I am completely unenthused by this unseemly rush towards city region status.
I can't see what difference it will make in terms of better regional government.
London and its mayor works because there is a clearly defined city entity. Everyone is a Londoner.
They associate with London. Greater Manchester is looser, but most people in the North West accept the concept.
The West Midlands is a bureaucratically created area with very little "glue" to bind it together. And now we are being asked to accept another completely artificial concept, the city region.
Entirely arbitrary in where it starts and finishes, with no natural feeling of belonging, and plenty of historic tensions between Birmingham, Coventry and Wolverhampton.
What, for goodness sake, is Telford and Wrekin doing in it? A coterie of councillors is slotted to run the show, rather than a mayor.
Well, I can quite accept why there shouldn't be a mayor.
There is no way that Coventry and Wolverhampton are going to feel empowered if the mayor comes from Birmingham.
You might as well ask Yugoslavia to reform.
And it is plain to see why Birmingham Council leader Mike Whitby doesn't want a mayor.
Because a directly elected mayor would probably end up being a Labour mayor.
The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition turkeys are hardly likely to vote for Christmas.
So we are back to our coterie of councillors - a recipe for shambles. Just look at the best example of where they operate together at the moment - Birmingham International Airport.
The required fudge needed to maintain unanimity has meant the brave decisions necessary to create a truly great international airport haven't been taken.
But, even more important, I can't see why all this should help one iota to solve the big intractable problems which have faced us in recent years.
Look at the library - we are still waiting for council indecision to progress towards some sort of way forward to the extent that Argent, owner of Paradise Forum, which wants to knock it all down and build something vibrant and new, is having to "waste" £2 million to have an interim tart-up.
And then there's New Street - all we have in prospect is another tart-up which fails to address the station's rail line capacity problems. And to solve that, whether we have a city region, elected mayor or the current system involves Network Rail and a host of Government quangos.
There is no evidence that a city region could tackle these big ticket projects and progress them any faster than is currently the case.
And finally when we can at last see results from regeneration agency Advantage West Midlands, like the West Midlands Development Agency before it, it will get torn up to accommodate the new messiah.
What is the point in rearranging the deckchairs of local government, at enormous expense and great disruption because a few siren voices want to be flavour of the month? None. Better the devil we know.
