The whole Manchester covid thing is crazy and makes me livid but what worries me even more is the possibility that this time next year few things 1/n

The first will be that we are still doing this in and out of local lockdowns constantly tweaked by a gov playing around the edges 2/n

The next and response to that inadequacy will be a call for greater devolution but the result will be a devolution of responsibility with no power to the regions, especially in the north 3/n

The risk is that under the current circumstances the temptation to draw powers closer to home would look really tempting but I’m not sure it’s the right thing 4/n

The reason for that is that the conservatives in power at the moment need an enemy - a them to their us. Divide central from regional and local under small government guise is a standard conservative strategy. 5/n

I’m not suggesting that this is the plan as much as it the underpinning ideological structure that hard liberal conservatives need to make sense of the world. 6/n

So the last might well be a constant battle for definition of devolved powers that plays to the strengths of central government and slowly kills regional identity and sustainability through engineered chaos . 7/n