than a few good examples of public run transport services around Europe. In Paris, or in Germany, there are well maintained railways that are run for considerably lower fares than in the UK (Williams, 2015).

However, it was particularly interesting to see the perception that the only options being offered came in the form of a polarised dynamic, limited to either privatisation under greedy rentiers or nationalisation under inflexible Whitehall bureaucrats.

In fact commenters even went beyond that to observe that the railways in Britain are actually both and neither. That the railways are a kind of national-corporate cartel, with infrastructure nationalised while profit-making services were privatised - even more confusingly, often into the hands of state-owned companies from other countries.

What was clear in people's thoughts was that by some means the running of the rails needs to be decentralised, either with more lines or with more options. That no one interest should be given too much leverage, whether trade unions or rentier investors. And that responsibility for the rails should not be separated from the train services.

That combination, of well run public service and the need for decentralisation, in fact plays into the actual substance of Corbyn's policy, which was for public though not necessarily state railways (Connor, 2015). What Corbyn actually called for was to mutualise the railways as worker-consumer coops.

In mutualism, there is a path that has cut across progressive party lines. From Labour, and obviously the Co-operative Party, to the Liberal Democrats, the idea of workers taking a greater stake has a deep history. Whether as worker-management co-operation, workers on boards, or share-ownership schemes, at least a low level version of mutualism has long been proposed by those on all sides. But the present crisis in Britain's services calls for a deeper commitment.

There is much that mutualism can offer, even within the slow to change framework of capitalism. Autonomy, not least, for people to exercise power over their own working lives. And equity, a meaningful stake in the product of their own work. Between the two, you have a model that challenges both the lopsided struggle between workers and management that often leads to exploitation, on the one hand, and the extraction of wealth, on the other.

Fear of alienation by bureaucratic centralism is understandable in the running of essential services, from housing to energy and transport. But so is the pain caused by exploitative, extractive rentiers, and it has been clearly stated. Too much is taken out of communities, extracted as profit by rentiers (Milne, 2014) - who use wealth to step in and set up toll booths on essential local services. Little is ever fed back into the communities from which these private taxes are levied.

Mutualism and cooperation present an alternative. Working examples are already out there, tying the product of a community's resources to those communities, serving the common good without overbearing central control. But they need support to break through public-private corporatism and that means government to rethink how it intervenes - to be smarter and willing to decentralise.