“Hull and Humber Chamber of Commerce chief executive Dr Ian Kelly told The Yorkshire Post: “When it comes to cricket, Yorkshire is great as a brand, and when it comes to tourism, Yorkshire’s quite good too.”
Yesterday the Yorkshire Post launched a debate about the need for a Yorkshire mayor to represent Yorkshire as a whole. They argued that a consensus must coalesce around a figurehead who could speak with one voice and trumpet to the world that Yorkshire was open all hours. They definitively defined the terms of the debate as focused on the right leadership structure to represent all the counties cities, towns, villages and coastal regions to drive the economy forward and build infrastructure.
Today they could reveal that most business leaders think that idea of a Yorkshire-wide elected mayor is completely crackers.
Yorkshire isn’t a single region with a single future, business leaders said, almost in unison. And, “Given Yorkshire itself is the size of a small European country, that diversity is not easily captured at a single Yorkshire county-wide level.” (The Culture Vulture can reveal that Yorkshire is also the size of a small Asian country too… a fact which has never been seen in print before!)
A mayor for the whole of Yorkshire would also add another unmanageable, “expensive and inefficient” layer of bureaucracy, as well as burdening the county with an additional “Yorkshire Tax.”
Of Yorkshire’s four Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs), only Sheffield City Region could be bothered to comment on its position to the Yorkshire Post (I can only imagine the other three are far too busy growing their development and developing their growth to engage in debate.) And the only positive thing they had to say about the proposal was that “a region-wide mayor would effectively boost the region’s profile.” Does that mean to imply there is nobody boosting the region’s profile at the moment? Or does it mean they are doing so ineffectively?
Because, of course, as Ian Kelly noted above, the tourist brand is only “quite good”. Plenty of room for improvement there then.
Not surprisingly, local business leaders were agreed on one thing – any future mayor must be “business friendly”. “They must be focused on growing the economy and building wealth.” As one of them put it (a guy with an impressive title which I think means he is responsible for the county’s knives,) if a mayor is unavoidable, any funding attached “must be used for growth”. And another couldn’t have been more clear; “Devolution is about economic growth and jobs. If its not its a waste of time.”
So, today the debate has moved on to how big a useless, expensive, pointless excrescence a “Boris Johnson style mayor for Yorkshire” will be exactly.
I can’t wait for what the Yorkshire Post will be able to reveal to us tomorrow. Ain’t debate great!