91Èȱ¬

Ah, remember, remember the Fourth of November, referendums, regional assemblies and routs.

We're marking an anniversary on this weekend's .

It was five years ago next week that .

In case you've forgotten, a region which was supposed to embrace the idea with enthusiasm rejected it by a margin of four to one.

The plans to roll out referendums in the North West (including Cumbria) and Yorkshire were hastily dumped by a chastened Prezza.

And unsurprisingly there's been little clamour for their revival since.

Indeed .

You can .

And you can even .

But of course despite the demise of the assembly idea, we still are governed in some ways in regional form.

Government offices are organised into regions, there's the regional development agencies, and there are still plans to get off the ground.

All organisations that are pretty unaccountable to voters.

The Conservative solution is to scrap, or in the odd case, reform them, and hand their powers to councils.

Labour insist though that some things are better done by region, even if the assembly idea is dead.

My colleague Mark Denten has though found three people who voted no to an assembly who've now had a rethink.

Of course, no sane government is about to hold a vote again, but it'll be interesting to hear their reasoning.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• |
• Reddit
• - What's this?